In the afternoons when I waited in the carpool line, however, I became a “normal” mother. He wasn’t crazy about me catching a quick nap—“Mom, people see you sleeping and they think you’re passed out!”—but I told him if I didn’t catch a snooze I’d probably drive off the side of the road on the way home. He cared how I appeared. It was especially important that I look young, to match the younger mothers. When gray hairs started to show he would say, “It’s time to get your roots done.” Comments like that made me laugh, and I loved when he made me laugh. But time moves inexorably on, as parents well know. The boy becomes a young man. One day Spencer was a five-year-old with his hand in mine, and the next his draft card arrived in the mail.
When he was in elementary school, especially through first and second grades, his teachers and I knew Spencer needed special consideration. He was fragile, and we watched closely for ways he might act out because of his father’s death. Through guidance from his grief therapist, Ellen Sanford, and my own psychiatrist, I learned important lessons about how to raise a child who had lost a parent. The first thing Ellen said was “Too many families try to shield a child from a parent’s death. Don’t do that, because you can’t.” She continued, “If you want him to grow up healthy, don’t act like it didn’t happen. He’ll begin to think Howard never existed, or that perhaps it was his fault his father died.”
“Ask Spencer about his father,” I would suggest to his teachers. “Its okay, even good, to encourage him to talk.” We were at a meal with friends when their daughter, who was Spencer’s age, blurted out, “Spencer, you don’t have a father. Your father is dead!” Her parents were mortified and started to scold her and apologize to me. But I told them it was okay and meant it. Spencer said, “Yes. My dad died from pneumonia but we have his picture everywhere and he’s alive in our hearts.” When his first-grade class had the children talk about their parents, I urged the teacher to let Spencer make a presentation about his father. This particular teacher, Dan Specter, was remarkable. He gave Spencer his time, even if it meant sitting out in the hall for private chats. Occasionally, the three of us would take weekend walks or go to the movies. Dan wrote a letter to Howard, and Spencer brought it home and cherished it.
As Spencer got older, into fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, and especially in middle school, I told his teachers it was time to treat him like any other boy. At that moment between adolescence and becoming a young man, he was tall for his age, good-looking, lean, athletic, smart, well mannered, and popular. At school he did well academically but had brushes with upper management caused by the bad decisions boys can sometimes make. I didn’t like his acting out, but I tried to understand and face it head-on. I worried about how it related to Howard. Was it genetically hardwired or was it insecurity? On occasion as he aged, I would dole out more truthful bits of background on his father, filling in the gray areas of the legacy that had landed on us, helping him to see a bigger and more focused picture. I measured what I told him based on what I thought he could accept and understand. I always made clear that Howard loved us, and loved him most of all.
Mischief would happen. Transgressions would happen. Unfortunately, too many times what I’d hear from school officials, and sometimes other parents, was “I know this happened because he doesn’t have a father.” Excuse me? He has a parent! Whatever he’d done was because he was a teenage boy who occasionally used bad judgment, not because he didn’t have a father or because his mother owned a saloon. Or was it? I did my best, but was it enough?
I was home almost every night. If I went out with friends, I had a trusty sitter and was home well before midnight. If he had a friend sleep over, I was on duty, not out partying. Most nights I was in bed by ten, not hosting after-hours parties at Nathans. I was defensive, I know. What I wanted was for these well-meaning but hurtful people to give me some credit. As for my son, when male teachers offered to “father” him, I would say, “Thank you for volunteering, but he doesn’t need you to be his father. He needs you to be his friend.” I wished his uncles, my brothers David and Robert, could have been more involved in his growing up, and also his aunt, Martha, but David was in Seattle and Robert lived out in Virginia, and they had busy lives. Martha and her husband, Vijay, moved to Washington and lived near us, and we did see them from time to time, but for whatever reason she did not have a pronounced role in Spencer’s life. I wondered if it was just too hard; Spencer and I, and the challenges that had landed on us, were perhaps too painful a reminder of what her brother had done.
