From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  SR: We went back to Duke that fall for parents’ weekend. Each college has its own traditions, of course, and at Duke, the rooters in the stands rattle their keys, to cheer on the pathetic football team. I looked around at our fellow parents and of course we all had rent-a-cars with a single key on a plastic ring that didn’t make any noise! We all wanted to be loyal parents, but what is the sound of one key shaking?

  CR: Neither one of our kids would apply to the schools we went to. Steve had gone out of the business of pushing Lee, but he pushed Becca a bit to apply to Harvard; she absolutely refused.

  SR: I wanted her to take advantage of the preference for alumni children, but she wanted her own place, and she was right. In the end it came down to Michigan and Princeton, and after she made a visit to Princeton in the spring, she came home, announced she was going, and said, “Dad, I have a present for you.” It was a Princeton sweatshirt. Now, it happened to be a Sunday night, and I was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt at the time. I ceremoniously took it off and put on my new one. Becca was so pleased she said, “Dad, we have a date for the Harvard–Princeton game,” a date we kept. Later Cokie said to me, “See, do you get it now? You have lots of Harvard sweatshirts but no Princeton sweatshirt.” It’s always been a good metaphor—kids need to find their own place, their own identity. And like Lee choosing Prep and Duke, Becca was much better off—and so was I—if she made the decision for herself, and then had a stake in proving she was right.

  CR: So we drove her to Princeton. We took two cars because she was keeping one at school. Steve and I would take turns getting in the car with her. She was in total costume. She had her hair up in a ponytail and her sunroof open and she was bopping her way off to college. I was trying to have a conversation with her about what lay ahead, how it could be complicated and she could find herself in situations that were emotionally difficult and intellectually challenging. I warned her that the work was going to be harder than any she had ever done before and I wanted her to feel like she shouldn’t take on too much, shouldn’t get caught in the myth that the women in our family could do everything all the time. She was insulted by that conversation; so much for maternal advice. We spent that night at my sister and brother-in-law’s and then the next day moved her into her college room.

  SR: We made a mistake. We stayed too long. We got her moved in and we should have left then, but we didn’t, we stuck around for lunch. Lunch took a long time because the restaurants were all crowded, and Becca grew more and more agitated. She was ready to get settled with her roommates and start unpacking her stuff.

  CR: And this is a kid who’s essentially never given us any lip.

  SR: Finally, after lunch, we went back to her dorm and she waved us a hurried good-bye. Now, colleges often have rules that parents have to leave by ten o’clock in the morning. They know this syndrome. They’ve seen enough fights on the lawns of dorms!

  CR: She wanted us to go. She wanted to get started with college life.

  SR: We walked off campus feeling a little bruised. She simply dismissed us, with no signs of regret or emotion of any kind. Then we saw a young woman weeping copiously into her parents’ arms, beside herself with grief that they were leaving. Cokie turned to me with a smile: “Now, there’s a satisfying child.”

  EMPTY NEST

  When we left Becca at Princeton our lives changed. We had always defined ourselves as parents first, and now that was no longer true. Our days became both easier and emptier. We could stay downtown and have dinner with friends, but when we got home the house was dark and cold. Except, of course, for Abner, the droop-eared, drool-stained basset hound Becca found for us as she left for college. Steve’s first reaction when she brought him home was, “Why did God make a dog who looks like that?” But it’s remarkable what a difference it makes to be greeted by a friendly face at the window, even one as goofy looking as Abner’s. Becca understood, perhaps better than we did, that the old folks at home would need some companionship when Bradley Boulevard became an empty nest again, twenty-eight years after Cokie left for Wellesley.

  CR: With Becca going away, I was not only losing my child but my friend. The idea that suddenly this friend wasn’t there was shocking. I had prepared for it, but still I was bereft. I couldn’t imagine what I would’ve done if I weren’t working as hard as I was. I kept wondering, what did women do when they didn’t work and their kids left home? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I wasn’t only missing my kids and seeing big changes in my daily life, I also had to redefine myself. From the moment I had a baby, my first responsibility was to those children. I saw my life first and foremost as that of a mother, and suddenly that wasn’t my role anymore. At least not in a daily fashion the way it had been for twenty years. I felt almost uprooted.

  SR: That was true for me, too. While I didn’t define myself as a father in quite the same way that Cokie defined herself as a mother, it was a very important part of what I did and who I was. So the kids’ leaving left a big hole in our lives. But I also think it had a positive effect on our friendships.

  CR: That’s absolutely true.

  SR: We’ve talked a lot about the importance of friends when we had young children, particularly since our own families were far away. But at that stage, with kids always around, our attention was distracted by dealing with them; we’d leave a party early because the kids were cranky or we’d jump up to make sure they didn’t break something. Then, as the kids got older, we devoted most of our free time to being with them. Once they left home, we were able to spend more time and energy on friendships, and other members of our family.

