Jennifer Messer

Last week I was featured in a news story about the fact that I provide legal services for the city of Fishers. The story was unfair, intellectually dishonest and straight-up sexist. You know the charge — congressman’s wife (by the way I have a name; it’s Jennifer Messer) gets paid too much for not really doing very much — leaving the presumption that me and the local municipality are doing something wrong.

Well, these are the facts:

• I have worked with Fishers for nearly eight years, and Fishers was my client two years before my husband was elected to Congress.

• I am paid well for my legal services but the city is paying less today for legal services than it was before its contract with my firm.

• I work diligently for Fishers and have never, in eight years, taken my job for granted. My job is a privilege — not just because I love the economic development work that I do, but because I work with a group of rock-stars. These are people who wake up every day and want to make Fishers a better place for its residents, potential residents and businesses.

• There are simply no facts suggesting that Fishers has received anything as a result of my husband being a member of Congress. Put simply, the premise of the entire Associated Press story is false.

Fishers Mayor:Mayor: Jennifer Messer's $20,000 a month legal contract is a bargain for Fishers

As a former board president of Girls, Inc. of Shelbyville, my girls often hear the mission of that organization — to be strong, smart and bold. My husband and I tell all our kids that with hard work, they have the God-given ability to accomplish most anything.

Luke and I are fortunate. It is a lesson we have heard our whole lives — Luke through his mom who raised him and his brother on her own working at a Greensburg factory, and me from parents who didn’t finish college and were determined that their daughter would.

With that, I worked my way through college, went to law school and accepted a job at Indiana’s largest law firm after school. Since that time I have been afforded many wonderful opportunities in my career, and in each I worked to serve my clients well and learn from the experience.

I’ve worked as an attorney my entire adult life, other than one six-month sabbatical taken to illustrate a book my husband authored, “Hoosier Heart.” Like millions of other strong, smart and bold Hoosier women, I have worked early in the morning before kids awoke, late at night after they were asleep, while sitting at car pool, while sitting in bleachers, while on vacation and at any other time there was work to be done that was my responsibility.

To be clear, this doesn’t make me exceptional. Rather, it makes me typical. It is 2017, and plenty of professional women are sufficiently smart, sophisticated and working hard to succeed at work and family. And here is another fact: Women are quite capable on their own merits, regardless of who their spouse may be.

Finally, I am incredibly proud of my husband. He is a loving spouse and father who never put his career and aspirations above his faith and family. He has risen through the ranks of Congress trying to serve his constituents well. Luke’s accomplishments are not mine. I love and support him but at the end of the day, the work is his.

The same is true of me; just as it is true of most women working to support and raise their families. Women have the brains, the guts and the determination to be strong, smart and bold. The characterization that any success a woman has should be attributed to her husband is antiquated, ignorant and out-of-touch. But none of that is news to working mothers in 2017.

Messer has been a practicing attorney for 16 years.