Toward Commitment

by Diane Rehm

  I must confess that I also resented the fact that I, as John's wife, was not perceived by society at that time as a fully contributing partner to the family unit, since I earned no income. Perhaps unrealistically, I saw myself as a coequal, raising our children and caring for our home while he took on the more public aspect of our joint venture. But as at social gatherings all over the world, when the inevitable question of “What do you do?” came up, I was annoyed to note a total lack of interest if I identified myself as a homemaker. Someday I hope this country will recognize the important contributions of stay-at-home mothers to our society. It's as though, on the one hand, we stress the importance of raising healthy children and creating a stable home life for them, while on the other hand we fail to acknowledge those contributions in the form of tax credits or even credits toward social security.

  With Richard Nixon's election, John left government and joined a law firm. He went through a rocky time professionally, doubting himself and his ability to perform in the private sector. It was another difficult period for us, since he brought those doubts home with him in the form of depression and withdrawal. There was additional income, but that didn't begin to compensate for the new tensions. What did serve as compensa- tion, however, was our widening circle of friends, beginning with John's partner, David Busby, and his wife, Mary Beth.

  John's professional life, from my perspective, has been successful and rewarding for both of us. While he worked in the public and private sectors, I was free to develop my own interests in several areas, including cooking, sewing, playing the piano, and gardening. I wouldn't have been able to move into my own career as a broadcaster had it not been for the income he earned throughout those years, which allowed me the freedom to become a nonpaid worker and to pursue a vocation of my own. I have loved the relationships that have been created through his working life. Those are friends who will be ours for a lifetime.

  John has provided a secure home for our family, permitted our children to receive fine educations, and created a nest egg for us to go forward into retirement. For that I'll always be grateful, as I am for having journeyed with him through the evolution of his extraordinary professional life. I only wish we had found ways to openly discuss, in rational terms, our frustrations, instead of hiding behind anger and fear. I wish I had been a more mature and understanding wife, recognizing that there were constructive ways to deal with my anger and disappointments, and that tirades were counterproductive. We got through those years, but only by the skin of our teeth.

  Dialogue on the Other Partner's Profession

  DIANE: First of all, I want to say how fortunate we've both been in terms of our professional lives. Perhaps I've been more fortunate than you, in that I've enjoyed my professional life in its entirety somewhat more than you because I chose it without choosing. It just happened. You chose professionally to use your talents as a gifted lawyer in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, doing work you loved. After that, I think your love of work diminished considerably, and with that diminishment came even greater difficulty in our marriage.

  JOHN: I think that's true, and it just struck me why I did become envious of your success as a radio broadcaster. I think it's because you did enjoy it so thoroughly, while I, as you know, had reservations about private practice and the value of my work. I was representing my clients with a high degree of competence, that was clear, but I never had the kind of satisfaction that I did in government, promoting the commonweal. Yes, to help corporations solve their problems did contribute to the economic vitality of the country and did have value. But it didn't provide anything near the satisfaction of what I did in the government, and in two programs in particular: foreign aid and trade liberalization.

  DIANE: So what could we have done to make things happier for both of us? I couldn't do anything to make your life happier. You seemed to be an unhappy person in the midst of lucrative and productive work. I must say I was flummoxed. I didn't know how to help you. You had such a productive job and were so highly thought of, and you earned the kind of income that you did. Yet there was this core of unhappiness within you that I couldn't seem to do anything about.

  JOHN: In some ways, looking back, I wish I had stayed in the government. But once Nixon was elected, I knew that I would be extremely unhappy in that administration. I'm not saying I predicted Watergate, but there was a meanness, a narrowness, a parochial attitude among his senior White House aides with whom I worked briefly that just turned me off. I was an ardent Humphrey supporter, and had he been elected, I might have stayed on, and my career, though less lucrative, would have been more satisfying. As to what you could have done, I can't fault you in any significant way for your behavior. I was wrestling with myself, trying to come to terms with myself, which I did to a degree, but not wholly satisfactorily. Therapy and counseling certainly did help. But I was still wrestling with the basic fact that I was never wholly happy in private practice.

  DIANE: You seemed stuck, somehow, in your sense of unhappiness. It was almost going against the grain for you to earn the kind of income you did. I wonder, had I not had the kind of career I've had, would that have made it somewhat easier for you, do you think?

  JOHN: No, I don't. One of my great satisfactions is having helped you grow in intellectual terms. I've often said I was Pygmalion and you were Galatea. It was just that Galatea got out of hand.

  DIANE: [laughter]

  JOHN: Your success is certainly well deserved. Insofar as I did and do take genuine pride in your success, that made me feel better. It made me feel that I had made a contribution through you to society, if you will. But at times it did bring on an envy as well. For a while, somehow, the greater your success, in proportionate terms, the more my self-esteem fell. It took me a while to realize that your success didn't have to affect or diminish my self-esteem.

