That used to cause a lot of problems between us. Now she understands. Over time, you get to know each other as a couple and you respect each other’s differences. You accept the reality of who your spouse is. You make adjustments. You carry on.
MARY
THE ADHD + JAMES epiphany gave me a new lease on our married life and I’m sure that was a great relief to his sister Gail, whom I used to call about every ten minutes for ten years and ask, “Is this normal?” and she’d answer, “Well, sister, it’s normal for James.”
Though they never said anything, I am pretty sure James’s family couldn’t really fathom why I was always griping about “normal.” By their estimation, for me to talk about normal was the very definition of the pot calling the kettle black. Nonetheless, I thank Gail for her decades of patience.
Every day there are big and little adjustments to make for his ADHD. Some days I am not as good as I’d like to be, but there is no more screaming like a banshee and door slamming followed by couch sleeping.
But there is one thing I will never accept: that these processing issues are disorders or disabilities or anything whatsoever to lament. Lamentations invite self-pity and the whole victim pathology. People who process outside of the norm, which is nothing more than the median, which is often at best mediocre, should be considered gifted not victimized. Seeing a gray world through kaleidoscope lenses is a beautiful thing.
I am sure it’s painful for him because he thinks the girls inherited his processing issues and that it’s a troublesome thing. He’s always whimpering, “Oh, my poor little girls.” Which annoys me so. Poor little girls? Are you kidding me? There is no aspect of their existence that wants for anything. There’s nothing they cannot do, and everything they do they do exceptionally well. Which he ought to know because he is forever bragging about them way beyond the bounds of acceptable parent pride.
I can’t help but think there is an instinctive political element buried in this pain. And nothing bugs me as much as a liberal’s ability to see victims around every corner. “They aren’t victims!” I scream. Can’t help myself. “And Lord have mercy, neither are you!”
Do you know any exceptional person who doesn’t process the world through their own unique prism? To me, the disorder is in trying to fit everyone into the same sorry, boring box. Instead, we should nurture, reward, regale and glorify thinking outside the box. And I suppose we do, but not enough. These people are writers, artists, thinkers, risk takers, inventors, innovators, entertainers, mystics, visionaries—people who shoot the moon.
I know James knows this and believes it, victim instincts aside. And he has spent a lot of time and effort working with ADD and ADHD kids; he is a real inspiration to them.
As it turns out, processing issues usually manifest differently in girls and boys. Girls tend to internalize when they have attention issues and can go supercreative or dangerously negative. Boys, because they tend to externalize, can dangerously “self-medicate” with recreational inebriation to slow the world down. On the more positive side, they often become the class clowns, look at me, look at me. They’re intense and hilarious and adventurous and off-the-chain creative. They act like James. They act like Vince Vaughn. And I am the first to admit that those are the boys who always made me swoon. And still do.
JAMES
THE EASIEST WAY TO explain my ADHD is this: I am an utter and total creature of habit. Anybody I’ve ever worked with, anybody I’ve ever lived with, they absolutely understand this. One of the main ways I deal with the whole situation is to create structure and routine.
Take my typical day when I’m home in New Orleans. By design, it rarely changes. I have to run in the late afternoon. Everything else emanates from the run. I run the same four-mile route each day, twice around Audubon Park. Same route. Same direction. I run in the afternoon because I know I’m at my best in the morning for work. Any meeting with me, best to schedule it between nine a.m. and eleven a.m.
Most mornings, I’m up by six a.m. I go downstairs and grab the newspapers. The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal. The New Orleans paper comes three days a week, and the Baton Rouge paper every day. I go through each paper, one by one.
Whatever fruit is in season, I’ll scarf down a bunch of that. I have a few hole-in-the-wall breakfast joints I like, so sometimes I’ll stop by one of those places. I’ll glance at the computer, maybe take a quick look at e-mail, then start making phone calls. People usually are calling me by seven a.m., anyway. Many of them are on the East Coast, so they’re an hour ahead and they know I’m up anyway.
