by Wendy Davis
Especially Dru, who had always been the calmest, happiest, and most easygoing child but who now was acting out and crying a lot. Her asthma, which she’d begun suffering from around the time she turned a year old, had gotten significantly worse with the thick, damp air of the New England fall. That’s when I was told that acid rain in the Northeast—precipitation that contains higher acidity levels—can aggravate asthma, which it clearly did, since Dru frequently used a nebulizer then. But once we finally returned to Texas at Christmas, the girls and I settled into our more relaxed selves again in the brief three weeks we were home. Seeing that transformation made Jeff and me do a lot of soul-searching about it, and ultimately we decided that for all of our sakes it would be best if the girls were back in their childhood home in Texas, around extended family and their friends and attending their regular school and part-time day-care program. My mom, as she had numerous times for me in the past, came to our rescue, agreeing that she would help care for the girls while I was away.
I would become a long-distance commuter student.
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So once I returned to HLS, our new arrangement started. Every morning, my mom would come over to our house in Mistletoe Heights and get the girls ready for school. She cared for Dru in our home, did the grocery shopping, and made dinner every night for Jeff and the girls. Once Jeff got home and was with the girls, she’d go back to her own house and spend the night. Almost instantly the steam in the pressure cooker released for both girls. Instead of going to day care for a full day every day, Dru was now on a much more relaxed schedule, a half day of day care three days a week—giving her an opportunity to be in a social setting those three mornings without the stress of a full-time day-care environment. Amber was in elementary school and doing well. My mom did an amazing job, and I’m so deeply grateful for her help. Without her, such an unusual arrangement would never have been possible. She and Jeff were both extraordinary in making it all work.
For the rest of that first year at Harvard, I flew back and forth from Boston to Fort Worth, coming home as often as I could throughout the spring semester. Usually that meant that I’d go to school for ten days and then come home for five. Commuting like that meant I was missing three days of classes every other week (Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays). Harvard’s lack of a mandatory attendance policy made it possible for me to miss classes, but I still bore the responsibility of trying to keep pace with my studies while missing so many lectures. It wasn’t the easiest way to go through law school, and I never would have been able to do it without the help of my friends, who were so generous about sharing their notes with me so that I could keep up with what they were learning when I was gone.
That summer and the next, I did clerkships at local law firms in Fort Worth and Dallas. And during my second year of school, I continued my habit of commuting back and forth, trying to make it home every other weekend. Despite the grueling flying and commuting schedule, not to mention the intense and crushing workload of law school, the arrangement worked really well for me. The added expense of the air travel wasn’t ideal, but in my third year I was able to get out of the Lexington lease and cut costs significantly by moving into a tiny dorm room on campus. Those weeks at school became the first time in my adult life that I had the opportunity to experience what it was like to create close friendships and have normal everyday moments with friends over lunch and coffee. In my second year, I even started working out for the first time in my life, because one of my core group of friends, Andrew, got five or six of us to start working out with him. We all became completely obsessed: three days a week, we’d work out for two hours at a time doing weight training in a tiny, sweaty little gym room in the basement of one of the law-school buildings. And, while I was home, I would keep it up at a nearby gym.
In spite of the privilege I felt at being a Harvard Law School student, in the spring of my second year, I made arrangements with HLS to do a visiting year, my third year, at Southern Methodist Law School in Dallas: Harvard allows students to do a visiting year at another school and still graduate with a Harvard Law School diploma—it’s just another example of how they will literally do anything to make things work for the students they accept. After thinking about the toll the commuting was taking on me, on our family, and on our finances, Jeff and I decided that I would go to SMU for my third year of law school, to eliminate the commute and still get my diploma from Harvard. We’d put everything in place to make that happen—I’d gotten permission from Harvard, I’d registered with SMU, and I’d even had a big good-bye party with all my friends at the end of my second year—but just a few weeks before my third year of law school was supposed to start, I found that giving up that final year at HLS was not going to be as easy as I’d thought. I’d gone to orientation at SMU Law School for transferring and visiting students, and as I sat in an auditorium full of people I didn’t know on an unfamiliar campus, I felt a mix of emotions, not the least of which was that I wasn’t finishing something I had started. I worried that when my Harvard diploma hung on the wall, I would know I hadn’t entirely earned it from HLS. And I was very sad about not finishing out my last year among the friends who had come to be my family there. The third year of law school is usually considered the best one of all—the point at which you’ve finally gotten comfortable enough so that you’re not scared to death every day. Leaving to spend my third year at SMU would mean missing out on that part of the experience and becoming a commuter student at a school where I knew no one. I couldn’t help but be reminded of all the lonely first days at new schools I’d gone through as a child, and I wanted to spare myself another such experience.
