On the sultry Monday morning in early May when I launched my congressional campaign, I woke up with a terrible cold. I stayed under the covers, unable to move, until I reminded myself that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, 30 years my senior, had powered through an entire 9/11 ceremony with a full-blown case of pneumonia.

Trudging down to the kitchen to heat some water for Theraflu, I realized that I had no voice. In roughly eight hours I was scheduled to deliver a ten-minute speech to a large room of mostly strangers, enumerating all the reasons I was a better choice for the Texas Seventh District than the sixteen-year Republican incumbent. In the name of populism and “letting Texans run Texas,” Congressman John Culberson had voted to take health insurance away from 23 million people to fund a tax cut—99.6 percent of which would go to the top 1 percent.

Claudia, my four-year-old daughter, met me at the bottom of the stairs. “Mommy, can we play family right now?” she asked. “I’ll be your baby sister and you can be my teenage big sister.” I walked past her. She’d grown a little clingier since our recent move from Washington, D.C., to West University Place, the idyllic, manicured neighborhood in southwest Houston where I grew up.

I sympathized, but I needed to focus my limited energies. Mug in hand, I crawled back into bed to hone my talking points on education, infrastructure, and health care. I decided I should insert a line about how I was determined, for my daughter’s sake, to protect the basic freedoms—such as access to affordable birth control—that I had long taken for granted. Our return to Texas, the state that led the charge for eroding women’s reproductive rights, could not have come at a more critical time.

My grandfather arrived in Houston in 1942 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He had lost everything—his profession, his language, his money—but the city welcomed him, as it has hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years. Because of my family history, Houston had always represented to me a place of hope and possibility, where totally dissimilar people could come together and make their own stories. I married a man whose Hindu father grew up in the rural north of India and whose Jewish mother grew up in the Bronx. Our Jewish children, with their father’s Indian last name and their mother’s bright-blue eyes, were now residents of the most diverse city in America.