What I thought was best for my son and what was best for my son were not always the same thing, and the learning curves were sometimes steep and painful. My greatest blunders involved the schools I chose for him. I was so hell-bent on making sure his educational environment was traditional and what I mistakenly viewed as “normal” that I simply missed seeing who he was. After trying it for grades four through eight, I was not happy with the coat-and-tie boys’-school choice, believing the single-sex setup may have been a factor in his occasional run-ins with school authorities. Mentioning this to one of his former teachers, she said, “You know, he’d do well at Georgetown Day School.” It was not the first time this coed school had been recommended, but I had a bigger idea. He would be in ninth grade and entering puberty, and I thought he would benefit from some distance from me, some independence, and that a coed boarding school made sense. We applied to only one, and he was accepted. I called it Hogwarts. It was an old and respected school in New Jersey, where we knew some families. We liked the fact that it was not too big. It was close enough but not too close. I was positive this separation from me would be good for him, and that he’d thrive. Wrong.
From practically day one he was in hot water for one stupid act or another. It seemed to me he had more weekend detentions than he had weekends in which to serve them. Talking back to his dorm supervisor, talking back to a senior, not being prepared for a class, needling a classmate. When I talked to him on the phone or drove up for a visit, he’d assure me “It’s all good. I’ve got it under control. Don’t worry. I’ll stay out of trouble.” His offenses, while disturbing to me, at least did not count as “strikes.” This was a two-strike school, meaning just that: Two strikes and you’re out.
One weekday morning, as I walked along the C&O Canal from a breakfast meeting to Nathans, my cell phone rang. It was Spencer. I could tell from the tone of his voice that I should brace myself. “Mom, I’m in big trouble. Some of us were caught smoking dope.” My heart sank. This was a definite strike. I called the school. The boys were caught smoking marijuana in a dorm room and had been suspended. Spencer would be sent home immediately. He returned home to a very grumpy mother. I gave him a strong lecture about his crime and why it was wrong and not okay with me, and I handed out his punishment—a week of helping out at Nathans and at a friend’s lunch shop downtown. I couldn’t help but point out that most kids, when they smoke dope, don’t do it in a dorm room. “Most kids go into the woods, and you guys decide to do it in the dorm! Were you out of your minds?”
“We had a vaporizer,” he said, as if that made any sense.
“You realize you are a freshman and you already have one strike?”
“I do, Mom, I do. I’ve learned my lesson.” I told him about his father’s experience at Choate: He got kicked out for drinking, and that was that. “You don’t want to lose this opportunity,” I said.
“I know, Mom. I won’t.”
The next school year started well, and when he returned to Hogwarts after the winter break I eased up on the worrying. Boarding school was working out. His grades were good, his teachers were pleased, he was maturing. I’d made the right decision, after all. It was time for me to stop focusing so much on him and begin to focus on myself, perhaps test the waters out there. Gosh, maybe even get involved with a man. The house seemed bigger and emptier without Spencer there. I missed him every day, but I also enjoyed being on my own for the first time since I met Howard.
Spen
cer was back at school only a few days into the second semester when I got the call. It was Friday afternoon. I was working at my desk at home. “Mom, I’ve been kicked out of school. I copied from Wikipedia. Two strikes. I have to leave the campus now.” I saw no point in yelling into the phone. His shaky voice made clear he was scared. The next voice on the line was his housemaster, who was kind but said there was nothing that could be done. Two strikes meant two strikes and no reconsidering. I asked the housemaster if he could please help get him to the train station.
“Of course,” he said.
It was late at night when Spencer walked out of Union Station to the car. He got in, kissed me, and said nothing during the fifteen-minute drive to the house. He quickly ran upstairs to his room, threw himself on his bed, and cried for a very long time. Finally, I knocked, stepped in, and sat on the edge of his bed. “I know it hurts,” I said, rubbing his back. “It hurts a lot. Some things are just not meant to be, and I guess boarding school was one of them.”
