Settle for More

by Megyn Kelly

  “What if you could be just like—ninety percent of you?” he joked. (He’s stuck with the full 100 percent.)

  Diane is my spiritual guide. She is a Duke- and Harvard-educated oyster fisherman in Cape Cod. Now there’s something you don’t hear every day. Like Jackie and Doug, she does not seek the spotlight. The New York Times got wind of Diane’s situation a few years back and wanted to do an article on her, this brilliant Ivy League graduate oystering on the Cape. She declined. She doesn’t need or desire attention. She finds that affirmation in herself. She devotes herself to spiritual growth and education. If I need a different way of looking at a problem, I call Diane. Her philosophy is very empowering—that everything we want or need in life we can have, and we can get for ourselves. (She also believes that you should say nice things to your water if you want to encourage its healing properties, but every sage has a few eccentricities.)

  I love Diane’s sense of humor and commitment to ritual. She wears a Santa costume to Midnight Mass every Christmas (it is actually a dog costume she bought at Petco, but somehow it works). She makes us all wear antlers or Santa hats at Christmas . . . American flag headbands on July 4 . . . enormous birthday hats on birthdays . . . you get the picture. Every birthday she sends old pictures of the feted person by e-mail throughout the family. Every week or so she sends me a thought of the day or an inspiration. Our kids love their Auntie Di and her partner, Brad. They’ll drive down from the Cape and whirl through our apartment with positivity, talking to our children like they are forty (which they eat up)—Diane offering up endless energy for games or projects with them.

  Doug’s brothers, Ken and Will—both of whom had gone out of their way to welcome me to their family—were also there, along with Will’s wife, Leslie, a native Texan full of southern verve. Like Doug, Ken and Will are gentlemen—thoughtful, smart, and funny. Many people wonder how Jackie and Doug’s father, Manly, raised four kids who are so well adjusted and so connected. My take on it is that they gave them values but also room to breathe, and prioritized family at all turns. Manly was a brilliant doctor with a photographic memory. He died a few years ago. Shortly before, I asked him, “What was your favorite time with your kids?”

  He thought a minute and said, “All of them.”

  I pressed him with a follow-up: “But if you had to choose one . . .”

  “Right now,” he said. He was eighty-three.

  The morning of our wedding, Jackie pulled me aside and quietly offered me something old, borrowed, and blue: a beautiful embroidered handkerchief that she’d had when she was married nearly fifty years earlier. It brought tears to my eyes. Just about that same time, a staffer at the castle brought me a gift from Doug that completed the prewedding ritual—something new, a strand of pearls, the only real pearls I’ve ever owned. I held them and thought about Doug and his beautiful family. I remembered the fake pearls I wore in law school and beyond, going into interviews and trying to make my life better. Now I had.

  Of course I invited Nana to the wedding. By this point, she was ninety-three years old. When Nana got married in 1934, she was nineteen years old and wore a white linen suit that cost five dollars. She would go on to have two children, five grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren. Over the course of her later years, as her health turned a bit, she’d had a mastectomy. She’s nearly deaf. She’s lost her vision in one eye. But one thing she’s never lost is her sense of humor.

  “May-gyn, my love,” she said, “I got one eye, one breast, two hearing aids, and even dey don’t work worth a damn. Ahm just not up to it.”

  “Nan,” I said, “that is a great excuse. I love you. We’ll be thinking of you.”

  It was a beautiful service. Kelly Wright, my old friend from the early-morning shift at Fox, officiated. He is a pastor in Virginia Beach. I managed to keep from crying, except at the very end of my vows—“I will love you, and honor you, all the days of my life.”

  The passage of time. A beginning, and a promised ending. Life is so bittersweet that way.

  I look at the photos now from my wedding, and the ones that make me smile the widest are the ones of all of us dancing—Doug, me, and our brothers, dancing hard. Especially, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who’s heard it, to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” which became our wedding song. It doesn’t get more joyful than that.

