Settle for More

by Megyn Kelly

  Our kids see that Doug and I support each other’s goals. When we got married, Doug was running a company down in Palm Beach. He was splitting his time between there and New York, and he was not enjoying that travel once Yates was born. He was clearly not happy. It wasn’t the most productive, healthy work environment.

  We went for a walk in Central Park. I suggested he try to figure out what might make him more fulfilled. He’s like my dad was, a voracious reader and a master of observation. Doug had been writing a book as a stress reliever on all those airplane rides. He told me he loved writing and thought it was something he could pursue.

  “Why don’t I read your book?” I said.

  It was nerve-racking for both of us. What if I hated it? Luckily, I didn’t. In fact, I loved it. It’s called Ghosts of Manhattan, and it’s beautifully written. If you read that book, you’ll know why I love Doug. I encouraged him to quit his job and try to become a published author.

  Off he went. He sold off a large part of the company, and started writing full-time. And he’s never looked back. That book became a New York Times best seller. He cares deeply about his writing, and has networked in the writing community very well. He’s in a supersecret book club with some very famous authors and writers. (I’ve already said too much.) He creates these gatherings like my mom and dad used to do, where they talk about things other than politics—literature, storytelling, possibilities.

  Doug’s next book, The Means, also sold big. The main character is a little bit me and a little bit Melissa Francis, who started out on Little House on the Prairie and is now a newscaster at Fox and a good friend. It was funny—when I was reading early drafts, I’d write in the margins, “Hey, that’s my story!” So if you’ve read The Means and any stories in here sound like ones in Doug’s book, just know they were mine originally.

  Now Doug’s publishing a third book, called Trophy Son, and I have to say, that career has been great for him and for us. Other than for the three weeks after his publication dates, Doug can make his own hours, and usually writes in the mornings after school drop-offs. It allows us a lot of flexibility. He can get the kids to Fox for an office picnic. He and I can meet for a nice lunch. Every once in a while we make a Broadway matinee or take a walk in Central Park. If I have to leave town to cover breaking news, he can cover for me, and I leave knowing my children are with not just a nanny but a parent they love, which alleviates some of the guilt. Thankfully, I don’t have to travel much—but I do put in long hours at the office, especially in election years.

  We’re teaching our kids that moms support dads and dads support moms and the main goal is that the family unit thrive. They are learning the importance of true connection, because they see and feel and live it in our home. They are also learning that being unhappy at the office long-term is not acceptable. We want our kids to think, I can do better than that. I can find something that invigorates me. We want them to be excited and challenged by what they do. To find that, you have to get a good education. You have to work hard for good things to happen.

  We find ways to inculcate Kelly family values, which thankfully Doug happens to share.

  One time Yates and I were playing a game.

  “Yates,” I said, “you’re going to win!”

  “Maybe we could all win,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “we cannot all win. There is a winner and a loser. Losing is an incentive to keep practicing.”

  Doug and I want them to understand that. Right now my daughter doesn’t like competition because she doesn’t like losing—she’s usually playing against Yates, who’s got nineteen months on her. I think she also doesn’t like to be in a position to make other people lose. I want her to understand the value of competition and winning and losing, but I’m also conscious of not putting my own competitiveness off on her. They can be whoever they are. Our way isn’t always right.

  We encourage them to do things themselves. Order their own meals at restaurants, pour their own milk in their cereal, clear their own place settings. Inspired by my dad, Doug and I will go around the dinner table and ask, “What’s the report?” Each child gets a turn, and sure enough, they go on and on. We try not to interrupt (dinners are long). When we go to the airport, we have the kids get us to our gate. These little things build confidence. This is not to say Doug and I have it all figured out—far from it. This is just how we approach parenthood and find ways to enjoy one another more.

  Just like with Linda, we have a lot of laughs. I’ll come out in the morning with my hair sticking straight up, my glasses on, and no makeup, and I’ll start posing dramatically, like a runway model, telling the kids if they want my styling secrets it’s going to cost them big, since I am a Very Famous Person and I don’t just give these gems out to anyone. Yates will deadpan to me, “That’s not your best look.”

  One thing that was always worth a laugh in the Kelly house growing up was when anyone tripped—usually my mother. There would be a moment’s hesitation, just to make sure the person was not hurt—but just a moment—and then laughter would follow. It’s built into me to this day, like the response “God bless you” to a sneeze—it’s almost instinctual. I cannot help it, and I take no responsibility for it. It’s all my mother’s fault.

  One time Doug tripped coming off a curb and thought he got away with it.

  “I just want you to know, I saw everything,” I said from behind him.

  We both burst out laughing.

  Then Yardley chimed in. “I thought it wasn’t nice to laugh when other people tripped?”

  Doug smiled.

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  Just like in my career, I work hard at motherhood. And I have to because motherhood takes practice. It’s trial and error.

  Once, my mom and I were out with Yates when he was a baby. I was gazing at him lovingly in his stroller. After a while, my mom got exasperated: “Talk to him!” she said.

  “What?”

