Off the Sidelines

by Kirsten Gillibrand

  It must have taken heaps of confidence in the 1950s for a man to appreciate all my mother had to offer and all she could do. She worked on the school newspaper in high school, and in college she wanted to try sports reporting. But when she tried to gain access to the press box at the hockey rink, she was denied. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, women did not wear pants in public, and the press box was above the stands, with a metal grate for a floor. Only an immodest young lady would walk, in a skirt, over the open grate above the bench, right? That’s not how my mother saw it, and she didn’t care what others thought. Her behavior caused such a stir that it was covered in The Boston Globe.

  At my parents’ wedding, my mother held a glamelia bouquet made from white gladiolus and wore a Spanish comb in her hair; she was easily the most exotic bride Albany had ever seen. My brother was born in 1965, nine months and eighteen days after the wedding, and my parents celebrated his arrival with a roast beef sandwich. The birth had not been the most elegant affair, so the sandwich was fitting. Most of the medical residents at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital crowded around to watch my mother deliver. Few had seen a woman go through natural childbirth before.

  After I was born, my mother managed to fit in both childcare and her law practice by trading off babysitting days with her friend Carol Bartley, who had two girls, Kathleen and Elaine. Mondays and Wednesdays, my mother took both sets of kids. Tuesdays and Thursdays, Carol did. Friday, my grandmother watched us. My mother didn’t know anyone else who did this, and she didn’t intend to be a flextime trailblazer; it just made sense. She prioritized both work and family; I never imagined I would do otherwise.

  I was a slightly straighter arrow than my mother. Okay, I was a massive kiss-ass and lived for positive reinforcement. As a child, I wrote in perfect cursive penmanship, thanks to the nuns. I did all my homework as soon as I got home, and I kept my room clean. I tattled on my brother and older cousins, payback for them not including me in their games. This was probably for the best, as they were far more adventurous than I. They tried to catch frogs and built potato guns. I liked to organize clubs. My first, with the Bartley girls, was called Cricket. I was secretary and kept meticulous notes.

  November 14, 1975

  Today we went to the Bartleys’ and Erin started to cry. Elaine was shouting.… It snowed that morning and it was dark so we could not have the meeting in the fort. In the treasury we have one dollar.

  Oh, the joys of governance.

  My second club was bigger. We had a proper constitution and dues of ten cents per week.

  CONSTITUTION

  Article I: NAME

  This club shall be known as the U.S. TAG TOE* Club.

  Article II: PURPOSE

  The purpose of this club is for social enjoyment.

  Article III: MEMBERSHIP

  Membership in this club shall be granted to those in sympathy with its purpose according to the law of unanimous voting by confidential means of our officially official vote counter who thereby is, Alison (Cara) Collins.

  PURPOSES OF HAVING DUES

  1. Anniversary (buy ice cream for all club members)

  2. Birthday for club members (buy ice cream just for birthday)

  3. Activities

  4. Club accessories

  5. Tooth decaying molecules (candy)

  *TAG TOE stands for The Almost Greatest Things on Earth.

  In Brownies and Girl Scouts, I had to earn every imaginable badge and sell the most cookies. A measurable goal, a good cause—sign me up! I didn’t just sell to my family and my parents’ co-workers. I set up a table at the strip mall and walked door-to-door.

  On the tennis court, I learned to deal with stress and competition. At home I learned to argue. My father and I constantly debated: the fairness of pillow-fight tactics, whether I was allowed to go to Saratoga for a concert, if my first car—a blue-and-white AMC Pacer that looked like an inverted bathtub—was too embarrassing to drive to school. I didn’t back down easily or quietly. I was on a never-ending campaign to shape and reshape arguments, tinkering until I built a logical framework that allowed me to win.

  In response, my father took to calling me Foghorn and Loudmouth, the latter of which he later graciously shortened to Mouth. Those fights, and constantly being challenged by him, helped me develop a thick skin. To this day, I don’t let in much negativity or allow myself to feel vulnerable often. This frustrates and bewilders others—“What do you mean, that nasty political cartoon didn’t make you want to throttle somebody?”—but it’s also allowed me to move forward in a political life.

