Tough Love

by Susan Rice

  Looking back, I do not recall a time, even as a child, when I was shy about speaking my mind, afraid of what others might think of me, or was even fearful of another person. My parents reinforced my sense of self and stoked my innate confidence. At home, we argued energetically over policy and politics, so I learned early on how to hold my own in debates, marshal strong arguments, and present them forcefully. In the Rice household, one could not afford to be intimidated by loud voices or shy away from vigorous disputes.

  Yet there did come a traumatic period, when the fighting between my parents became deeply personal, and it was clear there was no road to reconciliation. In that painful process, I learned how to compartmentalize conflict, protect myself emotionally and psychically, and bounce back from adversity—all capacities that, ideally, I would not have needed as a child but would serve me well over the long haul.

  Our house became a tinderbox. My parents fought ugly and often, and it only seemed to get worse with time.

  Johnny and I would come home from school fearful of what the night would bring. I eavesdropped on many arguments. They seemed to range from money to Mom’s travel, their drinking, and, eventually, an affair. Their recriminations ran the gamut, with each side blaming the other: Why are you home so late? Just leave me alone. That’s a lie, and you know it! Don’t you dare talk to me like that.

  The screaming and yelling seemed almost constant. Sometimes they scuffled, pushed and shoved, or threw objects at each other—hairbrushes, lamps, small statues.

  “Be quiet, I can’t sleep!” I’d yell. One night I lurked in the hallway just outside the kitchen where they were fighting. As I poked my head in to demand that they stop, I saw a wooden object fly through the air and hit the wall without harming either of them.

  On occasion, they would wake me late in the evening to witness and presumably condemn the bad behavior of the other. The violence I saw was not terrible, but it was terrifying, because I never knew how far and how fast things might escalate. When I heard loud, angry voices, I would get up from bed, my heart racing, and steal downstairs to assess the severity of the fight—ready to intervene, if necessary. It got so bad that Johnny and I stopped inviting friends for sleepovers, since we couldn’t predict when an embarrassing fight would ensue. I was constantly on pins and needles and furious at my parents for doing this to me and our family. Their screaming was bad, but the unpredictable violence and my foreboding that someone might get seriously hurt was far worse.

  I heard my mom implicitly threaten suicide more than once, declaring, “I’ve had it. I can’t take this anymore.” I could not adequately assess whether she meant it or was just trying to manipulate my dad. But she had enough problems at the time—a neck injury (origins unknown) that landed her in traction for a short period, high stress, and unpredictable behavior—to make me doubt her will and ability to live. I feared that my mother might try to kill herself.

  One day, Mom returned from the hospital with numerous stitches in a bad injury to her wrist. My understanding was that she punched through a windowpane in fury. I am not sure why, or even if that was a truthful story, but it underscored to me her irrationality and vulnerability. And it left me even more frightened.

  Never before or since those years have I felt such shaking, stomach-wrenching fear—the kind that possesses you and eats through your soul.

  Still I had no choice but to cope. I could not sit on the sidelines as my family burned with the risk that the conflagration would consume me and my little brother. Instead, I steeled myself and ran into the fire in hope that I might save something of their marriage, or if not, the ones I loved. Fearlessly, if foolishly, I offered myself as a sounding board for my parents’ grievances against one another, trying to talk them toward calm, if not comity. As the older child, and in the absence of any alternative, starting at seven years old, I appointed myself chief firefighter, mediator, and judge, working to defuse arguments, broker compromises, and bring rationality to bear when emotion overwhelmed reason. In the process, I developed innate toughness, calm under fire, and an intuitive sense of when conflicting parties might be able to reconcile. These elements of my character endured and afforded me an unconscious reservoir upon which to draw, when much later, in my chosen career, I found myself again trying to put out other people’s fires and forge common ground.

