'I'm going to be honest with you. My life is this city and my family.'

Patricia Hagan White, daughter of former mayor Kevin Hagan White, granddaughter of Boston City Council presidents William ''Mother" Galvin, and Joseph White, and great-granddaughter of the City Council president Henry Hagan, cannot stop talking about someone else while she's on the campaign trail.

How much he cries. How much he eats. How little he sleeps. How she needs to run home to Roslindale to change his diapers.

White, 35, is running for an at-large seat on the City Council, for the second time. And she has rearranged her approach. Intensely proud, yet painfully wary, of having grown up in one of Boston's most prominent political families, she barely mentions her lineage.

Instead, she gushes about a family member whose greatest achievement is being able to burp up his Enfamil. It is her 2-month-old son, William Hagan Fine. And it is a change that helps her connect with female voters, and that may blunt the perception, lingering from her campaign in 2003, that her candidacy is about the restoration of a family dynasty.

''I really want the voters of Boston to understand that I'm more than a politician's daughter," she said last week over a soda in a snack shop in Hyde Park. ''It's very important that they understand what my experience is."

Growing up the youngest of five children on Beacon Hill, White said she had never dreamed of running for office. At Josiah Quincy Elementary School in Chinatown, her favorite pastime was watching her brother, Chris, at his hockey practices in East Boston.

At Brookline High School, where her parents, Kevin and Kathryn White, paid to enroll her -- convinced that she would get a better education than in Boston -- she played field hockey swam competitively.

White said she also tried theater, but was too shy to succeed on stage.

At Boston University, where her father was a respected and feared professor, White studied history; she graduated in 1992.

''I was a pretty normal kid, I guess," she said. ''I was preoccupied with things like sports and boys."

In 1975, however, politics, in its rawest form, found her by the swing set. White was in the first grade, and she was being bused to Josiah Quincy. Across Boston, people were deeply divided by court-ordered desegregation of the schools.

Some busing opponents were angry at her father, who reigned as mayor from 1968 until 1983. Six-year-olds, charged up by their parents at home, yelled at White on the playground, she said.

''That was my first political moment," White said, her confident voice halting a bit. ''I mean, it was a really difficult time, not just for the city, but for me personally.

''I was very young and in the center of that," she said. ''I know that kids understood who I was and what my father's role was, and it was very tough. The good part is, I think, at a very early age, I developed a very thick skin."

After college, she delved into the worlds of nonprofit groups, and of campaigns.

White worked on Bill Clinton's campaigns in 1992 and 1996. At the Heinz Foundation, she was a women's health advocate from 1996 to 1997. She promoted child and elder care at Work/Family Directions Inc., a consulting firm in Boston, from 1997 to 1999.

In 2001, she worked on Steve Grossman's gubernatorial campaign, and in 2002 became political director for the state Democratic Party.

White speaks most proudly of her time at Boston Partners in Education, where she launched The Big Cheese Reads, a program that enlisted about 50 chief executive officers to read to, and to mentor, middle-school students.

White worked at Boston Partners in Education until June, when she left to campaign full time.

''There was no road map," she said. ''I was hired to really think through and solve problems."

In 2001, she met her husband, Isaac D. Fine, now a lawyer at Palmer & Dodge, when the two were working on www.voter.com, a defunct voter information website. They married last year.

''He pursued me, and thank God he did," White said. ''He didn't take no for an answer. That's one of his best qualities."

Now, she campaigns throughout the day -- at Roche Bros. in West Roxbury, at Kit Clark Senior Services in Dorchester. And she makes one pit stop at home every afternoon to check on her baby, who is cared for by relatives.

''I'm going to be honest with you," White said. ''I have no extracurricular activities. I don't do anything. I wish I could say I went for a run every day or watched movies. My life is this city and my family."

Shaped by the pressure of being a mother and a candidate, White says she wants to help others handle the stresses of work and family. She supports universal after-school activities, expanded prenatal care, more police officers, and says, broadly, that she wants to be a voice for women's issues on the male-dominated City Council.

''I understand that this city needs constant nurturing, constant nurturing," White said. ''We cannot take for granted where we are today."

No stranger to campaigning, she has a talent for schmoozing voters.

In the basement of the Hyde Park Municipal Building on Wednesday, White rested in the doorway of a food bank, telling volunteers about her plan to provide vitamins to pregnant women. This would be ''when I'm elected to the City Council."

White did not pass out literature, and she came with only one aide, who sat in a folding chair. When she ran in 2003, she often campaigned with her father, who also recorded phone messages for her.

Last month, she finished sixth in the city primary, which narrowed a field of 15 candidates to eight for the November ballot.

''I have waddled the waddle," White said, puffing out her cheeks, walking like a duck and joking about weight gain during her pregnancy. ''As a new mother, I have a whole new perspective, one, frankly, that I didn't have when I ran in 2003."

When White spotted a woman at the food bank holding a baby and wearing a T-shirt for the ''Greater Boston Memory Walk," White smiled and said hello.

''I just had a baby myself," White said. And she said: ''I was very involved in that walk. I'm a sponsor."

Moments later, White was nodding and listening as the woman talked about her job. White asked her for her vote, stressing that she wanted to help mothers.

''You need somebody who understands these issues," said the food bank coordinator, Shirley Shillingford, who has known White since White was a toddler. Shillingford worked as an aide in Kevin White's City Hall. ''She understands."