  The nickname Loudmouth summed up the dynamic between my father and me: To him, I was too much, too loud. My mother even had my hearing tested, concerned that I spoke at such a crazy volume. It wasn’t just my voice. I was determined to be heard. When I fought with my father, I gesticulated with abandon, so consumed with making my point that I often knocked over my milk. Whatever I did—debating, playing piano or tennis, selling Girl Scout cookies—I had to earn a gold star. In just a few minor areas I didn’t strive for excellence. As I wrote in a school paper, in which I was supposed to reflect on myself at age eight or ten: “I am sometimes bossy. I try not to be, but ‘nobody is perfect’ (except perhaps God). I also tease my sister, but I feel this is natural.”

  My mother saw in me the determination that marked all the women in my family and gave me the freedom to set my course. For high school, she let me choose between attending Albany High, the big public school with excellent AP courses in downtown Albany, and the Emma Willard School, an elite all-girls school, with boarding students from around the world, located fifteen miles from my house, just north in Troy. Attending Emma Willard was an incredible privilege, I now realize. But at the time I chose the school only after a family friend sat me down at the kitchen table to say I should make my decision solely on where I could get the best education and not on the fact that Albany High had boys. She spoke forcefully about the benefits of an all-girls education, the excellence of the teachers, and the exposure I would have to young women from all across the globe. She believed the choice wasn’t even close and that I’d be wasting a precious opportunity by passing it up.

  At Emma Willard, I met girls from South America, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea and traveled to France, Spain, North Africa, and Russia on school exchange trips each spring. Those experiences were such a gift. As for boys, I was distracted enough just thinking about them. If there was a party where boys would be present, I planned it—I even planned the dances at school. Even so, I never had a boyfriend in high school, and my crushes amounted to nothing more than dates to formals. On weekends I invited home a carload of friends. Two, three, four girls—it didn’t matter. My mother was always welcoming; she preferred having us at her house, where she knew what we were doing. Usually we’d just push together the sectional couches and watch old Hitchcock and Grace Kelly movies, admiring the bold female actresses of the past, like Bette Davis in All About Eve.

  By age fifteen, we had terrible fake IDs. Not that any of us drank—we just wanted to tag along to the Lark Tavern with my older brother, Doug, and his friends. Half my girlfriends had crushes on one of them. But let’s be honest: The 1950s film version of romance playing on the VCR at home was far more glamorous than anything going on at the Lark Tavern.

  In many ways, my most meaningful relationship through my childhood was with my sister. We had our bumps, to be sure. When Erin was twelve and I was fourteen, she picked up a charming habit of saying “I hate you” to me. The words hurt far more than she realized, and I told her so in what turned out to be one of the most important conversations I’ve ever had. Apologizing tearfully, Erin confessed that she didn’t realize how much she could hurt me and that she’d just been saying “I hate you” because that’s what her friends said to their sisters. So I spelled out for Erin the kind of relationship that I wanted us to have. I wanted us, as sisters, to be best friends, to give each other advice, to share our innermost truths and have eac
h other’s backs, to offer each other unconditional love twenty-four hours a day. Erin agreed that this sounded much better than the I-hate-you sister model. We committed to that positive vision, and Erin remains the person I confide in, the one I tell how I’m really feeling about things. She can handle me in all circumstances, and I am grateful for that every day.

  Meanwhile, my mother kept on being her self-actualized self. For years, along with playing tennis and golf, she hunted and lifted weights. She even went to see Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was still a professional bodybuilder and he came to talk at the Steel Pier, her old weight-lifting gym. She was already the most badass mom anyone could imagine when, one day, she saw a sign for karate classes at the Steuben Athletic Club, the gym near her office. She enrolled and spent the next ten years practicing at the local dojo and making regular visits to practice with a sensei in New York City, happy to pursue a sport that focused on inner strength, not just outer. Still, back at home, she’d take off her white gi and bake cookies with my friends and me, all the while emptying the dishwasher and talking on the phone to file the details of an adoption case she was working on. That’s her essence: moving quickly and doing three things at once, powerful and fully engaged with her family, law practice, and life. The phone in our kitchen had a very long cord, but we still had to replace it every few years as she was always pulling it off the wall.