  I learned far more than I wanted to know about my parents’ marriage—that their unhappiness had deep roots, if unclear origins. That their trust was gone, and Dad had hired a private investigator to spy on my mother. That my mother clandestinely installed recording devices in our house to entrap my father. That they really didn’t like each other and maybe rarely had.

  The proximate catalyst for their breakup was the revelation that my mother was having an affair. Dad was able to confirm his suspicions using the detective. But my parents’ discontent and disagreements well preceded Mom’s affair.

  Mom and Alfred Fitt likely met at a conference on higher education when Mom was working at the College Board, and Alfred was a special advisor to the president of his alma mater, Yale University. Their relationship convinced my mother that she wanted to divorce my dad and marry Alfred. The challenge was how to extricate herself and still retain equal access to her children in an era when the courts (and society) readily punished women for adultery.

  In reaction to my parents’ impending breakup, I behaved both maturely and angrily. Maturely, as I sought in earnest to hear each side out, appreciate their perspectives, and soothe their differences. Angrily, as I yelled at them to stop the fighting and be responsible adults. Once, I was so furious at my mother that I pinned her to the bed and slapped her face, screaming that I hated her for having an affair and ruining our family. Stunned and hurt, she offered little resistance, as if she understood my fury. Yet, on most occasions, she would argue back, insisting that I treat her with respect.

  Generally, both parents seemed to appreciate that my acting out was a healthier means of expressing my anger than suppressing it. Still, I gave them plenty of grief, sometimes running away from home for hours at a time. Never putting myself in danger, I’d disappear to a friend’s house or to remote places in the neighborhood, long enough to worry Mom and Dad. One time, feeling left out, I timed my disappearance to ensure my dad and brother missed their plane to the Super Bowl. They were (and remained) furious with me for years (even though they made it to California with plenty of time to see the game).

  On Johnny’s seventh birthday, I drove with him and my mom to pick up his cake at a nearby bakery. Angry in general, and now especially annoyed that he was getting all the attention and I was relegated to the backseat in deference to the birthday boy, I plotted my revenge. Nobody noticed as I slid over and nonchalantly sat on the bakery box before moving back to my spot. When we arrived home and Johnny came to retrieve the box, he was hysterical to discover it was flat as a pancake.

  My mother and father had the good sense to take both me and Johnny to a child psychiatrist to be evaluated. The doctors assessed that because I was expressing my feelings forcefully, I was coping adequately. Ever since, I have been a believer in not hiding emotions and expressing discontent, even anger, directly. With me, it’s easy to know where you stand—for better or worse. To a fault, I hold myself and others to high standards, expecting the most out of those with whom I am closest, and continuously struggle to mask my impatience with shortcomings—mine and theirs.

  My parents were more worried about Johnny, who the shrink assessed was repressing his emotions and denying our family reality. Much to his enduring frustration, Johnny was sentenced to about a year of therapy, forever resentful that I somehow managed to escape the same fate. Yet in slogging through the trauma of our parents’ divorce together, Johnny and I evolved into fellow survivors, each other’s constants, and became closer than ever. For years, I played the role of big sister—more mature, strong, secure—until as a late teenager Johnny came into his own. With quiet wisdom and confidence, he grew to support
and advise me in equal, if not greater measure, such that as adults, he is as much my big brother as I am his elder sister.

  As our family approached the breaking point, in the summer of 1975 when I was ten years old, my mother whisked me and Johnny away to Aspen, Colorado, where she was attending a conference. Two of her colleagues helped smuggle us to the airport, and we found ourselves unexpectedly on a plane to Denver. The whole thing had a faint whiff of cloak-and-dagger but, at the time, it didn’t seem so strange. Mom had taken me and Johnny on work-related trips before without Dad. We happily returned from Aspen two weeks later, and it was only as adults that we came to realize we’d been kidnapped, albeit briefly, without my father’s knowledge or permission.

