I RESPECT ALL RELIGIONS (except those that promote violence); am open-minded about political views (except those that begin and end with demonizing demagoguery); am not particularly judgmental about consensual adult relationships (except those that are flagrantly and gratuitously paraded in my face). I try to be a good listener should a friend have a personal crisis of faith or politics, or a problem “in the bedroom,” but in general, don’t seek out those subjects on the grounds of, “it’s none of my darn business.”
Obviously, I cannot object to anyone questioning my politics; and I am always happy to evangelize—though not proselytize—when asked about my Catholicism. And, of course, I understand the days of Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke sleeping in separate twin beds is so yesterday, but Lord Have Mercy . . . I have just never adjusted to the casualness and frequency of queries about the sex life of Mary Matalin and James Carville.
I cannot deny James and his boy pals obsess about sex like they are still sixteen, but even the sex-crazed Carville is reticent to talk about sex much in mixed company. So I am just not sure how our union manages to invite so much personal scrutiny.
JAMES
WHAT CAN I SAY? I’m a ravenous heterosexual.
I’m sixty-nine now, not sixteen, but sex is not an ancillary part of my life. It’s central to who I am. It’s like food or sleep. Just something you need to survive. I always thought everybody was like that. Apparently, some people are not, but I’m not one of them. Never will be as long as the parts work. I actually don’t understand the big taboo about sex in this country. Maybe that’s the New Orleans in me. But I’m actually amused by things like abstinence programs. I find it almost laughable that anybody thinks you can stop this kind of thing.
It’s human nature. Why would we pretend it’s not?
MARY
FROM THE BEGINNING we were always asked, “How do you do it?” but that question was directed at our divergent political views. Today, we are asked more frequently than you would imagine, and by people you would never imagine, “How do you do it?” . . . and they aren’t talking about our political life.
How could you sleep with her/him? Is he/she great in bed because there is no other possible explanation for being with him/her? Do you have great make-up sex? Do you have political fights just to have great make-up sex? Do you do politics rather than sex? Do you stop to have sex during a campaign? Who is better in bed, Republicans or Democrats? Do Republicans keep their socks on during sex? Does your pillow talk include exchanging politics secrets? Have you been to a D.C. orgy? Doesn’t everyone in politics cheat on their spouse? Do you cheat on each other? Did you stop having sex after you had your kids? Did you have sex more than the two times that produced your daughters? Are your kids adopted? How often do you have sex? Do you still have sex? Aren’t you too old for sex?
Seriously people? Here’s your answer: none of your darn business.
6.
ADHD
MARY
MY FATHER, MY HERO, whom I always strove to emulate, was superintense and had limitless curiosity and countless projects. My brother was always really hyper, which my mother attributed to a special trait she called the St. Vitus Dance. He endlessly entertained all of us with his nonstop antics—or maybe he just entertained me, since I was often a coconspirator. As for me, I was a courteous kid, but rambunctious, and as a teen, I ran with a never-still gang. More than once we had to be bailed out.
My earliest boyfriends all had many disparate interests (sometimes this trait manifested itself in being interested in many girls at the same time). My college buds and beaus always had multiple shifting majors and excelled at all of them.
From bartending to campaign toiling, my adult life was one parade after another of over-the-top, outside-the-box adventures and characters.
Campaigns attract the most energetic, adventurous, curious and original cast of eccentrics, and I loved them all, all the time. I was especially blessed with great bosses in my first “real” political jobs—incomparable, inimitable forces of nature, like the poker-playing cardsharp Rich Bond to the guitar-picking Lee Atwater. Even when he was dying, Lee Atwater could not sit still for a minute.
I never even thought about it. All I knew was there were only two things I just could not deal with: boring jobs and boring people.
So meeting James Carville in middle age seemed par for the course. But little did I know that he was a quantum leap in energy and eccentricity.
Back in those days, nobody talked about ADD or ADHD. We were swimming in a sea of high-energy megatalents. And since most of our dating years were spent in separate cities, whenever we managed to get together, we were both crazy hyper and crazy for each other so who noticed?
For years, everyone around him, especially his mom and five sisters, worshiped and adored him. And his steady stream of lovelies who had preceded me had simply adjusted to him, bent to him. Because James was just James. Growing up, he had been a wild boy-child, an episodic LSU student, a gung-ho marine, and all the other things he became, while being so gifted and compelling that everybody just accepted his oddities. Plus he was the oldest of eight raised in a part of the world that is still renowned for being the last bastion of the authentic eccentric.
But once he and I hit real postdating life, I couldn’t help but notice that James wasn’t just unique. He was a challenge to coexist with.
I remember one night when we were having dinner at our restaurant, West 24—it had been one of our mutual lifelong dreams to own a restaurant—when I finally lost it. We were with my close friend Ann Devroy, but James couldn’t stay seated in the booth. He kept jumping up, almost frantically, and talking to everybody who walked in. When he’d sit down for a couple seconds, his legs would be jumping under the table as if he was already trying to run away. I mean, there was no freaking point in even trying to hold a civilized conversation with this guy.