  CR: And not feel guilty about not being home.

  SR: We also got more sleep, frankly. When the children were still living at home, we never quite fell asleep until we’d hear the back door slamming, announcing they were safely home. Cokie calls it the “praying them into the driveway” syndrome. When they went off to college, and we were no longer waiting up, the anxiety level went way down.

  CR: The time with each other has been very nice, too. I think it could be rough to wake up with the children gone from home and look across the table and think, “Who are you?” Fortunately, we never asked that question. Working together all those years helped. We were around each other more than many couples with kids are.

  SR: Kids going off to college is a real danger point in many marriages. I can’t tell you how many students have sat in my office, with tears streaming down their faces, saying, “I just got a call that my parents are separating” or “I can’t stand to think about going home for Thanksgiving because I can’t please everybody.” One incident really caught me up short. When Becca was getting married, I wrote a column about it, and gave it to the students in my writing course to criticize.

  CR: This is a little dangerous for these students.

  SR: Once they realize that God will not strike them dead when they criticize me, they actually enjoy it. Sometimes too much. But after they read the column, three or four young women told me essentially the same story: my parents have broken up and I think of a wedding as such a horrible time of rivalry and jealousy and tension that I can’t relate to your story about your daughter.

  CR: Just breaks your heart.

  SR: It was a happy accident that I started teaching as an adjunct professor at George Washington University just a few years after Becca left. I always enjoyed teaching my own kids and reading what they had written, because that was what my father had always done with me. So my students have filled a real gap in my life, and it pleases me when one of them describes me as “our dad away from home.” It’s a reflection of how I feel that for the last few years we’ve celebrated Father’s Day by inviting over several dozen of my favorite former students. One couple already has two daughters, who they’ve dubbed my first “grand-students.” I love the term.

  CR: The mantelpiece in the kitchen is reserved for pictures of our surrogate grandchildren—nieces, grand-nieces and -nephews, godchildren—there are a lot of them ru
nning around.

  SR: We were also lucky that our kids were in college not more than about three or four hours away from home—the ideal distance. Far enough away so we couldn’t just drop in on them but close enough to come home for a weekend. Even though the kids were away at school, they were still very much a part of our lives, and they usually came home for the summer.

  One summer Becca worked at the Caucus on Women’s Issues, and one day they were holding a press conference. Talk about family values. Our daughter had helped arrange the event, Cokie’s mother was one of the speakers, and Cokie and I were both covering it. If that wasn’t enough, after I wrote my story for U.S. News, a researcher at the magazine called the caucus to verify some facts and the person who answered the phone was Becca! Of course she told them not to believe a word I had written!

  CR: I spent a lot of time in Princeton during Becca’s sophomore and junior years because my sister, who was mayor of the town, was dying of cancer. And Becca was unbelievably wonderful with Barbara. She’d drive her places, amuse her, fill in for her at public events, and at the end, physically carry her from room to room.

  SR: I was worried about Becca. Caring for a dying aunt is not usually part of a college experience, and I didn’t want her to feel burdened. But she absolutely insisted on doing it, and I was very proud of her.

  CR: That was a tense time between us, though, because I think it took you a while to understand how devastated I was and how much I needed to be there.

  SR: True, but I knew how devoted you were to Barbara, and that was part of what I loved about you, that you would be that loyal.

  CR: We had one fairly unpleasant conversation about it, but then you finally said, “Look, if you need to be there, then be there. Don’t worry about it.”

  SR: We also had some very happy times visiting Becca at Princeton, where she joined an all-women’s singing group, the Tigressions. Listening to them gave me a great sense of déja` vu, since I had sat through so many of Cokie’s concerts during our college days. But one song was my favorite. It was called “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Becca sang the solo, and she would always haul some guy out of the audience…

  CR:…generally an old guy…

  SR:…and sing the song to him, vamping and flirting the whole time. More than once she picked me out…

  CR:…he loved it…

  SR:…and it became a bit with all of her friends cheering her on! Then, at her wedding, many of her friends from the singing group were here as bridesmaids or guests and they cooked up a scheme.

  CR: Without telling her, the band started playing “Dedicated” as the friends crooned the background vocals and pulled her up on the bandstand for her solo.

  SR: So she sang our old song to her new husband. Not to Dad. A fitting gesture.

  CR: You took it well.

  SR: After Lee graduated, he decided to take a year off between college and law school, and went to work for CBS in New York on their election coverage. He rented a nice little apartment, but he needed furniture, and he and Cokie rented a U-Haul truck and drove it down to Ikea, the furniture store, which has a big branch about forty-five minutes away from us in Virginia.

  CR: Lee said, “We’re going to pull up in this U-Haul and the manager’s going to come out and welcome us personally.” Wrong! There were about forty U-Hauls in the parking lot with mothers going shopping with their kids.

