I attended Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s George Mason University rally with my daughter. We took the stroller and stood/sat under a small tree while two warmup speakers did their thing. A campaign worker walked up with a guy and a fancy camera thing and asked if we’d like to have our picture taken for the campaign’s focus on children. And hey, sure, why not? So we knelt/sat there looking personable, and then I signed a release. I don’t think the campaign used the footage — some children are just. too. cute. — but it was a fun part of the experience.

Soon after, Elizabeth walked onto the stage and talked about some stuff. Part of what I remember her talking about was her time as a special education teacher, a job from which she was fired (as she recounts in this book) because she was — in her words, and she repeated them — “visibly pregnant.”

Was that a lie, Elizabeth?

I ask for two reasons: First, because here you are in 2007 saying something else, and second (which we’ll get to soon), because your own documents offer yet another possibility.

In your 2007 oral history, you do not mention being fired for being pregnant. You gloss over what happened: “I don’t think [taking the graduate school courses to get certified] is going to work out for me.”

Were you failing the classes?

Was taking them while also being “visibly pregnant” (the term you used at the rally I attended) too hard?

Or did you have a change of heart — however brief — and decide that you’d rather mother a child than teach other people’s kids?

It’s hard to find fault with that decision.

It’s easy — or easier — to find fault with this:

You’ve been telling a different story on the campaign trail.

On the trail, as you tell the story, you were fired for being pregnant.

In that 2007 interview, you … left, possibly because you weren’t up to the academics.

Now, here’s the fun: Among the documents we have are your Harvard resume (which doesn’t include your special education teaching days), your Rutgers Law School application and your University of Houston candidate file, both of which you have made public in an apparent attempt to show how white you were saying you were at the time.

But in the Rutgers document, you lay out a third timeline:

1970: B.S. in speech pathology, University of Houston

1970: Move to New Jersey because Jim gets a new job

1970–71: Speech therapist, Riverdale Elementary School

[Not in document: September 1971: Amelia is born]

February 1972: Nursery teacher, Intervale Elementary School

June 1972: Begin graduate coursework in education at what is now Kean University

August 1972: End/abandon coursework (no certification listed)

September 1972: Enroll at County College of Morris for accounting classes

The Houston document, meanwhile, tells us that in 1973, you began and ended work as an administrator (“[l]ibrary reorganization, typing, filing”) at IBM, where your husband, Jim, worked. And in 1976, you were no longer identifying four of the colleges you’d attended, only the two at which you’d obtained degrees. (Since you don’t identify Newark State College, now Kean University, as a certificate-granting institution, we might surmise that you did not complete sufficient education coursework there.) You also weren’t listing your nursery teacher experience at Intervale, yet you were listing your work at Riverdale.

We have two basic options here:

You filled out the Rutgers application while having a case of mom brain, which I am familiar with. Dads get it too, but moms are associated more highly with general mental fatigue from raising the aliens we kindly refer to as children. You were not retained at Riverdale because you were not certified, so after taking a break with Amelia, you got a job as a nursery teacher at Intervale — probably needed the money, which makes sense given your eventual spider plant sales and your desire for a washing machine — and enrolled in the requisite graduate education certification coursework in the summer once you didn’t have a day job in the way. But it didn’t work out, so you switched to accounting, got a job with your husband’s company and … something happened such that you quit the same year.

I am not in the business of criticizing people for doing jobs because they need money.

I am not in the business of criticizing people for becoming bored by menial work or realizing they can’t cut it in whatever field or they don’t feel fulfilled or whatever else.

I am in the business of finding and fixing inconsistencies. And unless you simply remembered the wrong year — 1972 rather than the correct year, 1971 — what we have here is something that just ain’t true.

But on the other hand, why should anyone care? Whether you were not retained (as opposed to fired) because you didn’t have the requisite credentials or because you were pregnant and you didn’t have the requisite credentials is a distinction that doesn’t help or hurt anyone on the path to health care (where you favor access, as opposed to Medicare for All), higher wages, whatever. Zero economic benefit is to be gained from opposing you because of this potential problem with your origin story.

But people care about trusting politicians. Voters who trusted Hillary Clinton voted for her at a 94 percent clip, whereas voters who didn’t trust her voted for her at just a 20 percent clip — a more-than-four-fold difference.

The trustworthiness question was more specific in 2012, dealing with international issues, and in 2008 it instead asked if either nominee was “in touch with” the voter. Nevertheless, 2004 provides another easy example of how trust is a factor in voting:

So this matters because 2007 Elizabeth Warren and 2019 Elizabeth Warren are telling different stories. And if Hillary had a problem with her position-a-day calendar, Bosnian sniper fire, Nancy Reagan’s role in the AIDS crisis and whatever else, then you and your refusal to discuss not endorsing Bernie in 2016 — let alone your claims of native American heritage, including your elopement story nonsense — are going to have a problem with this latest trustworthiness issue, assuming that it is one.

