In the meantime, I was just as busy with our little constituents, to whom I was connected in a way that no one but they and I could see or appreciate. Mark’s connection was necessarily diffuse and to a broad public. Mine was intimate. I was wholly and completely engaged as I held down the fort in Charleston with my pack of babies, another of which, Bolton, arrived in the second year of Mark’s first term. One night in particular reminds me of the very different kinds of lives my husband and I were leading.
When Marshall was three and a half and Landon was two and a half, both had a violent stomach bug, and I found myself running around cleaning up after each one, repeatedly changing sheets and pajamas while trying to comfort them both and nursing baby Bolton as well. At one point, I got Landon back down in his crib and had Marshall with me in my bathroom. I pleaded with Marshall to wear a pull-up diaper because I just couldn’t keep up with all the mess. He insisted he was a big boy and didn’t need a diaper anymore. During a moment of clarity, I realized I would not win a negotiation with a stubborn toddler, so I got Marshall a pillow and blanket and placed them in the tub, and said, “Well then son, you are just going to have to sleep in the tub!” At the prospect of sleeping uncomfortably and alone in the bathroom, Marshall gave in and agreed to wear the diaper “just for one night.” Whatever you might say about the maturity of his colleagues, these were not the kinds of negotiations Mark was having in Congress!
The boys and I had our own pleasures and routines. I treasured my time with them. We loved sitting together with take-out pizza and watching movies while just a few channels away their dad cast his vote on an important bill on C-SPAN. Mark had a rare opportunity to serve the country, and all of us were pitching in. I reminded myself that my lot was no different than the wife of a busy salesman and a lot better than the spouse of a solider serving in one of our wars. And at least I could see my husband on C-SPAN if I really wanted to tune in. Job asked: “Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” We had been richly blessed. Doing my small part to accommodate Mark’s busy life while focusing on the blessings underfoot was minimal on the adversity scale; it was not too much to ask.
Knowing Mark’s extremely frugal habits, I knew not to expect much from Mark for birthdays or for Christmas, even if I felt it was surely nice to be remembered every now and again. After our first big primary and run-off wins in 1994, Mark surprised me over a romantic dinner one evening with a beautiful gold pin, a laughing elephant I have worn plenty over the years he has served as a Republican. Once in office, however, his habits deteriorated and he even forgot my birthday once. Thereafter, I nudged the scheduler to remind him. (My birthday is on September 11, and since 2001 Mark has learned to remember it without a reminder.)
One birthday during the later congressional years, Mark decided to do something very nice for me. He had a friend pick out a diamond necklace and he had a staff member hide it in my closet. Then he faxed clues to the campaign office in our basement as to where I should look to find my birthday gift. I had the boys join me in the scavenger hunt and, working together, we found it. I loved it! Not only did I love the necklace, but this reminded me of what I loved about Mark Sanford. The scavenger hunt was clever and his notes and clues were ever so boyishly sweet.
A few days later, he arrived home from DC. We had dinner guests, and I was proudly wearing my lovely new necklace. As soon as he saw me wearing it, he said “That is what I spent all that money on?! I hope you kept the box!”
He returned the necklace the next day, thinking it was not worth the money he had spent. He could see I was disappointed, but he promised to make it up to me. In truth, once I knew he thought he had overspent, I also knew it would pain him to see me wear the necklace had I insisted on keeping it. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable wearing it in his presence, so what was the point? I had married him, after all, knowing he was not a big-spending Wall Street type. I remained thankful for the thought and the sweet scavenger hunt nonetheless.
I wasn’t the only one to bear the brunt of Mark’s frugality. Mark had a standing weekly movie night with fellow congressmen Lindsey Graham and Steve Largent and they would rotate who was responsible for the movie tickets and snacks. When it was Mark’s turn to get the popcorn and soda, Mark chose the best deal. He bought one large bag of popcorn and a jumbo-sized Coke with three straws. I’m not sure if Lindsey and Steve thought Mark’s decision was stingy or hilarious. But his explanation was simple and true to form: The Coke had free refills.
In all fairness, I realize that seriously caring about saving money is an admirable (and rare) quality in a politician. Mark’s frugality isn’t for show. It is in his core. Spending money gets his attention. I learned to use this to my advantage.
We arrived home late one Sunday evening in January 1997 from a congressional retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with Marshall and Landon. We’d left baby Bolton at home with a sitter, Zetta Brown. Upon return, Zetta told us Bolton was sleeping soundly upstairs, but she thought she had heard a bird in the house.
When I went upstairs to unpack and get ready for bed, I discovered two bats sleeping peacefully in my sink. I called for Mark, who calmly got the bats snug in a t-shirt. The older boys were enthralled as he gently released the bats out the front door. We proceeded to unpack and tucked Marshall and Landon into their beds. Then I went to bed too, only to find bats swooping through my bedroom as soon as I turned out the lights.
This time I called frantically for Mark, and he got a tennis racket and started whacking at bats throughout the house as the boys slept. (I later learned it is against the law to kill bats, a federal law Mark called worthless once I informed him of it.) Nine bats later, we went to bed, though I lay awake and kept one eye open for bats for too long.