  My mother later told me she baked cookies with my friends for two reasons. First, so she’d have homemade treats for the packs of teenagers who passed through our home. But second, and more important, to show us that you could be a woman who worked as an attorney and trained in karate and also be an attentive, involved mom. She must have had an impact, because I didn’t think twice about becoming a lawyer, and five out of my six closest girlfriends ended up as lawyers, too. She was one of the few mothers who worked, and I am continually thankful for the example she set. She was permissive but careful, trusting but involved. She sewed for us, when we were young, the most beautiful clothing we owned. And all the while, she never wavered in her commitment to live the life she wanted for herself. She never boxed herself in by positioning her own goals at odds with the family.

  My father was the one who came to all my soccer and tennis games. He loved to watch me compete. And, whether intentional or not, he did train me well for my job today. My years of sparring with him have been invaluable in helping me understand my male colleagues. From my father, I learned how to tell when men stop listening and how to read their emotional cues. (Along with fidgeting and seeming distracted, their answers become monosyllabic and they tend to agree more.) When my father fell into that mode, I’d say, “Can we please talk about this later?”

  But ultimately, my mother—and my grandmother, too—cut the tracks on which I’ve traveled through life. They had more figured out decades ago than many women of my generation do now. They realized that they didn’t need to view the key pieces of their identities in either/or terms. Life is complex. You work, have a family, give to your community, pursue a physical life and your faith—and you don’t compare yourself to other women, because, as everybody knows, there’s no happiness down that route. Some days I reach 7:00 P.M. desperate to crash when one son needs help with fractions homework, the other one is begging to play Plants vs. Zombies, and I’m wrung out from colleagues fighting me. I begin to wonder why I’ve chosen this crazy life. But it’s in those very moments that I try to channel my mother and grandmother. I know they wouldn’t flinch. They’d just kiss the boys, go to sleep, and try again tomorrow—and be exactly themselves.

  Chapter 2

  From A to B, with Detours

  If you’re like me, you’re reading this book because you want to find out how to get to where you want to be in your own life by learning how someone else got where they wanted to be in theirs. I keep stacks of books next to my nightstand by and about female leaders, and always I have one question: “How’d she do it?” Too often I don’t find useful answers, and I close the book, annoyed. I wish I could offer you the perfect parable on how to get from A to B. But I can’t. So this is my idiosyncratic story of growing up and building the life I wanted, along with a few lessons I hope someone can use.

  It starts with a formidable woman: my Dartmouth squash coach, Aggie Kurtz.

  Before I met Aggie, I played JV tennis. My coach was an expert tactician, and he upgraded my forehand and my doubles strategy. I could have gone on playing tennis squarely within my comfort zone, had I not met Aggie. Aggie was one of those coaches young athletes dream of having. The kind of person who believes in you, and also sees right through you, and who, without you noticing it, molds you into the person you need to be.

  Because not that many people play squash in high school, Aggie pulled together a squad by scouting among the field hockey, tennis, lacrosse, and soccer players for girls who seemed hardworking, coordinated, and fit. Except for one or two players, no one on the team started with any skills. Few of us even knew how to swing the racquet or where the squash courts were. But Aggie, in her tracksuit, with her no-nonsense haircut and kind blue eyes, led us to the courts and taught us the basics: to stay low and lunge for the ball, and to hit the ball hard from high to low, with a chop and a snap, instead of low to high with topspin, as in tennis.

  Squash matches consist of nine players from one team playing against nine players from another: the best against the best, the second best against the second best, and so on. After I got the hang of the game, I often played fourth or fifth, where I could hold my own. Then one day Aggie put me at number two, for a match at Yale. I knew this would not go well.