  SR: I remembered so vividly going to New York at age twenty-two for my first job at the Times. I had gone by bus from my parents’ home in New Jersey the night before my first day, and here was Lee driving to New York for his first job and first apartment. There was a great sense of continuity.

  CR: He had carefully counted out all of his money for his trip to New York. But he didn’t realize that a U-Haul cost more than a car in tolls, so when he reached the Lincoln Tunnel he didn’t have enough money. Somehow he convinced them to take a check!

  After the ’90 election CBS kept him on because it was clear we were going to war in the Persian Gulf and they needed more hands here in Washington. He was going to law school in the fall, so it was silly not to move in with us until then, and we wound up having a great time together. Once the war started, all three of us were working around the clock—there were times where we would bump into each other at four o’clock in the morning, the first sighting of the day. We were all engaged in the same endeavor and we all had strong opinions and we enjoyed talking it out.

  SR: It was the first time we dealt with a child as a professional colleague. During this period I occasionally hosted a show on CBS called Nightwatch. It went on the air in the middle of the night, but we’d tape interviews during the day, and one Sunday during the war I went to the bureau and dropped by the control room and there was Lee. He was answering the phones and everyone else was schmoozing. I went over to say hello, and right in front of him was a bank of monitors tuned to the other networks. As I was standing behind him, patting him on the shoulder, up popped a picture of Mom on ABC! After I left the room, he told us later, a silence descended and everyone looked at Lee. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling: “Now you know why I want to go to law school!”

  Two years later Becca went off to her first apartment in Chicago. It took all day to rent the size U-Haul truck we wanted, it was driving me nuts! By the time we got the truck home, it was late in the afternoon. I called the Pier One store in the neighborhood and found it was open for about another twenty minutes. So we raced over and it was like a TV game show where contestants have three minutes to fill their shopping carts. Becca would say, “These are nice glasses, I’d like four.” And I’d say, “No, you would need twelve!” It was on that shopping trip that she dubbed me Daddy Blank Check. When we reached the checkout counter, the young woman at the cash register looked at Becca and looked at me: “First apartment?” I kept thinking of our honeymoon, when the clerk at the hotel gift shop spied my shiny new wedding ring and teased, “Just married?”

  As the children moved on to other places and other lives, we enjoyed going to visit them. Those trips were part of the readjustment in our relationship. When parents are on the kids’ turf, the younger generation becomes the hosts, the experts. I remembered when our parents came to visit us, how we felt more like grown-ups, and the tables were now turned in Chicago or New York or wherever they were living. They were the tour guides. They showed off their favorite places. Becca lived within walking distance of Wrigley Field, and she took me to my first and only ball game there.

  CR: After a year in Chicago, Becca moved to Philadelphia and started working for a political consultant, so I regularly used her as a source! It was a treat to have her just a short train ride away.

  SR: Lee was even closer. He went to law school here and then worked as a lawyer in Washington for three years. His apartment was just a few blocks from my office at U.S. News and on his way to work he would walk right past my parking lot. Some mornings I’d see him on the street and we’d stop and chat, but he was usually at work much earlier than me! He offered to give me a key to his apartment, saying I might like a place to drop by during the day. Cokie demanded, “What for?” and nixed that idea fast.

  I had moved from The New York Times to U.S. News while the kids were in college. Our professional lives changed at the same time our personal ones did. During that period I came to understand why “midlife crisis” is such a common phenomenon. The kids left home, and like a lot of other people, I took stock of my career, wondering about the future. It all happens at once. I think of it as the forty-five-year-old disease, because that’s when it happened to me, but people hit a crunch point at different ages.

  CR: This midlife crisis stuff is much more a male thing—I haven’t seen it happen to many women I know. I’ll be curious to see how it evolves in future generations, but the expectations of many women my age were so different from what our lives turned out to be, both for good and for bad. Since we grew up at a time when the ultimate goal in life was marrying well, most of us mea
sured our success by whether in fact we had succeeded in doing that. What we’re doing professionally is like icing on the cake. It never occurred to most of us that we’d be in this place at this age. Whereas the men we knew always had great expectations, unrealistic expectations. Half of them expected to be president or editors in chief of newspapers. Then they come face-to-face with life in their late forties, or early fifties. They realize what didn’t happen and what’s never going to happen and they have a tough adjustment to make. Whereas for women, of my age and acquaintance anyway, we look at what we’re doing professionally with some surprise: “Hey, that’s pretty cool.”

  SR: Well, it was cool. As National Public Radio became more popular, so did Cokie. After The Lawmakers went off the air, she contributed pieces to The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and then started making occasional appearances on This Week with David Brinkley. In 1988, when she signed a contract with ABC, she was better known and better paid than I was. I don’t pretend the transition was an easy one, but from the beginning I don’t think our core relationship ever depended on who made more money or appeared more often on television. That was still true even after the balance shifted, and I give Cokie a lot of the credit; she never tried to use her new position to change the relationship.