That night when I came home from SMU’s orientation, I sat down with Jeff and we struck a deal: I would go to Harvard two weeks at a time and come home for two weeks at a time. And so for my entire third year, with a few exceptions, that is what I did. Once again I had to be very diligent about keeping up with my studies, getting all my friends’ notes from class lectures, so I made sure that every class I took always aligned with someone from my core group whose notes I could share. Just as in the previous year and a half, my friends continued to be amazingly generous in that way. I’m so thankful to those friends who made it possible for me. And though I wasn’t quite the student I wanted to be, given that schedule, it all worked out in the end.
That third and final year at Harvard gave me the best of both worlds: when I was at school in Cambridge I was able to be fully present there, and when I was home in Fort Worth I was able to be fully present with Jeff and our girls. I’d never had the experience of being a young person without responsibility, and now, for the first time, I had segmented periods of time when I could focus on my studies with the freedom of being a normal law-school student. I’d never had the luxury of socializing with friends during the years before and after Amber was born in Fort Worth, when I’d had to be so careful about every precious minute of my time and every precious drop of gas. But now I’d left my rental in Lexington and moved to campus, into a tiny dorm room just big enough for a futon and a desk. And for two weeks of every month, I was a student much like my other classmates. Sharing shower space in the a.m., eating breakfast in the student center, and getting more involved in campus life. I continued working out like crazy, which became a lifelong habit for me and which not only got me into the best shape of my life but remains my most effective stress reducer and mood lifter. And I came into my own, figuring out what I liked to do and learning how it felt to be truly comfortable in my own skin. I’ve always considered those years at Harvard as a gift from Jeff and my mom, a gift that was more precious than anything anyone could have ever given me: the gift of time to be a young adult without a tremendous amount of everyday responsibility and with an incredible education and all the privilege and possibility that came with it.
There were moments, though, like those Sunday nights, when it was almost too painful to bear—I can remember sitting in the airport on more than
one occasion, crying at having to leave Jeff and the girls behind. It made me question everything I was doing. Reentry wasn’t easy either: I have a clear memory, in my second year, of landing at Logan late at night in the dead of winter and getting yelled at by a cabdriver for slamming his door too hard when I got in. Tears rolling down my cheeks in the backseat, I couldn’t help but ache for my family. And for home.
When I would come home to Texas, I’d get to devote myself to being a mom to my girls, taking them to school and being involved in their activities—playdates and schoolwork and errands and sitting down to dinner as a family—all the normal parts of motherhood that I’d missed when Amber was young and we’d had such a chaotic schedule. In the end, it all worked. And as a family we came through it intact.
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After three years of exhausting travel, crazy logistics, and hard work, I graduated with my friends and with honors, in May of 1993. Harvard graduations are major events—Harvard College and all the Harvard graduate schools (including the law school, the medical school, and the divinity school, among others) are graduated together in one huge ceremony in Harvard Yard; afterward each school heads over to its particular campus for a smaller ceremony in which graduates walk across a stage and receive their diploma. Each graduate gets only two tickets to the big ceremony, so my parents were my guests for that; everyone else—Jeff and the girls; Jeff’s son, Erik, and Erik’s friend, Drew; and my stepmother, Suzi—waited over at the law-school campus for us to arrive after the combined ceremony ended.
But at some point during the all-school graduation, I looked up to find a Harvard security officer standing at the end of one of the aisles of rows and rows of white-slat folding chairs. Amber and Dru, ages ten and four, were standing there with him. I’d later learn that Amber had gotten mad at Erik while waiting at the law-school campus with him, his friend Drew, and Jeff, and had grabbed Dru’s hand and marched off to find me. She’d walked across the entire law-school campus and the main campus, asking adults all along the way for directions to the big graduation. She was mad—she wanted to see her mommy graduate—and so she did. She and Dru joined me at my seat, each sitting on my lap for the remainder of the ceremony, and at the point in the ceremony when the members of the law-school class were asked to stand up and be graduated, we all stood up together—Amber and Dru and me—and we were “graduated” from Harvard Law School. It was an incredibly sweet and meaningful moment for me. We’d all three been through that journey together; it was only fitting that we would graduate together as well.
Later, at our smaller law-school graduation where we walked the stage and were handed our diplomas one by one, I walked across the stage alone, accepted my diploma, and walked off the stage into the arms of my father. We stood there wordless, both of us crying for a time. I know that my dad felt as I did that day, that my graduation belonged to him as much as it did to me. That I was who I became because he made me believe I could be. He was so, so proud. My mother was proud, too, of course, but in a different way than my dad. For him, what I’d been able to do was an extension of ambitions and goals he’d set for himself. We all live vicariously through our children, and because he was so gifted and smart and could have done anything he wanted to, having one of his children do something like that for him made him feel that perhaps he hadn’t failed me after all. It had been an amazing experience. Jeff, who’d been my most important partner on that journey, could not have been more proud of what we had accomplished together. Being there, in that moment, with the whole world in front of me, my whole future in front of me, standing among my family and with the best friends I was ever going to have for the rest of my life, it was an unimaginable privilege.
Now I would need to determine how I was going to put meaning to that privilege.
THIRTEEN
Doing justice is like a love affair: If it’s easy, it’s sleazy.
