Then again, my first child was born when I was fifty. I had half a century to do basically whatever I wanted. Most people don’t get anywhere near that amount of freedom. So a little deep and fundamental change wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all.
MARY
I KNEW WHAT A terrible mother I’d be to somebody like me. And if you put my eggs and James’s sperm together, what else would that produce but another crazy person?
That’s what I thought, what we both thought, actually. Not that we thought much about it at all when we got married at ages forty and forty-nine. We assumed we were beyond the point of having babies and didn’t even try to have kids at first. Then one day, I felt like I was getting the flu and discovered I was pregnant. Who gets accidentally pregnant at forty? See, I told you. Crazy people.
Children weren’t even part of our mutual attraction or any life plan—not that we had any identifiable plans. And waiting until forty to have babies wasn’t part of a career strategy either. It was just how my life naturally went. In my office at the RNC, I had a poster on my wall: OOPS, I FORGOT TO HAVE A BABY.
In reality, if you really want something, you arrange your life to make it happen—whether or not you’re doing it consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously. I didn’t feel a void in my life. Nor did I never give it a thought. Of course, as we were racing through our childbearing years, the topic would occasionally come up in girl chats. But having a baby was like: Yeah, sure, I’d like to fly to the moon someday too. To me, mothering was a big deal, the highest calling. It’s like a religious conversion. You don’t enter into that lightly. It’s a lifetime commitment. And I had doubts I could do it—physically or emotionally.
You can turn off your job. You can turn off your siblings, your neighbors, your friends—and put them out of your head. But you can’t stop being a mom. You are always thinking of your children, always loving them, always caught up in their emerging lives and concerns and discoveries. When that much of your brain and heart is involved in anything—although it’s hard to imagine what else would be so captivating—it is hard to shift gears and go whole hog for something else.
I guess many aspects of creating life are mind-blowing for everyone, but I was completely out of my element. Everything about it blew me away. I couldn’t adjust to the fact that a subject to which I’d barely given a thought was suddenly the obsession of my every waking moment and all my sleeping ones too. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else was worthy of serious consideration. I never got over the wonder of pregnancy, but it barely registered on the emotional Richter scale compared to actually having a baby. It was an all-engrossing, completely fulfilling, never-ending miracle.
Though everything else in my life had been incomparable to having kids, I can now see parallels to receiving the gift of faith—how indescribable joy and peace sprang from a place in your heart you didn’t know existed. In both cases, it never ceases to astound me. It is always totally unexpected. I never take it for granted. It is inexpressibly humbling and exhilarating at the same time.
The first time I looked at Matty’s tiny little face, her perfect miniature fingers, heard those small soft noises she made, inhaled her whole intoxicating baby being, I was teleported to another dimension from which I hope never to return. It’s a place of joy that makes me laugh and cry and swoon.
And it’s a good thing, because without the joyous counterbalance, no one could withstand the sheer terror of being 100 percent responsible for the very existence of another living being.
Getting into the car for the first time after Matty was born, I couldn’t even release her to the newborn-baby car seat, which would have actually protected her from injury or death far better than my arms. And when we got home, the grip continued.
This child never left my arms. We took her everywhere with us—to congressional parties, Sam Donaldson’s birthday party, Tim Russert’s Christmas party, anybody and everybody’s dinner parties. When I went back to work, the poor baby came with me to TV sets and radio studios. After work, we brought her to the Palm Restaurant and plopped her car seat on our regular table under the political caricatures papering the walls while we had dinner. When I went around the country to speak, I carried her along. That infant had 31,000 air miles before she was three months old.
This isn’t exactly normal behavior, but my friends were so cool that no one told me I was a tad over the top. Or maybe they just expected it of me. Whatever, all my girlfriends were enchanted with “our” baby. I’d like to think this was because Matty was so extraordinary, but it probably had something to do with her being the only baby we all had.
You think I am exaggerating? Because I never put that baby down, she never learned to crawl. She went from my arms to walking. And did you know that if you don’t crawl you don’t develop some of the processing tools you need to write and perform other small motor-coordination tasks? Me either. Well, now you do. Take it from another mother.
So one day she just pushes out of my arms and starts walking and talking and singing. It was like she had aged two years in a blink. She began talking nonstop at an unusually young age, maybe because she was constantly around adults who never shut up.
There wasn’t one second of baby mothering that I didn’t adore, or one baby task I wasn’t over the moon about. I loved changing diapers, loved breast-feeding, loved singing to her, loved reading to her, loved rubbing her impossibly soft belly, which always made her emit the baby version of purring. I was never bored. She was my constant companion, the light of my life, song of my soul. She was a bliss I never even dreamed of. And you know what? I felt exactly the same way about her sister when she was born two years and nine months later, though I like to think I was less neurotic, despite both girls’ insistence to the contrary.
• • •
From their first breath to this very afternoon, and every day in between, I look at the faces of my girls and think to myself, This is the face of God.