  DIANE: People—unthinking, insensitive people—have at times made jokes, referring to you as Mr. Diane Rehm. I always cringe, and have wondered how you've felt about that.

  JOHN: At times it annoys me. If I'm not feeling all that good about myself, it has a sting to it and makes me brood a bit more. But I'm reminded of one occasion when I accompanied you on one of your book promotion tours, and that was beneficial. It gave me an indication of just how much your listeners admired and, indeed, loved you. They also made the point that they admired me for supporting you and promoting your career, and that made me feel good.

  DIANE: I certainly hope you felt that I did exactly the same for you in your career.

  JOHN: I have no doubt of that. That was certainly true. So, on balance, I'm pleased with your success. I've been able to manage it, to adjust to it. And that's been good for our relationship.

  DIANE: There's been a lot of use of mood-altering drugs, like Zoloft, Paxil, and Prozac, that are supposed to be useful in treating low self-esteem, depression, and a feeling of being disconnected from the rest of the world. I sometimes asked you whether you felt that any of those drugs might help you. Do you think you—and we—might have benefited by your use of those drugs? Do you think their use in the past five or ten years might have helped?

  JOHN: I don't know because I never tried. But from my earliest days I had this conviction that you take life as it comes and deal with it, for better or for worse, without artificial support or means. I would think less of myself if I got through the day relying on one of these drugs.

  DIANE: That all sounds very noble.

  JOHN: No, it's not noble, but rather a desire that I want to taste life authentically, in terms of my immediate, direct, and unadulterated confrontation with reality.

  DIANE: But your confrontation with reality was, in effect, a confrontation with me that didn't make either of our lives happy. So when I ask you what you might have done, it seems as though you stuck your feet in the ground and said, “I'm going to live my life this way. I have a professional life. I don't really like it, but I'm going to live with it, and I'm going to take my dissatisfaction with my profes
sion out on you.” That's how it felt.

  JOHN: I can see that. It wasn't my intention. What I'm aware of is a deep distaste for getting along by artificial means.

  DIANE: What would you say to a young man in his thirties going through the same kind of struggle to achieve, to attain selfesteem, to make it through, and at the same time to keep balance in his life?

  JOHN: Well, hold on to the relationships you have, including wife and children. That leads me to say that, during this period, I did have a good relationship with David and Jennie. I look back on those years, and think that I was of genuine assistance to them, in terms of love, support, encouragement, sharing some of their problems and difficulties. My relationship with you was far more ambivalent, but we also had some good times. I don't have any great words of wisdom, other than to maximize the pleasures and to carry a sense of gratitude for what you have. I know you don't like relativistic comments, but for all of my problems and difficulties, I've been enormously blessed, as I compare my state with that of billions of disadvantaged people on this earth. So I hope I didn't engage in self-pity.

  DIANE: Do you think it was self-pity? Or was it just dissatisfaction with your own professional life?

  JOHN: Not self-pity but an undercurrent, which has decreased in recent years, of continuing difficulty with the marital condition itself. I've never been totally persuaded that the kind of a long-term commitment we're talking about is right for me, although, on balance, considering recent years, I have no question that it has been.

  DIANE: So looking back over the long haul, your preference would have been not to marry?

  JOHN: Part of me feels that way. Not marrying, leading a somewhat nomadic life, like journalism, or teaching without a long-term commitment to an institution, something like my father's life. He was essentially nomadic.

  DIANE: Hearing you talk about him and his “nomadic” life, I sense a kind of dreamy quality on your part. Perhaps you'd prefer to have done other things—

  JOHN: —a job that would have drawn on my intellectual skills, but wouldn't have committed me to a particular path. I say that, and another voice, immediately in response, says, “Well, that would not have been a satisfactory life. You would have missed being a part of raising two marvelous human beings, and missed a lot of good times with you.” It's just that, for me, the equation is a lot closer than it is for you. I think you feel that, by and large, you've had great satisfaction and great success, with fewer regrets than I. I'm not sure of that, but that's my sense.

  DIANE: So, for you, the word “commitment” continues to feel somewhat constricting.

  JOHN: Yes, but that's now enormously eased by my retirement. The banner of my retirement is freedom. I'm now free to do what I want, in the way of scheduled activities or just to take a long walk, enjoy the sky, the air, the flowers. So many of the pressures that led to a disquietude and dissatisfaction have now to a great degree been lifted. This makes me easier with you, family, friends, and the like.

  DIANE: Can you look back on your professional life and marriage and say, “I have been blessed with a good life”?

  JOHN: Unquestionably true, particularly as I look about me and see so many people who are fundamentally disadvantaged in so many ways. Yes, absolutely. A life without regrets? No. And how would you answer your own question?