  “You should talk to him!”

  “Oh!” I’d been so busy admiring him, it hadn’t even occurred to me. Good idea.

  A few months later, we were out at the Jersey shore, staying with Doug’s mother. Yates was about nine months old. It was a rainy day, and so I took him to the arcade. I thought he’d like the stimuli. Sure enough, he loved it, and then he fell asleep.

  I didn’t have anywhere to be, so I decided to play Skee-Ball while he slept in the stroller next to me. I was doing really well. Like, really well. I kept hitting 50s and the 100, which is hard to do. It was a rush. (I was a new mother. I had very little excitement in my life.) Then Yates woke up and started crying. I had four balls left. What would you do? It was a question of maybe thirty seconds, tops. I decided to finish my game. So there I am, rolling Skee-Balls, saying to Yates, “Mommy just needs one more second . . .”

  At that exact moment, a woman comes up and says, “Excuse me, aren’t you Megyn Kelly?”

  “No,” I said, rolling the last ball and picking up my baby. “Who?”

  Now that they’re older, I take all three of them with me and let them roll right alongside me. It’s utopia.

  With practice, I have gotten better—at both Skee-Ball and parenting. But just as you get the hang of taking care of one child, you have two and then three and you realize, usually the hard way, that the old tricks are not working. What I know now is that the moms who make it look easy also had to learn.

  Once, when Thatcher was a newborn, I took him in the stroller and went to pick up my two older kids at preschool. It was cloudy, but I didn’t bring an umbrella. You can’t take the stroller into the school, which I forgot, so I got to the school and had to wake up Thatcher to carry him upstairs. So now I had a crying baby and my two little ones, and it started to rain. The stroller wasn’t collapsible, so I couldn’t get a taxi even if I could find one. I thought, I’ll take the subway, but I couldn’t get down the stairs with the stroller and a baby and two little kids.

  So what did I do? I exer
cised my advanced problem-solving skills. I sat on the church steps across from the school with the three of them and cried. In the rain. That, as it turned out, was not really a solution. So I stood up. We walked ten blocks in the rain. We got soaked, but we got home, and everyone was fine. I knew I needed to do it differently next time.

  Once I was dry and sitting at the kitchen table, I thought, What was I trying to prove? I had a nanny. She could have watched Thatcher while I picked up the older kids. But I was trying to prove that I could do it all, and so I took the baby even though it made my life more difficult. And for what? My baby would not have cared if his mom wasn’t there for an hour of his nap.

  As mothers, we tend to put pressure on ourselves, especially as working moms, even if we push ourselves to the point of frustration. I realize now that it’s better to take a forty-five-minute nap if you can and be present for your kids with calm or positive energy thereafter than to power through and be a miserable version of yourself. Live and learn.

  I am still learning. Not long ago, I went to the park with Yates and another boy and the boy’s mom, who stays home and seems to me like an excellent mother.

  I left the house with two things: me and Yates.

  The other mom brought a backpack to the playground, and while the kids were running around, she took it out.

  “Mom, I’m thirsty!” her son said.

  Out came a juice box.

  Ah, juice boxes! Smart move.

  “Would Yates like one too?” she said.

  He would. Thank you so much.

  Then the boys were hungry. Out came some dried fruit and nut snack.

  Ooh, snacks! Right. Well played.

  And after that, sidewalk chalk.

  Chalk? A brilliant idea!

  And then, how about a ball?

  Soccer, yes! They like soccer.

  I went home laughing at myself, but I knew, too, that while all of those things from the backpack were nice, to have a good day, all Yates and I really needed was time with each other.

  Finding that time is perhaps my greatest challenge as a working mother.

  Most American working moms have been asked at some point, “How do you balance it all?” Many say the question is sexist because we would not ask it of a man. I suppose that’s true, but the reality is, some things are different between the sexes, and in my experience, guilt at being at work all day is often one of them.

  Every working mom I know—from part-time freelance consultant to killer Wall Street hedge fund guru—has guilt about missing out on her kids’ day. I don’t hear this as much from my male friends, although there are exceptions, like my executive producer Tom, who’s devoted to his son and often expresses those pangs of missing out. In general, however, most of the men I know seem to be in a better place when it comes to leaving in the morning and coming home in the evening and being informed about the child’s day as opposed to having been there for it.

  To me, some of this is inherent. The reality is that mothers have a biological need to be with their children, especially when they’re young. To be strong women, I don’t think we have to reject that reality, that particularly special bond between mothers and children. That’s not to say that women working is the calamity Lou Dobbs and Erick Erickson were suggesting. It’s just to acknowledge the emotional toll on mothers who choose to do it all. Sometimes it’s hard. In my view, the way forward is to be honest about this fact and to better support new mothers, rather than to guilt them about their choices.

