“Mom.” My youngest child stared down at me from the top of the banister. Neon-orange pajamas illuminated his body like a nightlight for me to walk toward as I climbed the stairs with his bedtime water in one hand and his blankie in the other, the latter retrieved after another round of the time-honored bedtime game, “Where’s My Blankie?”

    “Yehhhhhhhs?” My drawn-out acknowledgement of his demand reflected my sense that whatever was going to follow his, “Mom,” was going to be something deadly serious to him and take-a-deep-breath-cute-and-amusing to me.

    “Mom.” Please tell me that I am not the only mother who melts in the face of serious emphasis from a third-grader. “I noticed that you have a book on your night table called, “How to Win a Local Election.”

Rats.

    Although it is not as if my passion for the political could possibly escape notice by my kids, family or pretty much anyone who has ever met me, I had hoped to sit down with my brood, at some appointed time, after much rehearsal and thought, with notecards and a PowerPoint, and a short quiz afterwards, to thoroughly explain the thought process that caused that book to be the first and last thing I had been reading, repeatedly, every day, for a month.

    In my mind, the plan went like this: I would show them photographs of me as a child at the foot of my parents’ bed reading a newspaper that outsized me while they watched “60 Minutes.” I would stun them into rapt silence with tales about the vigorous family dinnertime debates we would craft around anything from alleged state bureaucratic incompetence to the Khmer Rouge.

    Then, I would regale them with copies of my curriculum vitae, color-coded to highlight my accomplishments that are most demonstrative of why they, I mean voters, should elect me to our community’s lawmaking entity. Scanning the multiple-page document, my family would recognize immediately that, all the while they had been thinking I was just a wife, mother, daughter, room mom, Motor Mom, parent networking board member and all-around great schlepper, I also have, in my lifetime, been a student, an archery teacher, a volunteer several times over, a U.S. government employee and Capital Hill intern, a research manager, a religious school teacher, a computer whiz (OK, circa 1985), a mental health professional, a lawyer, a freelance writer, editor, blogger and media geek who appeared on CNN barely 24 hours after having gum grafts in my mouth that made my jaw swell to three times its normal size.

    And now, I would tell them, I was going to work to convince people to vote for me and let me represent them on our city’s council.

    “Yehhhhhhhs?” I said, with a rising quotient of curiosity about what my son was going to say next.

    “Does that mean you are running for something, like city council?”

    Before you start thinking that there is no way a 9-year old is going to know to ask or actually ask that specific question, remember that Ohio has very specific curriculum material guidelines. They are not mandated, per se, in terms of the content that must be taught. But the Ohio Department of Education, in conjunction with the State Board of Education, works to align the content in all of Ohio’s achievement tests with the curriculum guidelines they develop and provide to the hundreds of public school districts in Ohio. If you have not guessed by now, civics and local government is covered in third grade.

    I figured that the classroom of life that was unfolding on our stairwell was as good a time as any to announce a decision that my husband and I had been discussing for weeks.

    “Why, yes, I am. What do you think of that?” I actually, really, did want to know.

    As my son stood above me and cradled an inch-thick hardcover volume of Calvin and Hobbes comics like the Statue of Liberty cradles the Declaration of Independence, he said, “I think that’s good, Mom.”

    Can I hear it for lowering the voting age to 9?

Jill Miller Zimon is running for city council in Pepper Pike. Check out her posts at blogher.com.