Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

by Alyssa Mastromonaco

  I wish that our culture didn’t demand women have an opinion on this. You don’t have to have an opinion on it. I always respond to the questions with something very diplomatic: I am not a victim, I say. Having kids is one way of being happy, but I too am very happy, and well adjusted; I like my house and my husband and my cats and my job. I have time to mentor young women and to see my parents. Many of my friends around my age also don’t have children, and none of them are super bummed about it. I’m a godmother. And I do really love my cats. This is sometimes seen as sad, or cat-lady-ish, but I think that is sexist. (Let’s remember Hemingway—dude had a lot of cats.) Oprah also doesn’t have kids, and she is doing just fine; she gets to hang out with kids all the time—and then she gets to go home to Stedman and they go on a lavish vacation.

  I truly believe all this. It is not some story I concocted late at night trying to rationalize the fact that I spent my peak childbearing years meeting foreign dignitaries and helping the United States respond to natural disasters.

  But there is something else—something I don’t tell the well-meaning people who ask me what it’s like to be a childless 40-year-old woman with a successful career. I always regret not talking about it, because I don’t think enough people talk about things like this, but it seems like too much information. The fact is, in addition to having always put my career first and not getting married until I was 37, getting pregnant is just not an option for me.

  My period was always fucked up, for my whole life. When I was a teenager, my hormones turned me into a menace; when I finally went on birth control when I was 23 or 24, it was because I couldn’t stop sweating—I would ruin shirts—and my doctor recommended a low-estrogen pill. I always got nauseated with the pill, but my gynecologist didn’t believe me; this went on for a while, until I finally started using the NuvaRing, which I loved, for about ten years. So many women have a birth control saga like this—it sucks.

  Even with the sweating, all this birth control would suggest that I thought I was capable of getting pregnant, which I did. But a few months after Reggie wished me a very biological birthday, I went to the doctor and asked him if he would give me an AMH—or Anti-Mullerian Hormone—test. An AMH test measures what is referred to as “ovarian reserve,” a phrase I have always thought was very funny; in normal-person terms, it measures how many eggs you have left. (Actually, it measures the amount of AMH present in your blood, which is a reflection of how many eggs you have left.) It’s not common to give an AMH test to someone who is 35 and not actively trying to conceive—I had to beg my doctor to do it.

  I got the idea to take the test from the Internet. David and I had just started dating, and although we weren’t anywhere close to having a discussion about kids, I was personally curious. I had started doing the math in my head—“Well, we’d have to be dating for at least a year, and by that time I’ll be 36…”—and I wanted to know if I even had time to roll the dice.

  AMH tests are scaled from 0 to 7, where 0 is probably no eggs, 1.5 to 4.0 is normal, and anything above 4 is high, which often suggests you have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). I clocked in at 0.2, which is the AMH level of a woman who is about 60 years old.

  It was not devastating, but it was shocking. It was so final—from that moment on, I didn’t have to wonder if I would ever have kids, because I knew I would not be having them, at least not with my own eggs. I didn’t want to dwell on the missed opportunity when there are so many other ways to create a family; adopting is not off the table, but it’s not something I thought about that much then. I didn’t cry, and I don’t remember telling my parents.

  If the test had come back as a 1.5, I might have been sadder, because it would have meant I had to make a decision. The finality of that barely-there number took the pressure off. I couldn’t even think that it was unfair, because I knew that I was older and sometimes things just don’t work out. What I did think about was the fact that I would forever be looked at funny by other people, who, deep down, probably pity me for not having kids. That was the truly sad part.

  The world has a funny way of driving home a point. Around the same time that I found out about my “ovarian reserve,” I went to a dinner South Korea hosted for the White House in Seoul. The setup was not conducive to chitchat; we were seated at one long, King Arthur–ish table, and I was two or three seats down from Lee Myung-bak, the president of Korea, and across from Pfeiffer. I was the only woman, which made Pfeiffer laugh, because no one was talking to me.

  Because I always prepared a lot for state dinners, I knew that the person next to me—it might have been the treasury secretary—had three kids, two sons and a daughter, so I started asking him about his family. He lit up; he was super pumped to talk about his kids.

  After a while, though, I noticed he hadn’t said anything about his daughter, so I asked about her as well. He replied that, because his daughter was 30 and unmarried, “As you would say in America, she is an ‘old maid.’” I discreetly moved a ring I was wearing to the significant finger and finished the dinner without incident.

  CHAPTER 6

  Confidence, or The Hope Flood

  I met David the same way I met the serious boyfriend I had before him, Marv, whom I’d broken up with about five years before: work.

  Some people may think this is tragic. It’s not! Besides, both are extremely cute stories; Marv and I met when I was staff assistant to the press and scheduling office for Senator Kerry; he was an intern in the DC office, and we had to fax things back and forth, which led to email flirting, which led to dating. And yet there’s still no movie called You’ve Got a Fax.

  The story with David is a little more technologically advanced. It was late 2009, we’d been in office for a little under a year, and my boss, Jim Messina, was working on a project in Nevada called CityCenter. It involved Senator Harry Reid, so Jim introduced me to Senator Reid’s chief of staff, David, over email so we could work on getting POTUS involved. Jim said something like, “He’s so cool, he only dates women who live in California, and he has a Porsche.” OK. Not the best impression to go in with.