  Not to be outdone in their escalating parental competition, Dad took me and Johnny to Europe for the first time later that same summer. As a member of TWA’s Board of Directors, Dad was entitled to free first-class travel for his immediate family and cut-rate stays at TWA-owned Hilton hotels. So we enjoyed a lovely, luxurious two-week trip to Paris, Rome, Madrid, and Marbella, Spain, on the Costa del Sol.

  It was our first experience spending extended time alone with our dad. We had great fun visiting museums and historic sites, walking the streets, eating good food, playing tennis, and horseback riding. Johnny and I thoroughly enjoyed having so much uninterrupted time with Dad but had little idea that he was auditioning for his imminent debut as a single parent.

  Then, suddenly, on September 24, 1975, soon after the academic year started, Johnny and I came home from school to eerie quiet and utter emptiness. Without warning, we found our house, now just Dad’s house, was no longer home. We knew their separation was coming, but that knowledge failed to lessen the shock. Mom had moved out and taken most of the furniture and all of the charm with her. The house was a cavernous, tasteless, almost unfurnished shell of its former self, improved only by the arrival of our first color television.

  The split followed a bitter battle involving their lawyers over a separation agreement, which would govern financial arrangements, custody, and visitation. The sticking points between my parents included how to divide their property and, in the unique case of their cherished Nigerian sculpture, how to fashion a swapping arrangement over time. But mostly, they couldn’t agree on how to share us kids.

  Mom was prepared (with great anguish) to concede custody to my dad, but she insisted on fifty-fifty visitation rights. Dad promised her orally, at least once in my presence, that he would allow equal visitation but refused to put it in a binding written agreement. He wanted control and argued simply that she should trust him. Understandably distrustful, Mom held out for months to get the pledge in writing until, ultimately, she realized she was screwed. She couldn’t afford a court battle, wanted to marry Alfred, and needed a no-fault divorce. But she had initially lied under oath about the affair. Though she promptly corrected her story, my father’s divorce lawyer had all the ammunition needed to dictate the divorce terms. Desperately hoping Dad would keep his word on equal visitation, Mom signed the separation agreement in January 1976.

  Their separation meant that the fighting and my constant fear were blessedly over. If a caring adult or a close friend would ask how I felt about my new life, however, I would answer, point-blank, “It sucks.” We all had to start from scratch: two houses, two single parents, shuttling between them.

  Near school, Mom’s new house was much smaller than our original family home and lacked charm. Of course, almost on Day One, Mom had it fully furnished in the good taste she brought to everything; still, it wasn’t home. My hunch is that with only her modest nonprofit salary, Mom struggled to support herself and pay her half of our expenses, along with her legal bills.

  My parents’ separation ruined more than our nuclear family. It caused major rifts within our extended family and even friends, with everyone taking sides. Uncle Leon outright trashed my father. When we went to South Carolina to visit Dad’s sister Aunt Pansy, an important figure in our lives, she had nothing good to say about Mom. Everything that once felt normal and secure seemed lost.

  For five years after their separation, and long beyond their divorce in May 1977, Johnny and I remained in the middle of my parents’ relentless tug-of-war. Neither parent could resist poisoning our perceptions of the other. Despite their best efforts to influence us, Johnny and I understood that, while flawed, neither parent was as the other portrayed. We knew each loved us unconditionally and never doubted their commitment to us as parents.

  For the first two years, we did split our time equally between my parents’ households, until Dad realized that we were sometimes exposed to my mother’s new partner. When Dad warned Mom to stop seeing Alfred at all in our presence, she protested that they were getting married and that Dad’s demand was unfair and irrational. Dad insisted and, for periods, Mom complied. Yet once Dad concluded that Mom would not consistently oblige, he curtailed our visitation to the letter of their legal agreement—every other weekend during the school year and half of all vacations, plus a few additional days when Dad traveled out of town.