—U.S. DISTRICT COURT JUDGE JERRY BUCHMEYER
WHEN JEFF AND I were first dating, we’d often end up talking about politics. With his city council background, it was a passion for him, but at the time I found it all pretty boring. As I got older, though, I began to really take an interest. By then our home on Mistletoe Drive had become the logistical hub of our social network—people came over to watch presidential debates on television, to discuss the uproar surrounding our local zoo’s controversial proposed expansion, and soon I became more and more interested in how things worked and how individuals and communities could organize to try to make things better. Jeff had a true devotion to doing what was right, even if it meant going up against the powerful status quo. He was every inch an idealist, which is one of the qualities that really drew me to him.
Though I never expected to follow his path into public service, I see now that Jeff’s influence and the important and formative experiences in and around law school laid the groundwork for me to enter that arena. Together with my struggles and hardships, these experiences gave me what I believe to be one of the most important skills a person can possess, not only in general but particularly in public service: the ability to compassionately understand another person’s point of view, even—and especially—if it differs from your own.
The most inspiring course I took at Harvard Law was called the Warren Court. Professor Morton J. Horwitz taught the class as a sociologist might have; we weren’t to approach the material in the way we usually did in our typical classes, which was to think in terms of case law and how it builds to set precedent. Instead we were asked to reflect on the individuals who were deciding those cases—the nine white male justices of the Earl Warren Supreme Court, who, against the backdrop of a country that was not yet ready to accept the desegregation of public schools, decided unanimously in favor of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to do exactly that. Brown was the seminal case of Warren’s tenure and one of the most important civil rights cases ever heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. While Chief Justice Warren probably could have passed the decision down fairly quickly, 5–4, it was crucial to him that it be unanimous; he understood that without a unanimous court, implementing its ruling against the resistance of many Southern states would be nearly impossible.
During the course we read biographies and autobiographies of the justices, talked a great deal about the social context and the civil unrest around the issue of desegregation, and read a beautiful book, Simple Justice, by Richard Kluger, which captured the courage and tenacity of the people who fought to bring equality to our nation’s education system. It remains one of the most influential books I have ever read. It was fascinating material, and through Professor Horwitz’s gentle urgings, the book made me think for the first time in law school not about the decisions that were being made but about the people who were making them—how their own human failings and achievements had shaped them. To borrow a word from George W. Bush, I started thinking about these “deciders”: who these justices were, how their experiences could be understood and therefore made a part of finding a path to common ground, to bringing people to a consensus. More than that, it made me think about this concept much more broadly and how it could be applied in everyday situations: finding respect for where individuals come from, not just where they are today, and how their journeys shaped their beliefs and thinking. That’s what Earl Warren was able to do with each justice: draw upon something from each one’s personal experiences, tap into that place, and guide them all to arrive at making a very courageous decision—that “separate” could never be “equal” and that only desegregation of our schools could lead us to being a land of equality.
The question that Professor Horwitz invited us to consider was this: What was it about Earl Warren that made him so personally committed to desegregation, and why was it so important to him that the decision be unanimous? Reading about his life provided a fascinating insight into his experiences prior to serving on the Supreme Court and how those experiences affected who he became as chief justice.
> Earl Warren’s appointment as chief justice was made by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. Talk at the time was that the appointment had come about because of a commitment Eisenhower made to Warren in exchange for the latter’s backing down from his own desire to become the Republican nominee for president. Eisenhower had promised Warren a Supreme Court appointment. He intended to make Warren solicitor general until the first opening on the Supreme Court occurred. But before the appointment of Warren as solicitor general was finalized, something unexpected happened—Chief Justice Fred Vinson died in his sleep. As the story goes, Eisenhower immediately reached out to Warren and informed him that he would be nominated to the Supreme Court. Warren insisted not only that he be appointed but that he be appointed chief justice. Eisenhower resisted, claiming that he had never promised Warren that position. But Warren pushed back, reminding Eisenhower that he had promised Warren the “first” opening on the Court. That opening, he argued, was the position of chief justice, and he demanded that it be given to him. As the saying goes, the rest is history. Earl Warren was nominated and approved for appointment as chief justice. He had never held a position on the bench before, but he would become one of the great jurists in our country’s history.
Before he was made chief justice by President Eisenhower, he’d been both attorney general and then governor of the state of California. In those positions he’d been the driving force behind the internment of people of Japanese descent in camps during World War II, and it was his experience with the internment camps and the deep scar he would bear as a consequence of his role in the creation of those camps that shaped him most powerfully as a jurist. Warren had visited the camps that Japanese-American families had been sent to, and he saw how wives had been separated from husbands, children from their mothers. And he witnessed the pain that the stroke of his pen had imposed. He had signed an order that would stigmatize us as a nation that let our fears trump our better selves, resulting in racial profiling at its worst. In his memoirs Warren wrote that he “deeply regretted” his actions and the internment that followed: “Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken. It was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty.”