If it’s true that hurt people hurt people, then supported people support people. Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary’s (D-13) life is proof of that, as I found out last week in an hour-long chat with her. We decided to meet at The Common Kitchen in Clarksville Commons. It’s in the district she represents, and she rightly wanted to meet somewhere there to contribute to its commerce. She said, “Well, Colleen, I’m partial to 13.”
The next day, I sat at the counter inside The Common Kitchen that looks out onto the The Clarksville Common esplanade. I saw Vanessa approaching. She reached into her bag, retrieved her phone, and, as she told me later, answered a text from her mother.
Vanessa’s family has been a through-line in her life: steady, strong, and unconditional. Her mother, Rosalynne, father, Knowlton, Jr., and her brother, Knowlton, III remain a force in her life and the life of her three grade-school-age children. Perhaps this is why her legislative focus is on issues that affect women, families, and children. I asked her if passing laws that nurture the citizens of 13 is her mission as a legislator.
“My mission hasn’t changed since the first time I ran in 2010,” she said, “except that probably I’ve gotten more passionate because of the things I’ve been able to see. And I think being a mom has made me more passionate.” She’s always wanted, she confirmed, to fight for the aforementioned groups. She leaned closer to me on the stool she was perched on and pointed out that one could argue that every issue falls under that purview. Another one of the issues she’s ultra-passionate about, that of reforming gun laws, became a cause dear to her heart during her first term.
Law and You’re Order’s Up
In 2000, Vanessa graduated from law school at Villanova University. As a compromise between her wish to move to Washington, D.C. and her parents’ opposition to her living there, she moved to Silver Spring.
“I really loved living there. I lived there for about 12 years, and then I moved back here in 2012,” she told me as a waiter from Trifecto brought over her salmon salad with fresh veggies brimming over the edge of the bowl. Upon moving back here, she continued, she got heavily involved in the community.
“That’s what I did here growing up through an organization I was in and my mom was in called Jack and Jill.” That group taught her ,and now teaches her kids, civic responsibility and volunteerism. During both her undergrad years and law school, she continued engaging in service work through her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha and various other organizations, like the black student law roup at Villanova. Then the idea to run for office came to her. I offered that it seemed like a natural progression for her. She laughed and added she thought, at the time, innocently, “I’ll run for office–of course!” She ran to represent District 18 in the Maryland General Assembly. The local electeds at the time told her privately they thought she was smart and liked what she stood for. Despite their belief in her, none of them wanted to come out publicly to support a non-incumbent.
She lost that first race. It devastated her, she confessed.
“I put so much of myself into it: my time, my parents, my home. My basement was my headquarters. We were a team. It was just us,” she said looking down at her salad for a moment. “Herb Smith worked for me. We were a team.” After her loss, she went “low-key” and had her first child, a son. When she got pregnant again a year later, she decided to move back to Howard County because she wanted her kids, a group that now includes a four-year-old daughter, to grow up here. Soon after her return to HoCo, a spot opened up on Team 13 when Guy Guzzone decided to run for Senator in the district instead of delegate again.
“I went down to Annapolis and filed and actually saw your good friend, Dr. Zaneb Beams,” she said, raising her eyebrows. Her normally tranquil expression became a little more excited as she widened her eyes, remembering. She told her parents that even though she hadn’t planned on running to be a delegate on Team 13, and despite that she’d already filed to run for Howard County Democratic Central Committee, she thought this opportunity was right for her. Who knew what the landscape would look like four years later! Former Delegate Frank Turner (D-13) urged her to think carefully about running for office, especially given that she had two young children. He’d been a lifelong friend of the family’s, so she took his advice to heart.
Team 13 met with her and two other non-incumbents running for Delegate. They chose her.
“They didn’t really have anyone on the the team that had worked on domestic violence issues,” she said. And no one wanted to be on the House Judiciary Committee except her. As Vanessa would have it, that’s why Team 13 chose her. I’d say it was her totality as a human being. The compassion, joy, and connectedness that practically emanate forth from her.
The Future’s Not So Much of a Mystery
I confirmed with Robert that Vanessa is the only HoCo-an we’ve interviewed so far that has said her proudest accomplishment lies in the future and will be when she gets passed her bill to change the legal age of marriage in Maryland.
“That’ll hopefully be in 2020. Then I’ll text you and be like, ‘Look!'” she said, mock-texting on an invisible phone and bending over at the waist as she laughed. She’s the kind of person, she said, who’s never satisfied. There’s always more to do, or more she could have done, she thinks. Even when she gets a bill passed, though it’s rewarding, to be sure, she thinks about the ones she didn’t get passed. Once, she said, an advocate sent her an article with an example of how a bill she’d worked on made a difference. That meant a lot to her.
These days, Vanessa’s working closely with the Tahirih Justice Center, she told me, which is traveling around the country advocating to get marriage laws changed.
“They do a lot of other stuff, too, but they’ve been working really hard on this, “And in the past four years, ten or more states have changed their laws. If Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and Pennsylvania can do it, why can’t we?” she asked me, looking out the window again. “What’s wrong here?” Often when parents consent to a child’s marriage, she explained, they’re covering up sexual abuse or selling their child. In her research on this topic, Vanessa’s found that several thousand teenage girls across Maryland are married.
“I’m always thinking about what we can work on next, what do we have to do next,” she said, poking her salmon to break off a bite.
