From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: We tried to spend as much free time as possible with the kids, but as they got older we had to adjust more and more to their schedules and their sensitivities, and we didn’t always get it right.

  SR: During this period, I did have one memorable experience with Lee. He decided for his thirteenth birthday that he wanted to go to a rock concert with a bunch of his friends.

  CR: There was no way on earth I was going to do this.

  SR: So I took the kids to the concert. The group was called Foreigner, and the six of them were probably the youngest people in the building and I was probably the oldest. We were the oddest group there. It also happened to be the first game of the World Series that night, the Yankees were playing the Dodgers, and I went to the concert with a headphone radio so I could listen to the game.

  CR: The kids were actually pretty tolerant of us. We went regularly to the theater and the movies together until they outgrew us and started going out with their friends instead. And they usually attended church with me every Sunday. Steven didn’t go to weekly services but we always made it to Jewish High Holy Day services; we found a comfortable, low-key congregation that met in a Korean church. And we continued to follow all of the rituals at home. When Becca was in high school, the church I usually attended asked for volunteers to sing in a little folk choir at the noon Mass. The two of us joined up and enjoyed singing together, especially since Becca taught me most of the music. It also meant she learned the Gospels, the Epistles, and the liturgical cycle. Later she took courses in college and is now quite knowledgeable about religion. Lee spent two years at a Jesuit high school, so he had plenty of exposure as well.

  SR: We did a little freelancing with the rituals—one of Cokie’s innovations was the children’s Seder.

  CR: I actually had two children’s Seders, one for little bitty kids and another for those who were just beginning to read. Once they started reading, they graduated to the grown-ups’ table.

  SR: The copies of the Haggadah Cokie had put together back in California became increasingly dog-eared and splattered with wine over the years, so from time to time we’d Xerox new versions, wine stains and all, and they became great family heirlooms. For our twenty-fifth annual Seder one friend, who was trying to do something nice, put the Haggadah on a computer and printed out fresh copies. Everybody was distressed! Where were the wine stains?

  CR: But when we updated the Haggadah we did make it gender neutral, a definite improvement. The God of Abraham and Isaac became the God of Sarah and Rebecca as well. But the complicated rabbis’ names are still there, and every year without fail some non-Jewish first-timer gets that section to read! At our other holiday dinners, we set up tables all over the house, but for a Seder everyone needs to be in the same room, to follow the service. Eventually, our crowd outgrew the dining room and our only solution was to move to the porch, take out all the furniture, and rent tables. Despite all my efforts with linens and flowers, it still has the air of a banquet in a VFW hall. Our maximum capacity is thirty-six, and last year the guests ranged in age from three weeks to eighty. A bit larger than the “cheesecake” Seder back in Greece.

  SR: When we came back to America we added an annual Hanukkah party to the calendar, a wonderful event that is still important to us, even if our own kids are well past playing the dreidel game. A dreidel is a small four-sided top, and which side it lands on tells you whether you’ve won or lost. When we started our annual party, little kids covered the floor spinning dreidels, and then one year I looked up and saw four teenage girls in black cocktail dresses and thought, “Goodness, something has changed.”

  We invite a lot of mixed religious families to Hanukkah, just as we do at Passover, and one year I looked around and commented that of the eleven couples there, in only two cases were both partners Jewish. A gay friend, who was there with his partner, quickly raised his hand and said, “Three.” We all laughed, but he was right. You have to adapt ancient rituals to modern times.

  CR: The only time in our married life where there was a real potential for discord over religion came when Lee wanted to change schools. He hated the big impersonal public high school he went to in ninth grade. He was lost and he wanted out.

  SR: One thing we learned during this period is how crucial a parent’s role is during the teenage years. It’s natural to think kids need Mom and Dad most when they’re small, but they need parents even more during adolescence. And there’s no way to make appointments for soul-searching conversations. The trick is to be around enough so that when they want to talk, at whatever hour and in whatever place, they have a parent available. I interviewed the mother of two teenage girls recently and she said her biggest job was “hanging out” with them long enough so that they felt free to confide in her.

  CR: During the fall of Lee’s freshman year, we both covered the 1982 campaign. When I was on the road, Lee would call me late at night in hotel rooms and pour out his soul. He said to me years later, “I would’ve never had those conversations with you if you had been in front of me.” That’s certainly true; it’s much easier to have talks like that at a distance. Of course, after we hung up I’d be left aching to hug him and he’d be fine and go back to sleep.

  SR: Our own experiences caused us each to react differently to Lee’s. Cokie had never gone to public schools, but I always had, and my rather irrational prejudice in favor of public education made me resistant to Lee’s proposal that he change schools. The spring of his first year in high school, some family friends were visiting, and I told them what Lee wanted to do, but I kept insisting that staying in public school would be best. One woman, who was a trained therapist and knew what she was talking about, turned on me and warned, “You are not listening to your child.” Stop imposing your own prejudices, she said, and start hearing what he has to say.