Though Mark thought doing so was a waste of money, the next morning, I called a pest control man named John to make sure the bats were gone. John discovered that a cap on the chimney had been torn back, allowing space for the bats to enter the house through the fireplace. He did what he felt was needed and told me once the bats left to feed that evening, they would not be able to return. But at dusk, the bats were swooping through the kitchen, and I was a nervous wreck! Bats in the house seem to swoop right at your face, making you want to dive for the floor. Mark killed a few more that evening and then chuckled at my fright as he departed for DC the next morning.
I couldn’t take another night of them. I vacated the house before dusk and took the boys to sleep at a friend’s down the street, while giving the keys to the house to my new friend John.
It turns out bats can hibernate inside. We needed to be patient a bit longer as he enticed them all to leave. Not a job for me. I felt I was wearing out my welcome with the three little boys at my friend’s house and also felt little empathy from Mark, safe in his batless office in DC.
So, on Thursday I moved with the three boys to a suite in a local hotel and called Mark to tell him that I was not moving back in until he had slept in the house for at least two nights without seeing a bat. Facing the prospect of paying for an extended hotel stay, Mark sprang into action, effectively dealing with every last bat. We happily returned to live together as a family Sunday night.
Mark described his time in Congress as similar to being a member of a fraternity, bantering about ideas with colleagues and remaining friendly despite disagreements. He also enjoyed standing on principle to nudge change in one direction or to keep change from happening too fast in another direction. As engaged and happy as he seemed, I began to wonder if remaining true to what he believed was making him a very lonely or unsatisfied man.
As a staunch fiscal conservative, Mark was on the fringe of his party in Congress. He was one of a handful who opposed the relaxing of our nation’s mortgage rules in the 90s, for example, when few could conceive of being against a law that claimed it would encourage home ownership for everyone. He made many lonely votes against large military bills too, because of the tendency to bloat military spending with unnecessa
ry earmarks. His principles required him to oppose things—opposition that later would be used to portray him as heartless. He was one of the sole votes against a breast-cancer stamp because it cost money and he thought it was merely feel-good legislation that would ultimately lead to more government creep. In some cases, it was he and just one or two others voting together on an issue.
At one point in the middle of his second term, we rented a house on the South Carolina coast for a much-needed vacation and the differences in our pace and lack of connection caught up to us. I was feeling the strain of living apart, and I was also exhausted by my time alone juggling the demands of the boys. On a walk together alone along the shore, I tried to explain my frustration. I didn’t begrudge Mark his time away from the doctor’s appointments, the school events, and later the homework, because I saw Mark’s career as a family effort. But his work protected him from the ordinary, day-in, day-out connection with the boys, I explained, and as a result I felt he was becoming out of touch with us. My job was tapping into the most tender parts of my heart and soul. His job demanded that he be calculating and sometimes manipulative. I was growing more vulnerable, and he was forming a hardened shell.
For his part, Mark complained that I didn’t understand the stress and pressure he was under. We didn’t say it in so many words, but it was clear that while both of us were rarely alone, in our own distinct ways, we were lonely.
What we did say led to tears—mine—and to a soul search about whether we should even stay married. I know many marriages weather similar discussions, sometimes with one spouse threatening to leave. Neither Mark nor I threatened to leave, but we were both working hard to be understood and falling short. Our geographic distance was yielding a real emotional distance as well. I questioned then whether he really understood me. I assume he questioned that about me as well. His seeming inability to understand my needs and my worries also made me question if he truly loved me. I don’t know if he could say the same, but in many ways I think we were discovering things about our marriage that made us each afraid for the future of it.
At the same time, this heart-to-heart served as a wake-up call of sorts. We were acknowledging that life had become hard, but we still loved each other and also had a family that we both dearly wanted to hold together. We both hoped that life would get easier, that we would enter into a new and more manageable “season” once his time in Congress was through. In the meantime, we agreed that his career was an important part of both of us, and that we didn’t want to upend it by continuing to move apart. Divorce just wasn’t an option. We wanted to stay together and we would. Besides, I believed him when he said he would end his service in Congress after six years. At the moment of this painful argument, we were about halfway through.
SEVEN
EVEN WITH A RENEWED AND EXPLICIT COMMITMENT AFTER OUR argument on the beach, Mark and I spent less and less time together during his last term in Congress. By then our home was on Sullivan’s Island. We had sold our house in Charleston and bought an informal and seemingly indestructible cinder-block one near the beach on Sullivan’s, an island at the mouth of the Charleston harbor. I had instantly fallen in love with life on Sullivan’s. The pace, the proximity to the sea, and the simplicity of the home itself suited me and gave me great happiness, even with Mark gone so much. This still-cherished year-round beach retreat has given us all some needed space—indoors and out—though Mark has taken refuge in its walls less than the rest of us. Indeed, at that point he was returning home infrequently on the weekends, travelling more often, expanding his knowledge of the issues in South America, Khazakstan, Bosnia, India, you name it. I got used to having him gone and justified it by his need for adventure and travel and, yet again, reminding myself of that finish line that I could see coming toward me in the distance. This was a fairly lonely existence for me all the same. Mark was seeing the world, but I wanted him to see that this world that he and I created was just as interesting. I worried that so much of it was slipping away from him unnoticed, never to be reclaimed. That restlessness and drive I had admired so much when we were courting was causing him to look outside the home for adventure, while I believed the adventure of my life was nestled in my arms.