Amusingly — or not, depending on whether you’re on Team Warren or not — the question of whether you were fired or not, for being pregnant or not, in 1971 and/or 1972, whether you attended graduate school courses in education in 1971 or 1972 … arise only because you have made documents from the 1970s available specifically to demonstrate that you were claiming white ancestry in 1973 and 1976. The red-box and red-letter emphasis in these screenshots of your Rutgers and Houston documents is yours, not mine:

Add to that the theme of your life in the late 1960s and into the late 1970s: You wanted to do something. You needed to be challenged.

Every time you moved, you got a job or got into school or both.

Getting married was enough for some women. (It trapped many others.) But it wasn’t enough for you. You wanted to do and be something more than Mrs. Warren, something more than Amelia’s mom. And that’s fine. By my count, you enrolled in six schools in eight years:

George Washington University, 1966

University of Houston, 1969

University of Texas, 1970

Newark State College, 1972

County College of Morris, 1972

Rutgers Law School, 1973

That’s how much you wanted your own life and your own challenges. And where women are seen as the primary caregivers — of babies, of people with chronic illnesses, of their parents, of other people, and in charge of unpaid emotional labor and all of this at the expense of their own health — you wanted more. So that’s part of your campaign narrative: You wanted to be more than a wife and mother. Nothing wrong with that.

Pair that narrative with the one in which women are the bulk of our teachers (whether paid or not). And add to that the long history of women getting fired for being pregnant, plus other fun. At an average Elizabeth Warren rally, I’d expect to find at least one woman who’d been fired for being pregnant, knew someone who had, or had heard a story of it happening to someone.

So all of this plays into one overarching central narrative: the woman who wants an intellectual challenge but is struggling because however hard she tries, the target keeps shifting.

Oh, and your husband’s a jackass:

“[Elizabeth Warren] got the [law school] job, but quickly became overwhelmed with juggling her career and her children. “It was hell,” she says. “I loved the teaching, but I had two little babies and I had no support for them. Jim’s position was very straightforward. He said, ‘I like our lives. You don’t have to work. I make a decent living, so if you want to work, this is all on you. I still expect dinner on the table, the kids bathed and ready to go.’” She continues, “In a funny sort of sense, I never held it against him. That had been what he expected when he married me. So I tried, God I tried to keep it all together. And Jim’s view was: ‘Well, then quit. Quit and stay home.’””

Jim was either delusional or making far more money than he was making when you had to sell plants to your classmates to pay your bills. I don’t know which is the case, nor do I care.

In any event, we have this brainy woman fighting back against a world that wants her to be a uterus with legs. She’s taught, she’s no longer teaching (because she was fired or because she wasn’t qualified), she’s now got a child, and her husband wants her to stay home and uterus up the place.

Skip ahead several decades — to now, conveniently — and guess who really likes Elizabeth Warren:

So it’s not surprising that you’re tapping into narratives that will be familiar to many of those women. And whereas Bernie owns the youth vote, you appeal across age groups — at least in this one poll; early polls are useless, so this’ll be the end of the poll aspect of this article:

So what we have here is a woman telling the story of her struggle to find her place in the world, to find her academic stimulation in the world, while it is hostile to her, while her husband is hostile to her wishes, while her children are basically petri dishes on legs, while her career consists of her working from home taking in walk-in clients, all after her speech degree went for little because she didn’t have the certificate she needed to join the 77 percent of teachers who are women.

And on top of that, she got fired for being pregnant.

Unless … you instead did not get retained because not only did you not have the certificate you needed to be qualified to conduct speech therapy with kids, you didn’t even attempt to get it until you’d moved on to a different school after your daughter was born.

We don’t know. And I, for one, would like to know if — when my daughter cheers for you because she hears your name in a debate — my daughter is cheering for a woman who lied to her.

So, Elizabeth, what’s the truth?

Did you pursue that certificate in 1971, before Amelia was born? And if so, why didn’t you note the attempted coursework on that Rutgers application?

Did you go back to teaching (at Intervale Elementary School) when Amelia was still an infant? And did you work out-of-home for IBM when Amelia was a toddler? I am not here to judge you for working, but you said in that 2007 interview, “I had a baby, and I stayed home for a couple of years.” It’s hard for Intervale, IBM and stay-at-home life to all be true. I’m particularly curious as to how you could have achieved “[l]ibrary reorganization” at IBM without opening your front door.

Did you take correspondence courses in accounting at County College of Morris, or did you attend classes in person? You were there between at least September 1972 and February 1973.

Your Rutgers Law School application is dated as being received Feb. 28, 1973. How had you already taken the LSAT that subsequent October? Did you have a plan for time travel? (A joke. But I am curious.)

Again, this is the timeline you provided in the 1970s:

1970: B.S. in speech pathology, University of Houston

1970: Move to New Jersey because Jim gets a new job

1970–71: Speech therapist, Riverdale Elementary School

September 1971: Amelia born

February 1972: Nursery teacher, Intervale Elementary School

June 1972: Begin graduate coursework in education at what is now Kean University

August 1972: End/abandon coursework (no certification listed)

September 1972: Enroll in County College of Morris for accounting classes

1973: Employed as administrator (“library reorganization, typing, filing”) at IBM, where Jim works

February 1973: Apply to Rutgers Law School

That isn’t what you said happened in 2007. And it isn’t what you’ve been saying happened this past year.

So I’d really like to know if you lied to my six-year-old daughter.