The following Monday we returned to New Jersey to clean out his room. As we departed through the gates of the school I called the admissions office of Georgetown Day School. If I had to beg on my knees, if I had to grovel, I would, because I planned—finally—to follow the recommendations I’d ignored before, that GDS was the right school for him. There was a long admissions process. Not knowing if he would get in, I took him to the public school to try it out. That was a wake-up call. Before I left, the head of the school said, “You should give your mother your jacket and untuck your shirt,” which Spencer did. Then the man said, “Here are the rules: No drugs, no guns, no knives, no other weapons, no leaving the school grounds between classes. Otherwise, you’re on your own.” He was a long, long way from Hogwarts. Dealing with me was no walk in the park, but he realized he’d done it to himself, and that I could help him only so much. That was ultimately a good thing.
When the good news came from GDS, we were elated. GDS is a famously down-to-earth school, open-minded, progressive, geared toward letting young men and women be responsible and accountable for their behavior. It was the first private school in Washington to integrate, in the 1940s; it celebrated diversity and emphasized academics over athletics while still promoting a good sports program. Spencer was like a duck finding water. In the spring I popped my head in the office of principal Kevin Barr. “I haven’t heard from you,” I said. “I’m not used to going through a week without getting some kind of troubling report about my darling boy, and here it’s been a few months. What gives?”
He looked up with a smile. “There’s nothing to report. If there were anything we would call you. He’s doing great.”
ONE THING I’VE learned through life is the amazing ability of human beings to transfer to one object, animate or inanimate, the emotions felt for another. What I had to face eventually, especially as Spencer became a teenager and young man, was that sometimes my anger toward him was actually the anger I felt toward his father. That came out especially when Spencer lied. It’s understandable for a parent to get upset when teenagers fudge the truth, but my anger was grounded in fear that Howard had somehow genetically transferred his lying to his son. When the cheating incident happened at Hogwarts, I forgave him, but my gut ached with fear. Another time, when he told me he’d spent the night at one friend’s but I later learned he was at another friend’s, I threw the book at him. “Don’t come home,” I told him. “I can’t live with a liar.” I had a revelation at that moment: This is my anger, transferred from my dead husband to our son. I felt terrible. Spencer was a normal teenage boy, telling the normal fibs that teenagers tell their parents. I was the woman, the mother, at the end of her rope, who had her own unresolved issues. When I recognized what I was doing, it was as if I’d released the last pressure point, and I began the journey toward closure.
I did want him to learn to see his behavior through the eyes of others. Fair or not, he had to understand how he might be perceived if he lied, or misbehaved in the extreme. “You know, you have to deal with this,” I told him. “Because people are going to judge you differently. Heck, they judge me differently. With you, if you lie, they are going to think, ‘Well, his father lied to his mother about taxes and so, you know, like father like son.’ You can’t play to that. You cannot let that happen.”
“Mom,” he said, “I know I lie sometimes, and I’m working on it. I don’t like it, but I do it because I think sometimes that if I tell you the truth you will get mad at me and I don’t want to get in trouble.” These were the same words I had heard from his father after so many little stupid lies over the years—fibs that were so minor I can’t recall even one, except my response would always be the same, and it was exactly what I’d say to Spencer: “Maybe the truth would make me mad, but the lie makes me furious.”
EVERYTHING ABOUT RAISING a child alone requires creative thinking. I found my surrogate “co-parent” in many forms. Sex and the City would be my teacher’s aid on the matter of male-female relations. Mother and son, side by side on the sofa, watched every episode. The plots and characters gave us a way to talk about sex in a less threatening, more comfortable way, whether the subject was condoms, multiple partners, or STDs. We’d be in the car on the way to school and I’d ask, “What do you think of the women on the show? Who would you date?”
“Well, Carrie’s okay. Miranda is gay and Samantha is a slut. I think I’d date Charlotte.”
We shared The Sopranos, too. It was a tutorial in business. “In a way, this is like Mommy’s business but without the guns.”