  Just driving into New Haven, Connecticut, which was still considered pretty unsafe in the mid-1980s, was a little intimidating for a girl who’d grown up in Albany and always gone to all-girls private schools. But I was with my team in our van, so I told myself it was just another match. My roommate Regina and another friend drove down in their own car to cheer me on. On the way, Aggie consoled me: I’d be fine; it was good experience to play up. But I’m a very controlled person, and the possibility of losing scared me.

  Yale’s big, cold Payne Whitney Gym did nothing to put me at ease. In the locker room, I changed into my green tennis skirt and a white tennis shirt. I put my hair up in a ponytail, secured it with a white sweatband (yes, it was the eighties), and walked up to the fourth-floor courts.

  The first shot of our match tanked my confidence, and nothing buoyed it from there. The difference between my ability and my opponent’s was vast, pretty much like sending your local tennis pro onto a court with Serena Williams. My opponent was much stronger and faster than I was. She had better down-the-line shots and a superior serve. With each point, I felt less in command of the sport’s basics. Why did I ever think I could do this sport? I could barely reach the ball, and when I did I couldn’t hit it with accuracy. No point lasted longer than thirty seconds.

  When the first game ended, I was devastated, my self-esteem destroyed. I walked off the court for a water break, and the minute I saw Aggie, I burst into tears.

  Between sobs, I managed to say, “I can’t keep playing this match. This girl is just destroying me.…” I was shaking, on the edge of hyperventilating, and ready to quit.

  Aggie just smiled. “Yes, you can,” she said. “You can play this match. Do your best with every point. Focus on the game.” I nodded. “All I want from you is for you to play your best—nothing more and nothing less. Can you do that?”

  I felt like melting into the floor. I said, “Yes.”

  That was it. I walked back on the court and played out the match, trying to stay mentally and physically focused. I didn’t play brilliantly, but I hung in. I was relieved to realize that Aggie didn’t expect me to win. I can’t say I enjoyed the match, but by the end of it I knew that I would be better off for it—from seeing up close how a faster, stronger opponent played; from having my flaws so glaringly exposed. I never played in the number-two spot again, but I think about that matc
h far more often than the ones that I won. Aggie taught me something important (and that we all seem to need to learn for ourselves): Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is instructive and necessary. Winning is great, but quitting is how you really lose.

  I’m amazed at how often my mind drifts back to that match now that I’m in Congress. A strategist or a staffer will say to me, “We can’t take on this issue. There’s no way we’ll win.” And I’ll remember Aggie. A lot of good intelligence comes from fighting your hardest even if the round ends in defeat. Being willing to risk loss has been a key part of my success in so many important moments of my professional life: my first election campaign, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, passing the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, fighting the entire Department of Defense over sexual assault in the military.

  I went to law school at UCLA, which I’d chosen so I could follow my first boyfriend, whom I thought I would marry. He had hoped to do his medical residency in Southern California, where he was from, but matched in Chicago after I accepted my offer from UCLA. We broke up a year later. After law school, I was delivered from my sheltered student existence into life as a young lawyer in New York City working at a big white-shoe law firm called Davis Polk & Wardwell. My goals were earnest and orthodox: I wanted to be taken seriously, to be given a fair shot, and to make partner, though in hindsight I realize I didn’t quite know how to achieve that.

  I’m a big believer in making your own luck—or, really, putting yourself in the best possible position to take advantage of your circumstances. If something good happens, you need to be ready for it. For this to happen at a law firm (luck at a law firm almost always means making partner) and in many other fields, you need more than a mentor. You need a sponsor. The difference between the two is crucial. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist who studies gender politics, puts it this way: Mentors advise; sponsors act. Mentors give; sponsors invest. Aggie was a mentor: She cared about me, saw my strengths and weaknesses, and helped me become the best version of myself. She gave a lot and received little. Sponsors, on the other hand, expect something back. They invest their clout and political capital in you, and in return they demand that their protégés be loyal and perform. The sponsor relationship is transactional, not emotional. Sponsors succeed when you succeed, and they lose when you lose. They can make a vast difference in a career.