  Doug and I slept at the bridal suite at the castle and then went to Cabo the next day. We were on a cliff overlooking the sea, with a Jacuzzi and a small pool. The place where we stayed came with a butler and a chef. I said to Doug when we got there, “What exactly does one do with a butler?”

  Flash forward to the end of the honeymoon—“Oh, Edgar! I’ve had to refill my own margarita glass again!” It was luxurious and amazing and far too short.

  Ten years later, I’m happy to know that Doug wasn’t too good to be true. My amazing initial impressions of him were accurate. Somehow, I landed him. Somehow, he saw something in me, too.

  I think one of the secrets to our success is that we look at each other through the most generous lens. I know who he is as a man, and I believe in that man’s character. Everything he does is interpreted from there. We root for and are unafraid to be honest with each other. We both believe that the harder a thing is to say to your loved one, the more important it generally is to say. We fight, but we never fight dirty. Dr. Phil says of fighting in relationships, “How can you win when the person you love most is losing?” Doug and I live this.

  We are generous with each other, and with our support for one another. At one of the presidential debates in 2012, down in Orlando, Doug showed up and surprised me. He came over, kissed me, and offered me a few words of encouragement before I went onstage. My friend and makeup artist at the time, Maureen, said, “Now, that’s a man.” (More than one woman has said exactly that to me about Doug: “That’s a man.”)

  He’s not afraid to tell you how he feels. And yet he’s not particularly emotional. I’ve only seen him come close to crying once in our relationship. He will well up here and there over our kids, but I’ve never seen him actually shed a tear. And I’m okay with that. I find a certain amount of reserve to be attractive. It’s the opposite of how I am.

  I recently realized that since I’ve been with Doug, men have stopped hitting on me. I believe that’s thanks to an energy I put off: Don’t even bother, you have no chance. I have more women friends now, both because of the work I did with Amy and because I think women know when someone poses a threat to their relationship. There was a time I put off a threatening vibe. I don’t think I knew what true devotion was. These days women know I don’t want their husbands. I’m deeply in love with my own.

  15

  The Best Line

  Early in the courtship, Doug and I were sitting around my living room. He was rumpled, in jeans and a white T-shirt. He looked so good, and I felt such love for him. Turning toward me, he said, “By the way, if you don’t want children, you should tell me soon.”

  It was one of those moments you never forget. Suddenly I felt flush with excitement and love and pleasure at the prospect before me: children. I was in my mid-thirties. Doug looked at me with those eyes, and the idea of my children was born in that moment. I saw the possibility of them and of our family, and it was almost as if we’d already met. As if I had just a momentary glimpse of them—the way when you close your eyes at the end of a long day, for a second your dream from the night before comes back—there they were, but just for a beat. And then, just as quickly, gone . . . for the time being. The next day, I said to my stepsister Liza, “I think I’ve met the father of my children.”

  I was thirty-seven when we got married in March 2008. Yates, our oldest, was born eighteen months later, in September 2009. I’d found out I was pregnant with him just before Barack Obama’s first inauguration. I took the test early in the morning, and bubkes, no double line. Doug and I had been trying for several months by this point and had one miscarriage already, so I w
as frustrated at yet another month of disappointment. I threw the test in the garbage, dejected.

  Later, after showering and getting dressed, I saw it sitting there in the garbage and—as I had done with about twenty other tests over the past months—picked it out of the garbage just to see if maybe I had read it wrong. And sure enough, there it was: a faint, barely perceptible second line. My first message from my son, delivering the best line any man ever could.

  My heart stopped. My excitement soared. I could not take my eyes off it! This little white wand might as well have been the baby itself, the way I cherished it, protected it, and checked and rechecked it about a thousand times that morning.

  I took another test. Same thing: an ever-so-slight-but-definitely-there second line. My child! I was meeting my child. That’s how it felt. My first knowledge of him. It all happened: the instant desire to take care of him, to protect him, to nurture him, to know him. Of course at the time I did not know if it was a boy or a girl, nor did I care. But I knew I was now a mother, and the world has never looked the same since.

  Doug was stunned—he had spent the morning telling me not to worry about the earlier (and, as it turned out, wrong) results, reassuring me that we’d get there eventually. First he wanted to hold the double-lined test, to see it with his own eyes. Then he wanted to hold me.