This was hardly unusual behavior for James. And like everyone else, Ann was totally chill with him. And, in fact, like everyone else, she told me to chill out.
I snapped and became totally enraged.
“I can’t stand this anymore!” I yelled, quickly apologizing to Ann. She just laughed and said, “Oh, what’s the problem? He’s just being James.”
Exactly. The problem was James being James. But not for her; she wasn’t married to him.
After that, snap crackle pop, almost everything about him set me off. When I could get him to the movies, my favorite kind of date, he got up and left after thirty minutes to make phone calls in the lobby or his car. He couldn’t sit through Mass or dinner or a TV show. He couldn’t sit period. He couldn’t listen either. We had precious little time for random conversation, and every time I would start one, he would pick up the phone or a book.
Though I was certain my inborn impatience or new-mom insecurity was the problem, I was always trying to change him, get him to settle down. Trying to get him to pay attention to me, listen to me.
There was a lot of fussing and fretting and crying and door slamming, hurt feelings and harsh words. In rational moments, I was always trying to communicate my irritation in a way that I thought was crystal clear.
Like most women, I’m hypersensitive to the unspoken—to body language and various social cues, both incoming and outgoing. If I do say so myself, I’m overly gifted that way. Though not everyone thinks it’s a gift, being able to intuitively read a person or a whole room of people can be a helpful life skill.
James didn’t offer himself up easily to being judged, studied, intuited, read or flat-out comprehended. In his defense, what seemed crystal clear to me was a nightmare of unfathomable passive aggression to him. When I thought I was transmitting the signal, Hello! Earth to James, please sit down/pay attention to me, he was receiving . . . nothing. Nada. At most, he might offer up a blank stare.
Forget the intimate communication of marriage. His every waking mo
ment became an irritation, another reminder that we weren’t meant to coexist. In order to control his own ADHD, and bring order to his life and lifestyle, he had instinctively constructed a rigid routine for himself, a way of living, hour by hour, that had worked for decades for him.
James is early to bed, early to rise, and every day he runs at three p.m. He believes in discipline, moderation, punctuality and every meal being eaten as close to the same time every day as possible. And if he varies that schedule, like when he’s traveling, he becomes miserable.
My preference is 180 degrees from that. I am antiroutine, antischedule. This is how I hold on to sanity. For me, every day should be a new day—and I want it to be different. I live episodically, and I like bouts of fun-loving immoderation. I like to stay up all night, linger at parties and prolong quiet dinner conversations to marathon yak-a-thons. Whatever I’m doing in life, I do 100 percent with obnoxious focus and drive—whether it’s a craft project, my critters, reading books or studying art. I forget to eat. Even something as commonplace as listening to music is only gratifying to me if it’s loud and long, and no one interrupts me. l love watching eight movies in a row (and often do), and more than once I watched episodes of 24 for twenty-four hours nonstop.
To James, this is insanity or worse. Sometimes, in those early days, he would give me a look that said, “I knew there was a reason I never wanted to get married.” He just can’t live the way I do. Any more than I can live tethered to a clock and a routine.
But after five years of marriage, we were at an impossible impasse. We loved each other desperately, but we couldn’t stand each other’s guts.
• • •
Then Matty started school. She enchanted her teachers, wowed them with her advanced verbal skills, imagination and vast repertoire of jokes. She had lots of friends and was kind and thoughtful to everyone, and unusually sensitive and especially protective of kids who got picked on. We were beaming at our first parent-teacher conference as the teacher described the Matty we knew and loved. Then she lowered the boom.
Matty couldn’t read. She couldn’t add. She couldn’t do the most basic stuff. Suddenly, the girl being described didn’t comport with the perfect Matty who had just been lavished with praise.
My first reaction was to tell the teacher she was an idiot, but that was not an option, as Mrs. Ryan was the best teacher and person ever and I knew she adored Matty. More importantly, she went on to ask about something that suddenly explained a few of my baby’s inexplicable home behaviors. Could Matty have vision problems? Hmmmm, I thought. This might be why she couldn’t ride a bike, hit a Wiffle ball or roller-skate. And why she stood smack-dab in front of the TV to watch it, or put her face almost in her food when she was eating.
Her vision impairment, undiagnosed from birth, contributed to various developmental anomalies. And correcting it went a long way in helping Matty at school, as you might expect, but it didn’t fix her basic skill issues. So she had the full battery of tests. My sister, Renie, who has multiple degrees in teaching learning-disabled kids and in teaching LD teachers how to teach LD kids, swooped in and enlightened us with ideas and advice. I read everything I could get my hands on. I devoured books on the subject of ADHD and every related processing issue, talked to every expert I could reach, every parent who would share, pored over every study I could find.
Finally a lightbulb went on, luminous and bright and miraculous. In my quest to resolve Matty’s issues, I stumbled over the solution to my marital issue.
I insisted James go to a specialist to get tested.
I realized that he was an ADHD poster child.
You think I would have gotten a clue when even total strangers, random doctors in airports who’d seen him on TV, would be constantly stopping me, offering in absentia diagnoses, “You know your husband has ADHD.” I mean any professional could literally spot him a mile away. But for years we all said, it was just James being James.