  DIANE: If you're asking whether I believe in commitment, the answer is, of course I do. I have grown tremendously as a result of living a life that has challenged me, both personally and professionally. If I hadn't been committed to making this marriage an important part of my essential existence, who knows where I'd be now? The issue is devotion: devotion to partner, to children, to extended family, and to friends. Commitment is something that comes easily to me, even though, as you well know, there have been many times when I would have given up on you and the marriage. But there was always a sense in me that what you and I were building together was important, not just to us but to those around us. We loved together, we created children together, we fought together, and we'll continue to work together. For me, that is the essence of commitment, and commitment is at the center of my life.

  Holiday Celebrations

  John

  Despite many years of celebrating family holidays, such occasions continue both to reward and to disappoint us. We anticipate them by combining memories and hopes. The memories preserve the vividness of happy, though fleeting, moments. The hopes obscure the disappointments of past celebrations; they create the illusion of a perfect celebration. As a result, we approach holidays with unrealistic expectations, along with feelings of vulnerability.

  I have found Christmas to be the most problematic holiday, with distinctly bright and dark features. However fragile, the bright features are largely defined for me by such activities as shopping, trimming the tree, wrapping and opening presents, cooking, and feasting. In our family, the list also includes the religious component of singing carols and attending a church service. These bright aspects of Christmas should ensure that our celebration will be joyous.

  Yet Diane and I experience Christmas as a time not only of joy but also of melancholy, which arises for several reasons. The very darkness of December creates a gloom that we struggle against, more or less consciously.

  Much of the ceremony of Christmas is an effort to dispel that gloom, as with tall candles and chains of light. Moreover, this gloom of December is subtly intensified by the recollection of deaths that occurred around this time. My parents died in the months of October and November, preceding Christmas, and Diane's father and mother died in November and on New Year's Day, respectively. It took me some years to understand the subliminal power of these sad memories. As one of our therapists put it: “The body remembers.”

  In addition, each year I unwittingly fashion, and fall prey to, an image of the perfect Christmas: at church, the Christmas hymns will all be my favorites, my presents will be uniformly liked, and every element of the Christmas dinner will be praised. Above all, the members of our family will set aside—for the day—all tensions and irritations. In one telling respect or another, however, my image will be tarnished. The season's spirit will flag and then revive, and I will count it—with some disregard of the facts—as another good Christmas.

  In recent years I've done a better job of dealing with this threefold melancholy. I accept its presence and don't look to others to allay it. By virtue of that, I'm a little more sensitive to the anxiety others face over Christmas. The close of Christmas typically brings a sigh of relief. I used to think of this as a sign of failure. I now have a better understanding of most of the elements at work, the choices I can make, and how those choices will, in turn, affect not only my own experience of Christmas but that of others as well.

  Diane

  I'm a child when it comes to holidays. I want to have all our friends at our home for Easter brunch. I love to see the table filled with people at Thanksgiving. And the tree, the presents, the food at Christmas—I expect all of it to be perfect. Unfortunately, these childhood fantasies rarely come true in adulthood, no more than they do in childhood. I remember the arguments at Thanksgiving, the absence of a hoped-for Easter basket, and the last days of my dying mother in the hospital at Christmas.

  There is a part of me that actually dreads holidays. The memories weigh me down, even as I try to put them aside and reach for new experiences. And those long-ago experiences seem to affect my body as well. Time and time again, sometime between the first of November and the end of January, I have become ill. I have gotten a bit better about taking extra care of myself during that period, knowing how vulnerable I am. But I can't seem to get beyond the sad memories of almost fifty years ago, when both my parents died in the same year, she on New Year's Day and he on what was then called Armistice Day. So the holiday spirit begins with sadness, with longing, and with a hunger, perhaps, to share for a moment the company of those no longer here.

  For various reasons, holidays are difficult for lots of people I kno
w. Some of the spirit of Christmas, of course, has been lost due to the enormous emphasis on its commercial aspects. We are told again and again what department stores hope to make in the way of sales. It's as if there's some kind of patriotic duty to go out and buy, to keep the economy healthy—the department stores need us! We're reminded every minute on radio and television of the gift choices we can make for friends and relatives. We hear popularized Christmas carols, instead of the traditional arrangements that help create the beautiful sound of the holiday.

  As an escape from the overdone store decorations and the constant advertisements, John and I turn to more quiet and peaceful activities. We love going to church and singing hymns of celebration, thanksgiving, and joy, and, at Easter, participating in the service that calls upon the congregation to be the crowd demanding Christ's crucifixion. Being within that church helps me to center myself and focus on our family and friends, those we know who are sick and those who are healthy, as well as the problems of the larger world.

  I promise myself each year that I'll do a better job of planning for Christmas, and yet each year I put it off. It's only in the last few years that I've learned to take a few days off to bake special gifts of cake and baklava. Also in the past few years, John has taken a more active role in shopping, wrapping, planning, and generally participating more fully, so that the burden is not totally on me. When Jennie and David were living at home, they both helped out a great deal. Now they must create their own family celebrations, devoid, as much as possible, of the kinds of sadness that have weighed me down, undermining my ability to celebrate these special times of the year.