  Our society also bears some of the blame—it rarely reinforces the message to women that it’s okay or expected, much less admirable, for them to go out and earn the money it takes to sustain a family. Too often, shame still attaches to maternity leave (or to getting pregnant at all as a working mother), to taking days off when a child is sick, to slowing down one’s work flow when one’s children are very young or having a difficult time. These are important things for a mother to do, and yet the American workplace remains reluctant to embrace them. In addition, the failure to celebrate working mothers is similarly damaging. Dads are given credit for supporting their families; when was the last time you heard a mother praised for working all day?

  I believe in what billionaire Charles Koch’s dad referred to as the “glorious feeling of accomplishment.” There is no reason to feel guilty about enjoying hard work, or pushing yourself at the office, just because you are also a mom or a dad. A job well done at work enhances our self-worth, brings joy and satisfaction, for women and men. And it has the added benefit of teaching that value to our children when we go home to them at the end of the day.

  In my little circle of the world on The Kelly File, I have resolved to build a better environment for parents. I encourage our working mothers to celebrate and not feel guilty about their work, just like the dads. (I’m not saying this always works, but we do try.) But we are realistic. When the women get pregnant, I also try to make sure they don’t feel pressure at the office. I’ll say, “I know that once the baby comes, you may need more flexibility for a while, and we will help make that happen.” If they are feeling overwhelmed, I tell them, don’t just quit and give up the struggle—come to me and Tom first and see if we can help. Similarly, if our guys need extra time with their kids, we all work to accommodate that. We are a team.

  If filling these gaps requires a temporary extra head count, or additional hours for those who didn’t just have a baby, or some adjustment to people’s work responsibilities, so be it. It’s to the employer’s benefit. If you support new parents’ need to be with their children—during a decent parental leave, and then within reason thereafter—you are far more likely to keep them long-term.

  And that is probably one of the reasons why half of the people on my staff have babies or are pregnant. One producer whom I love moved to damn Canada and had a Canadian baby. “What the hell, Deb,” I told her. “We’ll work out some arrangement.” And we did.

  It’s not that we have unlimited resources. It’s just that only women can have the babies. If society wants the human race to continue, they’re going to have to help us out here. Also, we’re talking about a time-limited situation. There are very few Duggars out there with nineteen children; it’s unlikely the women on my team will be having babies every year for the next twenty years. We’re talking about a few years when we need to get some backup. We can do that to hang on to our top talent.

  And to the employers of the world thinking, This is insane—it’ll hurt the bottom line, just remember: if you force a woman to choose between her work and her child, and she has any choice at all, she will choose her child. And then you will lose her, and all the money you’ve spent training her, which you will then have to spend again on a new person, when the cycle will likely continue unless you hire all men or postmenopausal women, which happens to be illegal.

  For me, the balance between work and home has gotten both better and worse over time. Better because when I first became a mother, I worried about two things: that my children would not feel bonded to me if I wasn’t there all day, and that I was somehow shirking my responsibilities in choosing to go to the office. Wrong on both counts, as it turns out.

  As for my fear that our bond wouldn’t be as strong—I now know that’s nonsense, at least if you put in the effort. Seven years into motherhood, I love my children and they love me. Our relationship is fully intact and secure. So I no longer worry about them being confused by our setup or estranged from me as a result.

  As for shirking my responsibilities, I’ve been able to let that go. At first I felt sad—and yes, guilty—about not being the one doing all the baths and meals and drop-offs. But soon I realized that even if I can’t do “it all,” what I really need is good time with them where we feel connected—playing, talking, sitting together. I don’t need to get them from point A to point B each day to prove a point. One day I was getting ready for work, and feeling a little sad. I did not want to go in; I wanted to stay with my kids. Our occasional si
tter, who’s from Bolivia, was there. She’s a hard worker. She cleans houses. She’s a full-time nanny for another family. Her husband drives a cab. She has two kids of her own. She saw me changing Yardley’s diaper at the time with tears in my eyes and put her hand on my back. She said, softly, “There are many ways of taking care of them.” And she was right.

  But the thing that still haunts me, the thing I do still worry about, is that I’m missing too much of it. That’s what keeps me up at night. It’s not that they’re not going to turn out well—they are. It’s not that they won’t love me or appreciate my efforts on their behalf—they do, and they will. It’s that I’m missing large chunks of their childhood—like most working parents do. Settling for more right now for me means pushing myself to improve this balance. Keep my job, and spend more time with my kids. That’s the next reinvention.

  I love my job and the excitement and challenges it offers. But my job does not define me. If this job ended tomorrow, I’d find another way to find that glorious feeling of accomplishment. No employer or career choice “made” me. I made me. And Linda and Ed made me. And my children made me. And they, and Doug, are the people—the only people—who have true power over me.

  19

  Election Season

  My family knows that election season brings big demands on my time. What it also brings is vitriol—a tidal wave of it. Even as a news anchor, you have to gird yourself for battle. During the lead-up to the 2008 election, Doug and I were at a cocktail party in Park Slope, Brooklyn. As soon as I was introduced as a Fox News anchor, the couple we were talking to turned and walked out. Four years later we were at a dinner party in Manhattan, and the woman next to me asked, “You work for Fox? How do you sleep at night?”