I now have some perspective on how this snuck up on us. Our entry into this unreal world started quickly and, at first, we were both caught up in the excitement of it all. As soon as we won that first campaign for Congress, the phones were ringing with other politicians congratulating Mark on his win and suggesting one course of action or another. The press wanted interviews and sound bites for the evening news. Congressional tabloids asked for photos and bios to profile the newest members of this exclusive club. Lobbyists called to flatter Mark as they pitched their causes and successful businessmen wanted to meet him for lunch or dinner to ensure their interests were protected. The accumulation of this special treatment was no doubt a big part of what disconnected Mark and me from each other and what disconnected Mark from the values and priorities he once held dear. On Wall Street, I saw many a man whose ego grew as his income rose and he got more attention from those around him, but nothing I saw there compares to the immediate and transformational ego-stroking of politics.
I can see now that it was naïve to think that marriage and family would take the edge off Mark’s frenetic hunger. After all, right at the moment when I had achieved a lifelong goal—the birth of our first son Marshall—Mark said he was bored. He wanted to be stretched to the limit, and as much as he loved me and our growing family, domestic life didn’t do that for him. Motherhood was stretching me physically and emotionally in ways he couldn’t share and that he didn’t appreciate.
Many marriages suffer when the partners start to prioritize differently and then grow apart from one another. The more I saw Mark pack his schedule, the more I tried to become the antidote; I worked to balance the frenzy. I supported his campaigning and entertained with him as much as possible when he was home on weekends, but I also would regroup and slow down during the week when he was away. When he pulled us into his freneticism, I pulled the other way, trying to carve out time for us to recharge instead of deplete our batteries.
This push-pull was probably futile. I grew to see I couldn’t fix him and he didn’t want me to slow him down. I couldn’t find his happiness, but I could make the effort to connect with my own.
Though I admired the way Mark persevered in the aftermath of his father’s death, over time I less charitably saw the mirror trait of that perseverance: stubbornness. He did things his way, and his way only, on a host of fronts. Still, I knew the stresses Mark was under and the challenges he faced so I had to pick my battles with him carefully. We had our shared goals, our family, and our focus on his career to bind us together. My feeling was that anything that distracted from those things was something I could let go of since there were so many pressing responsibilities that needed our full attention. As a modus operandi, this more or less worked because our basic values remained shared.
Call it perseverance or stubbornness, Mark didn’t make it easy for himself to succeed in Congress. He would regularly return from DC frustrated that he had “nothing to show” for his valiant efforts; at least, he said, I had the babies to show for my hard work. His popularity was sky high with the voters in our district because he took a stand against wasteful government spending. This made him a maverick among his peers. Fighting so many majority-supported big bills made it hard to champion laws of his own; he wouldn’t support other representatives’ bills so they had little motivation to support his. Opposing legislation often did succeed in keeping federal spending lower than it would have been but it wasn’t like a notch on the belt of success to be remembered for. He also wanted to enact laws he believed in, including some that would further restrict rampant government growth, and on that front, he frequently faced defeat.
I tried to help Mark see that success—as he was coming to define it in his day-to-day work—didn’t correlate to self-worth. Through the highs a
nd lows of his own life, my father has demonstrated that success is a personal thing defined by the way you live your life every day, and by what you do with the skills you have and the blessings you have bestowed on you. I praised Mark for his hard work. I praised him for the hard work of opposition. My praise was never quite enough. Like many men, his personal bar for success is satisfied by more tangible things. On the weekends at home when not campaigning, I would often find Mark on a track hoe at Coosaw from dawn till dusk creating a pond or even digging a giant pit for the boys to play in (and, possibly, risk their lives!), complete with a PVC pipe for chicken fights and a zip line. He explained he loved seeing his progress “one scoop at a time” and knew at the end of the day just what he had succeeded in creating. In this—building something—he could feel satisfied.
One brilliant fall Sunday at Coosaw, we took the boys deep into the woods for a picnic. I spread a blanket under the bright blue skies in a large clearing, while Mark got the boys to help him start a fire in a grand stack of logs left by a crew that had been logging timber there. Shortly after the fire was lit, the wind began to pick up. After finishing our simple lunch, I had to pack away the blanket and leftovers as the breeze strengthened. In no time whatsoever, the flames were two stories tall and the wind was blowing some of the flames in the direction of the neighboring stand of pines. I was terrified watching our little boys trying to beat back the flames with skimpy branches. Alarmed, I drove with the baby to a local store to ask the old men gathered there to help while the storekeeper called the fire tower. Eventually a small plane dropping water from above helped get everything under control. As we left for Charleston and the airport so that Mark could catch his flight to DC, a passing fireman asked him if he was related to Congressman Mark Sanford. Neither denying nor confirming his identity, Mark just smiled and moved along.
Staying True Page 8