I talk to the same six or eight people every single day. George Stephanopoulos, Al Hunt, Stan Greenberg, Paul Begala, Rahm Emanuel. A few others. Most days, I also talk to my brother in Baton Rouge. With all of them, it can be five minutes. It can be twenty or twenty-five minutes. But we talk.
I usually try to get a lot done in the mornings and head to lunch around eleven-thirty a.m. I never wait until noon. Growing up, my uncle was a farmer, and we ate what we called dinner at eleven a.m. Dinner was the big meal of the day. Supper meant leftovers or something small in the evenings. In the summertime, you’d get up at four-thirty or five a.m., work for a couple hours before it got too hot and come back in for a quick breakfast. And then it was back to work until lunch at eleven. I still like it that way.
Most days, I’ll go to one of my usual spots around town. I like to get out of the house. More often than not, I eat lunch by myself. It’s not that I’m averse to eating with other people. But I like to sit and read the paper or watch sports while I eat. I like to have a beer, usually an Abita Amber. And I like to eat quickly. When I’m ready to leave, I leave.
I usually run a few errands each afternoon. I compulsively like to get the car washed. I’ll drop the kids off somewhere. Run to the grocery store. By then it’s time for the afternoon run. Same route. Same distance.
In the evenings, I’ll head back out again for dinner with Mary and the girls if they’re around, or by myself if they’re not. There are probably five or six restaurants in New Orleans I go to 80 percent of the time. Mr. John’s down on St. Charles and Clancy’s over on Annunciation Street, for example. I go to this great little roadhouse called Mosca’s over in Avondale. I often stop by Eleven 79 down in the Lower Garden District.
Certain nights I eat at certain places. Every Sunday, without fail, I eat dinner at the same Italian restaurant in Uptown New Orleans. Jews eat Chinese food on Sunday; I eat at Vincent’s on Sunday. Mary and the kids usually like to stay home that day. So I go by myself. I love going in the fall because they always have the football game on. I always sit at the bar and talk to the same bartender.
I always have a Maker’s Mark at dinner, usually topped off by a glass of red wine. I’m back home by eight-thirty, nine o’clock. If there’s a good ball game on TV, I’ll stick around and watch for a while. But I’m sound asleep by ten o’clock.
Of course, sometimes my carefully crafted schedule gets altered for me. I’m on the road a lot, across the country and all over the world. Traveling definitely throws a kink in the routine, but I’ve learned to game the system pretty well.
For instance, I know all the airports. Very seldom do I end up in an airport I’ve never visited. I plan ahead of time where I’m going to eat and what I’m going to eat. Take O’Hare in Chicago. There are two Wolfgang Puck restaurants there, in Terminal 1 and Terminal 3. I like their pizza. If I’m in Houston or Dallas, I’d head to any of the Pappas chain restaurants. There’s Pappasito’s Cantina and Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. I probably could tell you what and where I would eat at almost every airport in the country.
And when I get to where I’m going, I find a way to run. I build trips around making sure I have time for the daily run. It’s nonnegotiable. I’ve taken the afternoon run in cities from Athens to Abuja.
I crave that kind of predictability. I need some element of certainty in daily
life. When I get away from the normal routine, I get irritable. I can’t think straight. I make errors. So I stick to it. I have no desire to alter it.
I don’t mention all this because I think people give a crap where I eat or how I travel or when I get in my daily run. But I hope it illustrates the larger issues that so many families have to wrestle with when a loved one suffers from ADHD. My case was so obvious that a doctor came up to me in an airport and told me he could tell I had ADHD just by watching me from afar, and that I really needed to get checked for it.
But every case isn’t so clear-cut. Left undiagnosed, it can lead to long years of misunderstandings, frustration, resentment and potentially unhappy endings. Mary and I know firsthand about those first few, but thankfully we figured it out in time to avoid that last fate.
7.