I was relieved to tears. Maybe I wasn’t a shrew wife; maybe he wasn’t a blockhead husband. Maybe it was just who James was as a person and part of his magic.
You hear in church that there’s a lot to learn from the little children. I learned from my daughters, and from helping them—because they both have processing issues, which are completely different and require completely different correctives. I never for one second stopped unconditionally loving them and never had a solitary thought of wanting to change a single hair on their beautiful heads.
And in the wonderful way God works, I got a bonus lesson. I instantly felt the same way about their father. I didn’t want to change a single hair on his beautiful head either, and not just because he has only a few hairs to begin with.
Almost overnight, his irksome ability to literally talk on the phone, work at his computer, watch ESPN and hear every word I’m saying and repeat it back to me verbatim stopped making me want to punch him in the face. His ADHD brain works on three levels of chess playing at one time. He sees the world through a different prism, his own prism, and often it’s a kaleidoscope. Definitely not boring.
He begrudgingly went with me to a specialist and—what a surprise!—he got an official ADHD diagnosis and was offered medication to focus and live a little more “normally.” To his credit—and for which I pledge my undying love—he said, “No way, José. I like who I am and this is how I know how to think.”
On this point, we are in aggressive agreement.
JAMES
FOR YEARS, it had been a strain on our relationship.
Mary spent a lot of time feeling frustrated with me, though I wasn’t always sure why. She’d accuse me of ignoring her or not listening because I’d be doing five other things while she talked. Sometimes I’d change topics in the middle of a sentence. She’d say, “You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.” But I was, and I’d recite back to her everything she’d just said. That would piss her off even more.
She’d accuse me of being rude if I got up and left the table. She thought I was angry at something. I wasn’t angry, and I never intended to be rude. I was finished so I’d leave. What was the big deal?
Over time, it became a big issue for Mary. She told me I was too impulsive. She took it upon herself to make an appointment with a specialist. This was about ten years ago. We went together to see the guy at his fancy office up on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. He did all this diagnostic testing and evaluation. We had to fill out pages and pages of questionnaires. Ultimately, he diagnosed me with ADHD.
The doctor started saying he could put me on this medication or that medication. He detailed this whole regimen that he said could help me rein in the ADHD. I said, “Look, to tell you the truth, I don’t want to be on a drug. I like the way I am.” I meant it. It would be a whole new reality to get used to. I didn’t know whether I’d be changing from a reality I liked into one I didn’t.
Mary actually seemed okay with that. After she understood the basic reasons I behave the way I do, and that my idiosyncrasies aren’t intended to insult her, she felt much better. “Now that I know what’s wrong with you, I know how to deal with it,” she said. After that, she became much more accepting and supportive.
You come to learn the things you can do and the things you can’t, because the things that you can’t do, you really can’t do. The key for me is not to do work that requires long-term concentration. Political campaigns offered a perfect outlet. High intensity, a defined time horizon. I’m good at short bursts of intense focus. But I’d be terrible at something that requires an actual attention span.
I went with my daughter recently to help her open her first checking account. I remember sitting there thinking that if I had to work as a teller at the bank all day long, stuck in one place at one window, I literally couldn’t do it. I would have a nervous breakdown. If I had to be an airplane pilot, sitting patiently in a confined cockpit for hours managing systems, I’d lose my mind. It�
��s not that I don’t have respect for those jobs. It’s not that they aren’t important. I just literally could not do them.
I practiced law early in my career, long before anybody even talked about ADHD, and it was an awful fit for me. Being a good lawyer is hard-ass work to begin with, and it’s especially hard for somebody like me because you’ve got to pore over and rewrite contracts. You have to read through court documents, take long depositions. You’ve got to maintain your focus the whole time, and I simply can’t do that.
My mother used to tell people I was like a toaster. The boy can’t sit still for long before he pops. It’s always been part of my nature. In my life, I’ve never slept in. Once I’m awake, I never sit still. I never nap. I don’t like to sit out at the beach. Five minutes, and I’m up and walking. Probably half the movies I go see I end up walking out of. I never just hang out around the house. I can’t stand it. I hate stillness.
Mary couldn’t be more different. Whatever is the opposite of ADHD, that’s her condition. She doesn’t share my need for routine and consistency. She would sit and watch twenty-four hours of TV straight if it involves a show she likes. She’ll stay up all night reading a good book. Not me. It’s lights out by ten p.m. I could be watching the final scenes of The Godfather. I could be finishing the last two chapters of the The Day of the Jackal. Doesn’t matter. I’ll turn the light out and go to sleep simply because it’s time.
Oddly enough, I’m way more punctual than she is. When I’m ready to head out the door, I head out the door. And when I’m ready to come home, I’m ready to come home. Mary’s like Bill Clinton; neither one of them can leave anything. One of my expressions is “The only way to leave is to leave.” Thank whomever and say good night. So a lot of times, when we’re out with friends, I’ll just say good night and head home. I’m not mad, not at all. I’m not trying to be rude. But I’m going home. She’s welcome to stay.
Love & War Page 10