  My friends at work had only positive reactions. James Rosen, a good friend of mine at Fox and a correspondent in the DC bureau, made me laugh with his response. James is one of the most clever, interesting people you’ll ever meet. He is obsessed with the Beatles, Watergate, and Woody Allen. His nickname for me is “The Perfect Storm,” which has a nice ring to it as long as I don’t think too hard about how I’ve been trying to conquer my desire to be perfect, and about how the story by the same name is tumultuous and sad and they all die in the end.

  When I told him I was pregnant, James sent me an e-mail, joking, Ah! This child will be a grand and glorious testament to the Jewish faith. . . . Oh wait. It’s Doug’s baby? Never mind. Congratulations anyway. He and his wife, Sarah, have two beautiful kids of their own.

  I had a relatively good pregnancy, although the nausea was prolonged. My morning sickness lasted through nineteen weeks, and going on the air each day with Hemmer while feeling like I wanted to vomit had its challenges.

  Hemmer might very well be the nicest, most patient man you’ll ever meet. My general philosophy about him is this: if you don’t get along with Hemmer, it’s you. And let me tell you, in the winter of 2009, it was absolutely me. I used to arrive at the office around 5:30 a.m., feeling terrible. I’d study the news for a few hours and get my hair and makeup done, all the while wishing I could go back to bed and curl up in the fetal position. I remember saying to my makeup artist at the time, “If you could only know the afternoon me—you’d like me so much better.”

  Bill, of course, was exactly the opposite in demeanor and disposition. I distinctly remember Bill coming out to the set one morning and cheerfully booming, “What’s the story, Morning Glory?”

  In response, I thought, The story is “Shut the hell up, Bill.”

  Poor Bill. As far as I am concerned, that man is a saint.

  I worked up until the very last minute. Thursday night I was doing my weekly O’Reilly Factor hit at 8:00 p.m., and Friday morning I delivered Yates. I had all of my children in New York, where my amazing doctor, Elizabeth Eden, personally delivered each child.

  When I went into the hospital, Doug and I were bursting with anticipation. We even videotaped the empty predawn New York City streets on the way into the hospital. “Check out that sidewalk!” Everything seems more exciting when one is about to meet one’s child for the first time. One of the first stops upon getting to the maternity ward was anesthesia. I’ll never forget sitting on the table in the OR, waiting for the anesthesiologist. There I was, a beached whale in a gown that covered far too little, when he came bounding in. He saw my exposed rear end first, then saw my front and said, “Megyn Kelly! Oh my God! I love your show!”

  “Yep, that’s me,” I said, thinking, Don’t you have some drugs to administer?

  “I have something for you!” he exclaimed.

  An epidural? I thought, hopefully.

  “My book! I have a copy for you. You should have me on to talk about how to enjoy your labor.”

  How ’bout we stop talking about it, and start actually doing it, Doc?

  Becoming a mother is the most profound thing that’s ever happened to me. It is the point in my life that divided everything into before and after. My friend told me, just before I gave birth, “Now you will know what it is like to have your heart walking around outside of your body,” and that has proven to be absolutely right. That feeling I had upon becoming an anchor—“I was born to do this”—was dwarfed by the feeling I had on seeing my son for the first time—“I cannot go on if I don’t get to do this.” My career change brought me happiness. My child’s birth changed my understanding of what happiness really is.

  Being a mother helps define me. It also terrifies me—the intensity of this love, the deep, spiritual need to be with my children and to have them be well in a world that is so fickle and unpredictable. It has humbled me, enlightened me, and enhanced my relationship with God.

  Maternity leave with Yates was transformative in so many ways. I was learning how to be a mother—by doing it, by reading about it, by talking to my own mother, but mostly by instinct. My mom stayed with us for a bit and gave me some tips. Mostly she cooked—enough to feed a kingdom—and I was happy I didn’t have to think about it. Doug and I spent a lot of special time together during those months—we couldn’t get enough of our little man, who we took with us everywhere. Yates never wanted for attention.