JAMES
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME: did having kids make you more conservative? The truth is, I just don’t know. There’s no way I can know how I would have evolved without them. I think there’s a certain way to raise children right, and it really doesn’t have much to do with your politics.
Mary and I have faced the fundamental question that every parent faces: Do you allow your children to engage in the world—and by the world I mean movies and TV shows and the Internet and all the good and bad of our culture? Do you expose them to this secular, sinful, selfish world? Or do you try to protect your kids from the larger world? Do you try to shield them from the worst of it?
There are plenty of people who opt for the latter. It’s perfectly understandable. But our approach has always been to expose them to the world rather than hide it from them. I think we both feel like our culture is what it is, for better or worse. And so if they ask about something we do our best to answer.
If a couple doesn’t agree on that basic question, it can cause real problems in a marriage. But Mary and I always have been on the same page as far as that goes. We took the girls walking down Bourbon Street with us when they were only toddlers, and they saw every stripe of humanity there. We took them to Amsterdam, where they saw prostitutes in the windows and marijuana bars and such. When they asked, we explained. There are very few enclaves where everybody is in some idealistic nuclear family, where the world is ideal and perfect. I don’t see the sense in pretending otherwise.
MARY
JAMES AND I WERE IN TOTAL AGREEMENT: the girls were to get a better education than we had. We wanted them surrounded by beautiful things, by flowers and art and culture. At the same time, we didn’t want them to be sheltered the way James and I had been as kids. We wanted them to see the world, even difficult things. And we wanted them to have street smarts, often more critical to a happy life than all of the above. We agreed that they should make as many decisions for themselves as possible, and we would
trust them as much as we could until their judgment proved otherwise.
JAMES
AND YOU KNOW, for all they might have learned from us, they’ve taught us plenty in return. One of my great satisfactions is that our generation has not been able to infect my daughters and their peers with our prejudices. If you bring up somebody’s race or sexual orientation, they don’t even know why you’re talking about it or why it matters.
That’s one reason I believe that very few young people identify with the hard-core social conservatives in this country. Young people think the conversation is totally irrelevant when conservatives rail on about gay marriage or whatever. It would be like somebody coming up to them and saying, “Hey, you better watch out for those sneaky Japs.”
Those are prejudices from another time and place. And my children, thankfully, are part of a generation that has left them behind and moved on to better things.
MARY
RAISING A CHILD IN D.C.? Well, since I’d given no thought to even having a kid in D.C. or anywhere else, I was slow on the uptake to figure out that Washington, D.C., was not Andy Griffith’s Mayberry in terms of child rearing.
I had no mother, no mother skills, no mother friends and even fewer maternal instincts, but I did have the requisite village it takes to raise a child in the form of great girlfriends, including Maria and my own sainted sister, Renie, not to mention a plethora of awesome avuncular types such as Tim Russert. And when my daughters were little, there was a pretty cool day-care center inside my office, the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB) next to the White House.
But once they hit the age of exposure to politics D.C. style, I confess the village started falling apart. There was no way to shield them from the worst of the place. And the best of the place was a constant distraction.
Despite the traumas of their uprooting from D.C., the girls were the compelling reason to leave.
The best part of a D.C. upbringing—with weird, plugged-in parents like us—was their hands-on experience with politicians as real people. The girls learned early that the famous and powerful are human beings just like anybody else. They saw Dick Cheney as the grandpa who had lots of dogs that he loved more than anything. The girls didn’t see Poppy Bush that often, but they thought of him as a faraway grandfather and heard lots of funny stories about him from me. Bill Clinton was a hoarse-voiced uncle who could talk to them about anything, and even better, about things they wanted to talk about.
After a marathon conversation with Matty about all things Beatles related (she had inherited the all or nothing gene and possessed every known factoid about every Beatle, their time and place and girlfriends and influences and mother issues, every lyric to every song, including obscure bootlegs . . . well, you get the drift), Clinton gave her his entire Beatles vinyl collection. I have to admit even I coveted it.
And because James is James, there was a regular stream of other famous friends in our house—from Barney to Popeye the Sailor Man, and anybody else his Hollywood pals could send. It wasn’t normal, but to start with, when you have a dad like Carville, I think your gauge of that becomes a little skewed. To this day, hanging with the Muppets is just another Take Our Daughters to Work Day in James’s world.
My own Take Our Daughters to Work Day happened a lot more often, and was slightly more grounded in real life. After we had an unfortunate caregiver issue, I brought Matty and Emerson to day care at the OEOB all the time. Once in the West Wing, when she was still a toddler, Emerson ran into the president and in her normal fashion offered her gross, slobbery bottle of God-knows-what to him. Without missing a beat, President George W. Bush said, “Thanks, but I’m off that stuff now.” She tried to follow him into the Oval Office before toddling back to my office.