Without our shared sense of humor, Spencer and I wouldn’t have survived. A good laugh was what got us through just about every adversity, and we laughed about some of the darkest parts of our life together, especially when I’d get frustrated with some of his behavior and demand, “Stop channeling your father!” Or I’d look to the heavens: “Howard, leave his body, now!” Usually Howard would. It was the least he could do. Quite often Spencer asked me to back off, to trust him more, to give him space. Fair enough. Just as trying as it was for me to have to be both good cop and bad cop, I know for him, as for all children with only one parent, it had to be equally tough to have no court of appeals, no other parent to run to for understanding when one parent was laying down the law. There’s a reason for the cliché “Life’s not fair.” It’s not, and solo parents and children with only one parent know this lesson better than most.
When Spencer hit bumps in the road, I wanted to be a fair guide, adviser, and advocate, and not an out-and-out paranoid, wagging my finger while snarling, “You’re just like your father.” The similar patterns were eerie, though. Both were smart and talented but capable of pulling a stunt or telling a fib that sabotaged what was precious to him.
Is Spencer his father? No. He’s entirely his own person. But during those teenage years, when he got in trouble for seriously bad decisions, I worried that the apple had fallen too close to the tree.
Most of the time, however, he was not in trouble; he did well—sometimes very well—impressed teachers and others, and even had an eighteen-month devoted high school relationship with one girlfriend, which I thought showed stability and maturity. Invariably, adults who met him pulled me aside to talk about his smarts, humor, and good manners. They’d say, “You’ve done such a good job.” I was grateful, but I didn’t take it for granted. Honestly, a mother’s work is never done.
WHEN I REFLECT on my career in journalism it becomes apparent that I was a skyrocket. It wasn’t clear to me then, but most young people aren’t reporting for a national news organization at age eighteen or writing the network news at twenty-two. It made sense to me. It was logical. I was determined, driven, and capable. It didn’t occur to me that I might be young for my line of work. Journalism was a cause as much as a profession. While I was honored to be in their company, or on their staffs, it never struck me as odd that I would be working alongside journalists of such note as Walter Cronkite, Merriman Smith, Helen Thomas, Hugh Sidey, Dav
id Brinkley, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, Charlie Rose, and Larry King. Yes, mostly men, but that’s the way it was.
Of them all, Walter was the one who was both mentor and friend, and his death in July 2009 was a painful loss for Spencer and me. Walter and I had an easy, comfortable, and appropriate way with each other that endured for forty years, starting with the day we met in 1970 at the Apollo 13 launch and he bought me a Coke. I was there to write a story for UPI on the network-news coverage of the launch. Before heading to the Cape, I’d sent Cronkite a fan letter, mentioning that, like him, I was starting my career at UPI. Remarkably, he answered and said, “If we’re ever in the same place at the same time, let me know.” When I mentioned this to the CBS News publicist at the launch he thought I was out of my mind, but when that same publicist told Walter I was outside the CBS launch-pad facility, Cronkite put down what he was doing and asked, “Where is she?”
We met, we had that Coke, and we became friends, kept in touch, and eventually he hired me to write for him. Working with Walter was the best of what popular culture now calls broadcast news. CBS was the Tiffany network when I was there—the news division was the network’s jewel in the crown—and Walter Cronkite was a living, breathing, walking legend. He was my journalism hero.
Being in the top tier of Walter Cronkite’s staff in the mid-’70s was not unlike being an associate of God. I took a holiday in the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the local paper put my picture on the front page with the headline WALTER CRONKITE’S WRITER VACATIONS IN NAGS HEAD. When I needed to catch a flight back to Washington for President Richard Nixon’s resignation, the airline held a passenger jet for me. Not because of me, but because I was Walter Cronkite’s writer. One day, walking with Walter back from lunch, a school bus stopped beside us on 57th Street. Suddenly, all the windows came down and dozens of young heads popped out. “Look, it’s Walter Cronkite!” they shouted. “Walter! Hi, Walter! Walter!” He stopped, smiled, waved and then we walked on.
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