  David and I started emailing about the project, and it was kind of flirty, but nothing overt. I was looking forward to eventually getting to meet him in person, but for no real, concrete reason. Sometimes you can be talking to someone and you just feel it.

  Then, on Christmas Day, a man tried to detonate a plastic bomb he’d hidden in his underwear on a flight to Detroit. I called David and said I didn’t think it was the right time for POTUS to get involved with the project—it didn’t really make sense to send the president to the opening of a mall at that point—and that we should put it on hold until the new year.

  In the meantime, we emailed about the project off and on, and we talked about other things. I made some Saved by the Bell jokes and was impressed that he got them. Things were shaping up.

  Then, about two weeks after POTUS came back to the White House at the beginning of January, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti about 15 miles west of its capital.

  It was completely catastrophic. When the White House got news of the disaster, POTUS coordinated a relief effort pretty much immediately. According to the ticktock, the minute-by-minute outline of an event that the White House comms team would send out afterward, POTUS heard about the quake at 5:52 PM in the Oval Office on January 12, and by 9:00 PM he was in the Situation Room for an emergency meeting to figure out the relief effort, which would include the deployment of thousands of troops and $100 million in aid. He asked a small group of people to go to Haiti to coordinate it immediately: Tommy Vietor, the National Security spokesperson; Denis McDonough, a senior national security adviser; and me.

  I didn’t think twice about agreeing to go, but as soon as I did, I was scared out of my mind. I couldn’t believe I said I would do this; I had no idea what to expect, except that it would be very, very hard.

  As part of my preparation to go, I emailed David and told him I was going away and that he should conta
ct Danielle if anything came up with the CityCenter project.

  He asked where I was going, and I said Haiti.

  He replied, “You have to come back safe so I can take you out to dinner.”

  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  I knew we had been flirting. I was reasonably sure. But when I opened that email—and you’re always sort of nervous to get emails from people you want to get emails from, even in normal situations when you’re not about to head into a disaster area—I moved back from the computer. We had never met in person. We had spoken on the phone only once.

  I thought the team and I would fly to Haiti in a jet, but when I showed up at the White House on the day we were supposed to leave, I realized we would be going in a C-17—an Army cargo plane. When something this devastating happens, everything you take for granted in a normal situation—roads, running water, the airport—has stopped functioning, and we couldn’t get there any other way. I had told Tommy not to worry about supplies, so I showed up at this cargo plane, which was full of Marines, with a bunch of Whole Foods bags filled with beef jerky and granola bars. We were wearing corduroys and Patagonia fleeces. “We look like Joanie and Chachi!” I hissed at Tommy as we got out of the car at Langley Air Force Base. We were terrified.

  When we got off the plane, it was very dark; most places didn’t have electricity, but for the entire time we were there we worked out of airport hangars, which had some. My job was to coordinate transportation and other logistics, but there was just no way to get anywhere—and we had to figure out how to make it to the embassy. We eventually got a ride from someone who worked at the airport. After that, for the five or six days we were there, we hitchhiked everywhere we went. Before I left, Ferial was really worried, and she gave me about 30 packages of gum to use to barter in case of an emergency; I thought she was crazy until I figured out I could pay people to drive me around in packs of gum.

  Everyone who was part of the relief effort—a lot of people—slept side by side in sleeping bags in the embassy, and no one showered for a week. For food, we had my bougie snacks and MREs, or Meals, Ready-to-Eat, which are field rations the military gives to soldiers in combat and other areas where food isn’t readily available. As you know, I have IBS, so these almost immediately gave me diarrhea, a condition that is especially not good when you have to share a toilet with 75 other people and can’t bathe.

  This is when I started drinking red wine seriously. It helps with stomach problems, and when Captain John Kirby, our guide in Haiti, who went on to become the spokesperson for the State Department, heard I was not doing well, he introduced me to the guys who controlled the embassy’s special-occasion stash. After that, every night we would get a juice cup of red wine with our MREs, and we would go sit on our sleeping bags to have our dinner. Now I associate red wine with community and generosity—a strong contrast to what was otherwise a sad, hard time. Much of what we were doing when we were working out of airports was helping people find their families and repatriating bodies. At one point, David texted me to make sure I got there OK, but I wasn’t thinking about that at all anymore.

  After a week, we came back on another cargo plane through Tampa, got burgers at Applebee’s, and then transferred, still unshowered, to a commercial flight to DC. Once we landed there, we went to our respective apartments and crashed.

  The next day, I showed up at work to find an envelope on my desk. I was still exhausted and dazed to be back, but the contents would have been a shock even if my mind had been in a more normal place. It was a pair of gift certificates for me and a friend to go to dinner and the spa at the Four Seasons. From David.