Another good thing about their one-dimensional D.C. world was their inescapable exposure to current events, although some of it was more like a bleak Grimms’ fairy tale than a Cinderella story. One of our rare family “vacations” occurred when the first Intifada erupted and I spent the entire holiday in front of the tube as the horror unfolded live. After a couple of days of bomb lobbing and surreal analysis, Emerson took out her zoo-zoo (our term for her pacifier) and offered the best advice I had heard, “That guy Arafat needs a time-out!” Another time, after overhearing way too many Mommy-and-Daddy “discussions” about Iraq, she asked me with the wisdom of the ages: “How can they say we lost the Iraq War before it’s over?”
My reply: “That’s right, kid!”
On the downside, D.C. is a highly competitive place. Competition is healthy and learning to deal with it is necessary. I have a real problem with fraudulent self-esteem schemes devised by liberal child “experts.” But that doesn’t mean kids need to face every day as if they were Fortune 100 CEOs.
James and I have never been pushy parents. We set standards, we know what our kids are capable of—and they have to answer to us if their efforts fail to match our expectations. We provide lots of opportunities for exposure to the big wide world and we’re both good listeners and good at being guiding hands. But we don’t push our preferences on them and we discourage them from self-judgment based on the standards and whims of their peers or pop culture. Find your own place and space. Explore your options. These are different and unique for each individual.
D.C. childhood reflects D.C. adulthood. Infused with adult competitiveness and ambition and aggressive type A personalities, it’s a hard place to find yourself as a young person.
But so many of the D.C. kids were on a boot camp schedule—enrolled in all manner of activities and sports. They took music, language, dancing and social etiquette classes as well as being provided with the coolest playgroups, the best concerts, designer clothes and fine dining. I wondered if they’d be burned out before their time—overwrought, overworked and played out.
They didn’t have time for the moments in life we like best—baking a German chocolate cake, concocting a new pasta sauce, watching Doctor Who or just hanging out.
Another inevitable and unavoidable characteristic of D.C., for good or ill—for kids as well as adults—is the omnipresence of politics. This is terrific if you are a political junkie with few other interests, but Matty and Emerson were not political junkies—in fact, they were fastidious avoiders of politics—and had multiple other interests. It was bad enough they had a mommy and daddy who could lock horns on topics completely irrelevant to them, but it became too common for schoolmates and neighborhood kids to goad the girls about politics. Fortunately, the girls had learned by osmosis how to dispatch a weenie kid on any given current events topic without breaking a sweat. But when adults jump in—and get hostile—that’s another thing.
Here’s a real-life story:
On Emerson’s first day of first grade, we were holding hands and standing in line at the bookstore with our arms full of gym shorts, notebooks, first readers, colored pencils with pink feathers where erasers should have been. I didn’t bother asking her what she would use for erasers because I knew she would give me that look—“I don’t plan to make any mistakes”—but just in case, I was looking around for the erasers, when the mom behind us, a tanned, taut-bodied young woman with a perky blond ponytail and a designer tennis outfit with matching shoes (in contrast to my real mom look of pasty-white saggy skin, uncombed hair, stained khakis and a BUSH-QUAYLE 1988 T-shirt) says to me, “You were such a bitch on Meet the Press yesterday morning.”
Emerson squeezed my hand. She knew. She was just six years old and she knew her mother could break bad at any moment. And I might have, if her knuckle smashing into my palm hadn’t been so distracting. Instead, I came home and said to James, “I don’t think I can raise my kids here.”
After that, we started to talk about leaving.
JAMES
THIS IS A FACT that can never be disputed: the single most vicious and cruel specimen on Earth—and I’m including al-Qaeda recruits, great white sharks, king cobr
as, pit vipers, whatever else—is a seventh-grade girl. I’ve said this to audiences. I’ve talked about this with other parents. Nobody disagrees with me on this.
And to the seventh-grade girl, there’s no more humiliating specimen than her daddy. It’s a temporary phase, but it’s a painful one. My daughters and I have always been close. Growing up, they always wanted to do stuff with me and have their friends do stuff with me. I thought I was sort of like a cool dad.
But it was not like that during seventh grade. Not at all. I might as well have had the plague. It was all venom and attitude. I was only good for feeding them and clothing them and giving them rides to visit people they actually liked. Beyond that, my usefulness was extremely limited.
It’s an evolution. Every age brings its own adventures.
MARY
JAMES ALWAYS TOOK MIDDLE school personally. It wasn’t him; the girls were living in a world not unlike our worst campaigns and certainly nothing like our young years.
I did not like being a teenager. And I wasn’t looking forward to my own girls’ teen years. But I thought I’d be dealing with those issues when they were actually teens. Today’s world of preteen and tween girls contains a kind of sophisticated cruelty akin to a maximum-security prison of hardened criminals. It’s a world of bully girls and cliques and Facebook viciousness in training bras. It’s even harder for older parents because we are literally from another paradigm.
5.
Sex When You’re Old
MARY
Love & War Page 9