  Living in two households was stressful, especially until my parents worked out a minimally disruptive rhythm—one that allowed us to move on the weekends and avoid the humiliation of dragging our suitcases to school. In the interim, my friendships began to suffer, as some at school called me out for being moody and even combative. From classmates’ offhand comments or cold shoulders, I realized that I was unconsciously antagonizing people. Finding myself increasingly isolated, I struggled to moderate my behavior and repair frayed friendships. With time, I got my act together at school, taming my temper and treating friends more gently.

  Eventually, living under two roofs and commuting between them became a routine like any other, and we grew inured to the emotional and physical disruption. As in all aspects of our new reality, Johnny and I learned to tough out the hard stuff and make the most of what we had—each other, two devoted parents, safe places to live, good friends, and a great education.

  As a single father, Dad went from the parent present mainly for the fun stuff to being omnipresent. At the outset, my father had almost no experience running a household. He could cook only steak and make instant coffee. He had never driven a carpool. He had to hire and manage his own housekeeper (rather, a series of them, each of whom lacked the constancy and refinement of our beloved Mrs. Jennings, who remained with my mother). Yet Dad managed to figure it out pretty fast, even if it wasn’t exactly pretty.

  Up in the morning long before us, he’d muster me with a cup of hot coffee, make us breakfast, and cook dinners that included a broadened repertoire of not only steak but chicken and tater tots and a handful of dishes in the other food groups. Almost daily, my father drove us to and from school, often in his prized gray 1964 Mercedes-Benz 190c with a red leather interior and ivory steering wheel. He had bought the car in Germany, when he and Mom traveled back to the U.S. from Nigeria shortly before my birth. Over decades, that old Mercedes never lost its intense leather smell or its historic charm. Riding in that car with my dad was one of the happy constants of these years. He kept it until after I went to college, repainting it a steel blue and ensuring it ran well, until a massive piece of ice fell off our roof, shattering the windshield and badly damaging the body of the car.

  I came to see the essential Emmett Rice in the sacrifices he chose to make to be fully present for us, while continuing to be the best at what he did. To tackle huge stacks of paper he brought home from the office, Dad stayed up late working at the kitchen table after dinner, sometimes dozing off but determined to be prepared for the next day’s meetings. Though he admonished us not to “burn the candle at both ends”—hounding us to get to bed if our homework dragged on too late into the night—he didn’t always heed that lesson himself.

  Originally, many of our peers had seen Dad as aloof, even intimidating—like Johnny’s friend who would only enter the house after asking “Is your dad home?” and making sure the answer was n
o. Yet swiftly, our friends got to know Dad well, realizing that he was actually a cool parent who took small groups to Washington Bullets basketball games or concerts like Earth, Wind & Fire and the Commodores. His dramatic transformation in the midst of an otherwise dark time was a lasting gift to Johnny and me.

  Even as my parents’ marriage crashed, my father’s career had taken off. He left the Treasury Department in 1970 and went on to head the D.C. Mayor’s Economic Development Committee. Three years later, he transitioned to private banking. Named senior vice president for planning and development at the National Bank of Washington, then D.C.’s third largest bank, Dad was the first African American to serve in a senior management position at a major commercial bank in Washington. Dad’s stint in the private sector, however, was relatively short-lived, because in 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Dr. Emmett J. Rice to the Federal Reserve Board, as only the second African American governor. I proudly held the Bible at Dad’s swearing-in ceremony at the White House.

  An eligible bachelor, Dad dated a couple of women seriously but ultimately chose to stay single—probably to give Johnny and me maximal stability and attention. Though brilliant, funny, and a connoisseur of good wine and music, I doubt Dad would have made an easy husband. While I admire my father more than anyone else, he possessed some less laudable characteristics, several of which I struggle with myself. Dad was opinionated and could be argumentative and quick-tempered. He was competitive, occasionally self-righteous, and utterly incapable of suffering fools. He would directly confront those he deemed subpar—whether an obnoxious journalist or an errant cab driver. Unlike me, Dad was also a very private person, almost secretive, and slow to trust those he did not know well.