  CR: It was one of those situations where an outsider makes all the difference. I had been trying to make the same point, but cautiously, because I didn’t want to start a fight. Our friend finally caught Steve’s attention.

  SR: I was taken aback at first, even a bit offended. I was a great dad, how could I be making such a mistake? But I thought about it again and realized she was right. It was a hard lesson for me to learn, and then I had to learn another one when the school he settled on was Georgetown Prep, a Catholic school run by Jesuit priests. Usually, families threaten kids with the Jesuits, but this was his choice. His uncle Tommy had gone there, and it was just down the road from Stone Ridge, where Cokie had gone, and she’d known and dated many guys from Prep. But Catholic school was not part of our deal. Cokie and I had always said that we would train the kids ourselves. This was the first and only time in our whole marriage that we were faced with this kind of decision. Did I want Lee taught, and perhaps indoctrinated, by the Jesuits? I was extremely dubious, but he definitely wanted to go there, so I agreed to go see it.

  CR: It’s a spectacularly beautiful facility.

  SR: That’s true. It’s surrounded by a golf course. But that didn’t sell me on the place; the people I met there did. The director of admissions understood my concerns, all my uncertainty and ambivalence. I was hearing in my own mind an echo of my father saying, “I’ll never be comfortable in your house if you marry a Catholic.” This guy was terrific in terms of reassuring me that I would feel comfortable with my son in a Catholic school. I went through a struggle with my own feelings and I had to relearn and remember what I had come to understand earlier in our marriage, that the Church had helped instill in Cokie many of the qualities that I most admired. I had said to my parents over and over again that the important thing here is not the labels, not the stereotypes, but the reality. So finally I took my own advice, and when Lee got in I agreed to let him go, and Prep turned out to be the perfect place for him.

  And I learned something important: when kids make a decision for themselves, they have a vested interest in showing they were right. So all the incentives are pointing in one direction. Lee wanted to prove to me that he
had made the right choice, so he worked hard and did well. If we’d forced him to go somewhere else or stay in the public high school, all the incentives would’ve been different. Then he would have had a motive to prove that we were wrong. It was such a simple, profound lesson, but it took me a while to grasp it.

  Lee flourished at Prep and then decided the only college he cared about was Duke. I’d be the first to admit that I was an Ivy League snob. My first reaction was, Duke? South? Fraternities? Why? The rest of the conversation with Lee went like this: “Remember when I wanted to go to Prep?” I said yes. “You didn’t want me to go, did you?” No, I didn’t. “I was right, wasn’t I?” Yes, absolutely. “So why won’t you trust me now?” I had no answer. His logic was airtight. He applied early decision to Duke and it, too, was the right place for him. The lesson I learned, at considerable cost, is clear: listen to your children. And I’ve always been grateful to that old friend of ours who first taught it to me.

  CR: It’s also true that what works for one kid doesn’t necessarily work for another. Friends of mine who have large families tell me they have to constantly remind themselves to treat each child differently. Becca thrived at the public school. But Steve’s right, it involves listening to children to know what they need. From a mother’s perspective, I think it’s easier to listen to girls than boys. They talk more. Also, girls tend to be more forthcoming. Becca and I would go to the mall and shop and have lunch and visit. We would cook together, which makes conversation easy. Still, at times listening isn’t enough, talking’s required. There were times when I would find myself saying, “We give all this lip service to values and morals that need to be taught in the home; what have I done lately?” In general, I believe in teaching by example as my mother did for me, but sometimes words are needed as well. You assume they know what you think about things, but how would they if you don’t tell them?

  SR: The kids needed their independence and we did, too, but we had to make sure that we didn’t just become strangers living in the same household. We had dinners together most nights, but everyone was tired and not particularly eager to linger. On Sundays we had a pretty rigid rule that everybody showed up for a long, leisurely dinner with lots of good food and lots of conversation.

  CR: We often spent all of Sunday together, but definitely Sunday dinner.

  SR: It sounds odd to say you have to make appointments with your own children, but you do. To some extent it’s out of consideration for them, because they have their own lives. But if everybody understands that everybody else is going to make the effort to be home, it becomes a habit, and that carried over. Years later, when Lee was in law school here in Washington and then working at a law firm, he still came home most Sundays for dinner.

  CR: And he didn’t even bring his laundry, which I thought was awfully nice!

  SR: It’s not only important to make appointments with the kids, it’s important to make appointments with each other. It helped that we worked together, that we had the drive downtown and back together, that we would go on reporting trips and conventions and things like that together. But that was more work than romance. We had to keep reminding ourselves of our old adage, “Have an affair with your wife!”