The Dark Ages
MARY
ON THE HIERARCHY OF our connubial contretemps, as James and I have both repeatedly noted, politics is actually pretty low in the pecking order. For us, it’s unrewarding and almost too easy. We aren’t low-hanging-fruit eaters. We like to make everything worth the effort. And if we are going to use our finely honed fighting skills, we’d rather have skirmishes in a new territory, not the one we spend all day working in. Or, as James likes to say, “If you are a plumber by day, you don’t want to come home and fix your own toilet at night.”
By the time of the Florida recount in 2000, we hadn’t really fought about politics for years, aside from some unpleasantness during the impeachment hearings in 1998. Matty, who was two, wanted to know “who is this Mokina Loo-whisky anyway?” since all the voices on the radio and all the faces on TV never stopped yakking about her. (Matty even went through a brief beret phase.)
I averted my eyes on the Clinton marriage issue. (Judge not, I say, since I wish everyone would quit judging my marriage.) And while the lying under oath part ground on me in the worst way—in my defense, I was in postpartum meltdown with a colicky infant—my rage was focused on how James was lied to by President Clinton, who then proceeded to relentlessly carpet bomb the airwaves with that mendacious message.
James’s response to my complaints was: “If I did something that stupid with someone that young, I’d lie about it too.” To my mind, not the best explanation for any wife, let alone a postpartum one.
So we managed to get all the way to Election Day in 2000—seven years of bliss, or our version of it—without much marital stressing over politics. Ironically, our relative marital harmony was aided by the otherwise worthless Al Gore, who wasn’t high on James’s favorite-people list, particularly after he launched his diss-Clinton charade, hypocritically distancing himself from the guy who brought him to the dance in the first place.
I was working at CNN in those days. Quietly, off-the-record and only episodically, I was in touch with the Dick Cheney political operation via his daughter, Liz, whom I admired but didn’t really know well. The entire Cheney family—both daughters, Mary and Liz, as well as Mrs. Lynne Cheney—were laboring on the campaign for him, as they had for all his congressional runs in Wyoming.
Not that I knew Dick Cheney that well either, but I had been a Cheney groupie since way back in the Poppy Bush days. And I supported his short-lived 1996 presidential consideration.
Mostly Liz wanted a sounding board. First it was about whether or not her father could or should run for president himself, and then it was about being Junior’s running mate. (Since we’d been office mates and had become friends on his father’s campaign in 1988, I had always called George W. Bush “Junior.” But after Governor Bush got into his presidential consideration mode in 1998–99, and I continued to reference him by his lifelong nickname, I was pointedly asked by his top man—in no uncertain terms—to cease and desist. Then I immediately felt like a fool. What president wants to be called Junior?)
By convention time, Liz and I were daily phone chatters. She’d share the campaign trail comings and goings. And when preparing to go on the air, I’d often check in with her. She knew she could trust me. I never repeat things I’m not supposed to repeat. And what I didn’t want to repeat were talking points, which the airwaves were replete with; I hate talking points. And so did Liz.
It was pretty calm and quiet in the Matalin-Carville world (meaning that James was his version of sane) until Election Night. Then—in warp speed, which is his MO—he devolved into an anti-Bush Beelzebub, making a simple household or parenting exchange with him almost impossible. So I stopped trying.
During the recount, every day of our lives was terrible, a precipitous decent into political hell on the home front. Every day, every hour, his mounting anger manifested itself in hideous and frequent muttering-to-himself rampages. After years of a home truce on politics, it was truly miserable.
We had never once talked about getting a divorce. It was never an option for us—even before I was a Catholic. And I have never not loved James. But now I was having unrelentingly days of not liking him and my confidence in our continued marital status was disintegrating. He echoed all the crap and lies that the Gore people were putting out, all the supercilious spin the heads were spouting on TV, and every prima facie false allegation he’d ever heard of, read or imagined.
It’s nice to be married to a confidently energetic person. And that had always been part of our mutual attraction. But suddenly life with James was like living with a caged animal. I’d like to think I was more measured in my affection for the Bush-Cheney team, but apparently—if he is to be believed (ha)—I was equally annoying.