  Shortly after I returned home, Roger called me to congratulate me. “I’ll be back soon,” I assured him, if soon meant sixteen weeks.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said, “what you’re doing is more important.”

  When I finally returned to work, I cried. It was very hard to leave my baby in the mornings. I remember thinking how bizarre it was to see myself with the Fox hair and makeup on. I looked and felt like an adult again. My first time on the air, it was for an O’Reilly hit. I was a bit stiff. I was tempted to speak in baby talk. But by the second time, things felt more familiar. “There I am,” I thought. And I realized it was actually good to be back. That there was something important at the office, too. A piece of me I loved, a piece I needed.

  That’s not to say it was easy to leave Yates in the morning. But I knew I needed to go, and that my son would be getting the best version of me if I could go and do this thing I also loved to do before coming home to him and holding him in my arms.

  People say Yates is my twin, but I think he’s a mini Doug. He came into this world a sweet old soul and he remains that way to this moment. Once, when he was five, we were walking home in the snow, catching the falling snowflakes on our tongues. Yates looked up at me and Doug and said, “This is my life and I’m loving it.”

  Doug was very shy when he was a child; Yates is not shy, but he is reserved. He assesses situations if it’s a crowded room. But once he’s satisfied that it’s for him, he isn’t afraid to run in. He’s also not afraid to play on his own if that’s what he prefers. Yates isn’t afraid of much, actually. Much like his mother did, he loves monster stories—I’m considering dusting off those old Alfred Hitchcock 45s.

  Yates is athletic, with terrific hand-eye coordination. Doug is too modest to say Yates got this from him, but he sure doesn’t get it from me. Yates is considerate and perceptive and bright. The responsibility of nurturing that beautiful mind for the next thirteen years is overwhelming to me. (Please forgive me for going on—I’m sure other parents understand.) We’re still trying to decide if we should tell him how smart he is. I’m leaning toward yes, since radical honesty probably trumps keeping the ego in check. There will be other opportunities to keep him humble.

  For a young c
hild, you would not believe how much he considers the feelings of others. When he was three, he learned to ride a bike without training wheels. Yates saw his friend ride into the playground on a bike with training wheels, which was totally age-appropriate. The friend was delighted to be riding at all. Yates, whose bike was parked nearby, congratulated his buddy and when we were walking away, he said, “Maybe let’s wait a minute—I don’t want him to feel bad seeing me without training wheels.” He wasn’t yet four. That’s how he is. A lovely boy.

  This doesn’t mean he never says the wrong thing. Like when I was pregnant with his little sister. Yates came over to me and put his hand on my stomach. “It’s getting bigger,” I said to him. “Yes,” he responded. “And your bottom’s getting bigger too.”

  Recently we flew to visit their Auntie Di in Cape Cod. Yates looked out the window and exclaimed, “I feel like I could reach out and grab the whole world.” There’s no doubt in my mind, he will.

  During my maternity leave with Yates, Roger promoted me. When I came back, I’d be launching my own show—America Live, a two-hour daytime program executive-produced by Tom Lowell. It was different not having a co-anchor—no one to play off, no one to help. The humor and reactions had to be done directly to camera—it was a totally different dynamic. I missed Hemmer. But I also knew this was a great new challenge for me—I had to anchor solo, and help produce my own broadcast. I had to make decisions, handle all the breaking news, and step into a leadership position.

  Much as with America’s Newsroom, Tom Lowell and I worked to turn what was previously a struggling time slot into a tent pole for the ratings. From the start, the show took off—the numbers were strong, and grew even stronger.

  I also began to take on more special coverage responsibility. Brit had retired after the 2008 election—a sad moment for all of us, although I was happy he’d still be working part-time. Roger needed an election night anchor, and chose to pair me with my colleague Bret Baier. It felt strange to be taking that baton from him—Brit Fucking Hume, of all people. I think Bret and I had an inferiority complex at first (and probably still do to this day). But we were happy Brit supported Roger’s decision, and Bret and I were pals, so the pairing felt natural.