Mommy May I Move to Pass This Bill
With all her work in Annapolis, which, during session can stretch from early in the day to early the next day, Vanessa sometimes confronts Mom Guilt. I thought it made sense, then, that she wishes Maryland offered a universal Pre-K education. Despite all these issues she’s so passionate about, including gun violence prevention (GVP), Vanessa’s three children are her proudest achievement.
“I’ll be on the House floor looking at pictures of my kids,” she said. We laughed, but she got serious again quickly. She recounted a time when her oldest son’s teacher sent her a note. It said it was great having him in her class. The teacher wrote that he’s just an honest, good, fun kid.
“I totally started crying,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, I just really want them to turn out to be good people.” I told her they already were. I met them at a 2018 Wear Orange event here in HoCo. All four of them wore that color to represent their solidarity with Moms Demand Action on the day it encourages members to don orange to show support for gun violence prevention. Vanessa’s three little ones played quietly together, decked out in orange, on a hot, humid, long day that might have made lesser kids throw a fit. Hey–I’ll admit that at one point I thought I might throw a fit, when we’d been there over an hour. I was sitting at a table with information on another GVP group, Marylanders to Prevent Gun Violence. Even in a covered pavilion, it was taxing to be in the heat.
In that same vein of including children in all she does, Vanessa’s spoken at local high schools and encouraged kids to come down to Annapolis to shadow her.
“One girl came down twice. She had two awesome days,” Vanessa recalled. But her eyebrows drew together and she fingered her handbag like a safety amulet when she told me she felt like she didn’t get to talk to the girl at all. She apologized, but the girl would hear none of it. It had been an amazing couple of days for her.
It had been a pretty amazing hour for me, too. I took the last sip of the fresh juice I’d ordered, and we decided to leave.
What She Sees, She Gets
During off-session times, like now, Vanessa engages puts her nose to the grindstone too. She works for her father’s business consulting firm, and she researches the areas she hopes to pass legislation on. She’s headed to Colorado next week to study how they implemented marijuana legalization there. The day after we spoke, she’d be in Annapolis putting her head together with other legislators in a workgroup that’s looking at how courts treat custody cases when the parents are accused of abuse.
“Vanessa’s a fierce advocate,” Jen Terrasa told me via text the next day. “She’s willing to take on controversial issues.” But that’s not all, Jen said. She told me that when Vanessa introduced her at a recent birthday party-fundraiser Jen had had, Jen felt like Vanessa’s words were the nicest ones anyone had ever uttered about her. She does, in fact, have a way of seeing, as Oprah Winfrey once said of what all the guests wanted to know that she’d had on her eponymous talk show as it ended its 25th year. They wanted to know if the world saw them, if it heard them. Vanessa does.
And: Sen. Guy Guzzone (D-13), Vanessa’s co-legislator, talked to me about his life in HoCo politics.
She knows how to have fun, too. Don’t sleep, as she said of her recent attendance at an aerobics class at Lifetime Fitness gym.
“It might have been 20 years ago, but I was an aerobics instructor. I was the champ,” she joked with her sister-in-law, who took the class with her and was impressed with how quickly she picked up moves. “Don’t sleep,” she said again.
Vanessa thinks quickly, too. She can go from guffawing about a parenting gaffe to expounding her reasons for caring about the issues she holds dearest to her heart.
“She’s demonstrated repeatedly how much she cares for those who are disadvantaged,” RoCo’s good friend Becca Niburg, a local immigration attorney and progressive activist, told me despite how busy she was at work that day. She wanted to weigh in on Vanessa.
Whether you’re a child like her own three kids, an adult like the brother she’s one-and-a-half years younger than and stays close to, or an older adult, like her parents, Vanessa’s got your back. She may be petite, but there’s something solid–something fierce–about her presence.
For example, her GVP advocacy made her think about what could have happened at HoCo’s first Pride festival on June 29th in Centennial Park. An event with a turnout in the thousands, it made her wonder.
“I thought, ‘I really hope nothing pops off while we’re down here,’ you know what I mean? And there was a time when you didn’t have to think about this stuff,” she said, looking straight into my eyes. I thought maybe she was feeling the innocent feeling we all had access to back then. But we moved on.
Vanessa had places to go, and I’d already usurped an hour of her time.
“Tomorrow I’m going to meet with Senator Sarah Elfreth who’s really passionate about raising the age of marriage too,” she said. Vanessa was excited to see Sarah (D-30), she said, because she’s “gung-ho.” She thinks she’s lost some of her own physical energy as we all do the older we get. Still, she’d be going to a group fitness class that evening, she hung in through Gun Day this year in Annapolis from 10:00 a.m to 4:00 a.m, and she’s an always-on mom.
Signs and Symbols
As the two of us walked out to our cars, Vanessa swinging a lanyard with her keys on it back and forth, I told her I was worried I wouldn’t make attractive or “good” signs for an upcoming picnic hosted by three local Democratic clubs. Keeping children involved with their communities stays at the forefront of Vanessa’s mind and she had a suggestion.
“Why don’t you get people’s kids to help?” she asked, stopping in front of her car. Yes! I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of that, but I loved the idea. Now I have two of the four signs done. Marketing expert and super-Dem Deeba Jafri’s daughter made one. Another good friend of RoCo, a molecular biologist and progressive activist Khaleda Bhuiya Hassan’s daughter made another. “HoCo Dems, Welcome,” they read.
As her black truck pulled away, I thought how I felt like I’d gotten a boost of energy from our hour together. As I told her once about a picture we took together, I felt like she supported me, as odd as it sounded, and it showed through in the picture. And so it felt that day, too.
Thanks for reading! Check back with us each here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.