  CR: We never traveled by ourselves at that stage of our life, except for work, because we felt so strongly that we’d be taking time away from the kids. When they started going to summer camp, we would have a little more time together. We were still working but it was a more relaxed atmosphere. We would stay downtown for dinner without worrying about rushing home. One year Lee was at a summer program at Wellesley and we had planned to collect him there and go on to Maine for a family vacation where Becca would meet us. But for three or four days before that, we went by ourselves to Quebec City. I remember looking at each other and saying, “Do you remember how this used to be? This is fun.” To wander through a city and eat good meals and do some shopping and learn the history and go to museums. It had been a long time since we’d done something like that, and we didn’t start doing it regularly again until they were in college.

  SR: One place that became very important to all of us, and still is, is the beach house we rent every year at Pawleys Island, in South Carolina. When we were abroad, we had rented houses on a number of Greek islands, and it was a type of vacation we all loved. We’d unpack and unwind, sit there for a week or two, and get into the rhythm of island life. When we came back to America, we asked a friend, what’s the closest we can come to a Greek island? And she suggested Pawleys. The first year we rented a house, sight unseen, for a week. Soon we were up to two weeks, and last year was our twenty-second year in the same house.

  CR: We really are creatures of habit. Many Saturday nights we go to the movies with the same couple and then to the same restaurant afterward, and we get cranky if we have to do something else. It’s so pleasant, and so much easier than thinking. Once, after Becca was grown, she came home on a Saturday night and checked to see if our car was parked at its usual spot near the restaurant. Yep. She knew where to find us. It’s comfortable—that thing Steve said he’d never become.

  SR: Pawleys is like that. Lee was saying just the other night, “Gosh, I was thinking about Pawleys, how much fun it would be to be there with you.”

  CR: Another place that was always special to me was the Capitol. I’d practically grown up there, my seventh birthday party was in the House restaurant, I knew all the old waiters and doorkeepers and cops. I still get a thrill when I see the dome lit up at night, and Steve came to love it as much as I did.

  SR: One of the things that I loved about the Hill was the opportunity to hear stories about Hale, which I made a point of asking about. Then I would come home and tell them to the kids. I felt that I was almost keeping an oral history for them about their grandfather. One day I was interviewing Danny Rostenkowski, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, in one of his many back offices. That man controlled more real estate than anybody in Congress. On his wall was this Plexiglas box, and inside was a gavel that had shattered in several pieces. He saw me looking at it and said, “You want to know how I broke that gavel?” When I said sure, he roared: “Getting your father-in-law to shut up!”

  CR: The kids came to love the Capitol as well. When Lee was sixteen he was a page in the House, and he had a summertime romance with this darling girl page. Poor guy, every time they would be on the elevator together, trying to steal a minute alone, the door would open and there would be a parent or an uncle or a grandmother! He was surrounded. Miraculously, he still married the girl.

  SR: We’d see him in the Speaker’s lobby off the House chamber and he’d love to say, “Well, I’ve got to go to work,” and march onto the House floor, where his parents, the big-deal reporters, couldn’t go.

  Becca worked a couple of summers at the Capitol as well, one of them in the office of California congressman Norman Mineta, where my brother Glenn worked. Norm was determined to rename an air force base in his district in honor of the Japanese-American astronaut killed in the Challenger accident, and an already scheduled ceremony provided a deadline for Pentagon action. Becca was assigned the job of making it all happen. She browbeat the military brass so mercilessly that when the air force guy arrived at Norm’s office with the proper papers for the name change, he asked to meet Miss Rebecca Roberts. She deemed it the better part of wisdom to hide out in a back office so he wouldn’t learn that his taskmaster was fifteen years old.

  CR: When the children started to contemplate college, traveling around with them to look at different schools was a true eye-opener.

  SR: They were seeing so much and absorbing so much every day that it concentrated their own thoughts about who they were and what they wanted. At dinner, those thoughts would come spilling out, and we had to be there to hear them. If we weren’t, the moment would be gone. But Lee wasn’t really interested in most of the places we’d visited; he had set his heart on Duke, and when he got in, there was no question where he’d go.

 
I think that the day your kids go off to college is one of the most indelible moments of parenthood. In Lee’s case, we drove him down to Durham, and went to dinner at our hotel near the campus. It’s the only time I’ve ever been in a restaurant where most of the tables were groups of three. I looked around the room and there were all these nervous, anxious kids and their nervous, anxious parents. The kids were allowed to get into their rooms in the early evening, and starting in late afternoon, they started gathering on the lawns outside their dorms with all their paraphernalia. It was like a lost tribe that had some mystical connection to each other, and they had been told to gather from all over the country and meet on this spot in Durham, North Carolina. The hour came and the tribe flooded into their dorms. By the next morning, less than twenty-four hours later, these bare empty buildings had been converted into hives of liveliness and color and sound. The tribe had occupied its turf, and our son had joined it. But we still had one left at home.

  CR: We were looking forward to time with just the three of us and so was Becca. Two years as an only child sounded pretty good to her.