For the entire duration of the recount, we were like two nuclear silos waiting for a button to be pushed. The tension in our house was worse than the Cold War, except I was pulling for mutually assured destruction. That seemed the only path to peace.
The recount itself—the management and legal argument—was headed up by a group of people I had worked with on many a campaign and for whom I cared deeply. The legendary James A. Baker III and his longtime deputy, the inimitable force of nature, Margaret Tutwiler, deployed to Florida and set up shop with their customary DEFCON 1 focus. My beloved Maria Cino, who had headed up the political effort for the campaign, did a whirling dervish version of her specialty, operations, and mobilized everybody who was anybody, catapulting them onto waiting Sunshine State–bound planes and making sure they were housed, fed and provided for. (We all knew it would be a heinous experience, as recounts always are. Little did we anticipate a political Bataan Death March.)
Even my former boyfriend, Michael Carvin, one of the most brilliant legal minds in D.C. or anywhere else, not to mention he’s the wonderful person who taught me Federalism from the ground up, plus many more necessities of life (and certainly did not deserve the psycho female BFF that I turned out to be), was arguing the Bush legal case in state court. Michael’s stunning televised arguments made me slap myself on an hourly basis. What cruel fate destined me to be incarcerated with a madman instead of hanging out with all my favorite people in the universe?
So in short, everybody I knew and had ever loved in politics and life was suddenly in Florida, while I was stuck in D.C., incubating in a petri dish of political mutation.
Truth be told . . . which is the point of this book . . . I have to admit I wasn’t all that broken up about not being there, as I had suffered through too many cuckoo recounts in my life, and I, in any event, was lactating away, still breast-feeding little Emerson, our adorable baby. Plus, I was still in dumbstruck love with her big sister, Matty, then five years old. Both provided far greater mature interactions than my husband-from-hell, in his ever-escalating state of frenzy and outrage.
If there is anything more joyful than holding babies in your arms and marveling at their porcelain skin and little appendages, I haven’t experienced it in this life. I have great memories of those sweet moments of motherhood. But even that God-given gift was tempered by the ugliness at home because Sweet Daddy James had reverted to that
odious James Carville Serpenthead. When I could get a word in edgewise with all his spewing to himself, I always asked the same easy question, “James, why are you fighting me tooth and nail over a chump you yourself cannot deny is a stone-cold loser? Have you forgotten his diss-Clinton campaign? Are you insane?” (Rhetorical question, of course.)
When the final decision came down in December—more than a month after Election Night—I watched from the tiny TV in our kitchen, heaving with slobbery weeps of relief and happiness.
For a nanosecond, things seemed a little better, for me at least. James is always more articulate at explaining the jarring feeling we both have when our side is victorious—because as happy as we are, we know that our spouse is suffering and will probably be miserable to live with for a while. This is the tension of our relationship: the yin and yang of self-joy and partner pain. Now that W had won—yes, won; elected NOT selected—I could afford to feel more sympathy and compassion for my husband, Sweet Daddy James, again.
Liz Cheney called the very next day. After we exchanged a few celebratory pleasantries, she said, “Mary, my father wants to talk to you.”
JAMES
SHE WAS NO PEACH to live with herself. We had two little kids at home, so we were both running on fumes as it was. We’d weathered election victories and losses before, not to mention the Clinton impeachment and plenty of other partisan battles in Washington. But during the recount, we were fighting about politics in a way we hadn’t for years. It felt personal.
Feelings were running pretty hot throughout the country. But I guarantee you they were running even hotter in our house because we knew the stakes, we knew the people involved and we each felt so strongly that our side should win.
I remember the Sunday after Election Day, when it was clear everything was going to be stuck in limbo for a while, Mary and I went on Meet the Press together with Tim Russert. She was already ranting and raving, regurgitating the Republican line about Democratic “party hacks” down in Florida trying to divine the will of the people by looking at hanging chads and calling the whole recount “a parody of democracy.”
Love & War Page 11