  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  A man had never even bought me a drink in a bar before. How that’s possible, I don’t really know. Maybe it was the fact that I looked like a fifth-grade boy in my early-to-mid-twenties, when women are most likely to be bought drinks in bars. Maybe it’s that the suave banker with good cheekbones swooping in and asking the bartender to put it on his tab is a myth perpetuated by romantic comedies, and it doesn’t happen that often anyway. Maybe it’s that I lived by Mo Mannino’s favorite saying in the Rhinebeck High School yearbook: “Everyone has an angle.” And he didn’t mean it in the America’s Next Top Model kind of way—he meant it like “Trust no one.” Once you internalize that, it’s hard not to be skeptical of random men when they come within 10 feet.

  Whenever I did try to let loose and flirt with strangers, it always backfired. After college, when I was sharing a room with her in side-by-side twin beds, Volpes had her birthday party at Polly Esther’s, a bar near Hudson Street. Polly Esther’s was known as a haunt for the “bridge and tunnel crowd” and beloved—or despised—for playing music from different decades on each floor. If anyone but a very trusted friend ever invites you to a bar that plays music from different decades on each floor, beware—it demonstrates a lack of commitment. I agreed because (1) it was Volpes’s birthday, and (2) I hoped for a little “Smooth Criminal” on the ’80s floor. I can’t say I enjoyed bars or clubs otherwise—I got little sense of possibility from them.

  At Polly Esther’s, Volpes and her friends from Garden City and I were dancing away when this sort of pasty group of dudes migrated toward us. Always looking out for me, Volpes advised me, in my bebe tank top and fit-and-flare pants, to go dance with them.

  When I got over there, they informed me that they were Welsh paratroopers. They told me this over and over, despite the fact they were neither Welsh nor paratroopers. I learned that they were not who they claimed because one of them walked me home and gave me his number, which Volpes encouraged me to call/taunted me with the next day. When I called the number, a woman answered the phone; she was confused but definitely not of Welsh descent. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but I do remember that when I asked for him, the woman laughed. I then came down with the flu, which Volpes referred to as the Welsh clap.

  David and I started talking on the phone. The trip to Vegas was finally scheduled for February 18, and we planned to go out to dinner on the free night I would have when I was there. I brought an outfit I thought Carrie Bradshaw would wear: cargo jacket, J.Crew sweater, pearls, jeans, high heels. In retrospect I don’t know why I thought she would wear this, because it is what everyone was wearing at the time.

  The big day arrives, I am jittery and excited and counting down the hours, and around 4:00 PM David calls. “Hey,” he says. “I talked to Jim Messina, and he’s going to join us for dinner.”

  What? I had been under the impression that I was being wooed, for basically the first time in my life, and then he goes and invites my boss to our long-awaited first date? Was I being tricked?

  I called my friends to tell them there was no way I was going on this date anymore. It was offensive and not OK that he had invited Jim.

  They told me to stop being a baby, get a vodka screwdriver, and go on the date. If I hated it, I could always leave.

  When I showed up at the restaurant, sure enough, Jim Messina was there. I was fuming but charming; I got a steak. Even though I often order steak at restaurants, I felt this time it was making some kind of point. Like, “Oh, this? You thought this was a date? I just came for the steak.” I believe the men had tuna.

  Afterward, David walked me back to the Bellagio, where we were staying, and asked if I wanted to go out again.

  “Well, that depends,” I said. “Will it just be me and you, or should I bring all my girlfriends?”

  From that point on we went out twice a week until we got engaged outside the Domino’s in 2012. We were married at the end of 2013. (More on that in a second.) (Don’t worry—it’s not at all a fairy-tale kind of thing.)

  I always felt kind of apathetic about my love life, for the most part. People try to project things onto you when you’re a single woman in her thirties, but I wasn’t upset when my friends were getting engaged and married and I wasn’t. I was helping run the country, in a smal
l way, and traveling the world and spending my time with brilliant people. I came to identify fiercely with the independence all this gave me. I realize it might be a little disappointing to see a woman start off a discussion about confidence by talking about her love life, but in some ways, having David woo me was a more alien experience, one that required a lot of self-possession and confidence, than something like talking about fjords at a state dinner with Chile’s minister of tourism.

  Throughout my adult life, I was always pretty confident when I moved from job to job. After I had that (very) brief stint as a rubber secretary at Merrill Lynch, I grew to understand and trust my gut, but I had also learned that I acclimate pretty well, and that every job has a learning curve that you have to, ahem, lean into. Every time you change jobs, even if you’re coming in as the editor in chief or senior marketing manager or whatever, you will have first-day jitters. You will still spend an hour (or two) thinking about what you should wear. Those jitters don’t mean you’re about to fail; they’re what get you ready to dive into something headfirst.

  After I became Obama’s adviser/director of scheduling in late 2004, Pete Rouse became my spiritual guide and mentor. Pete had worked in Washington for about 40 years, many of those as chief of staff to the Senate majority leader, and was known as the “101st senator” and “mayor of Capitol Hill.” He knew everyone and didn’t like talking to any of them. Walking the halls with him always involved some commentary on the people he considered to be violating his personal space. There is no one more thoughtful in the way they give advice. He returns every email, makes every connection, and does it all while being a wheeler and dealer. His code name in the White House was “Possum,” which is why from here on out he will be referred to only as Possum. Also, he loves cats.