After the vote, Henry and I retreated to the Lindy Boggs Room, a suite off the rotunda reserved for women members of Congress. It has a bathroom, desks for making calls, a space for small meetings with female staff, and a nap room with blankets and threadbare chaise longues, including the couch that John Quincy Adams died on. The place is charming but not remotely fancy—imagine somebody’s great-aunt’s apartment, circa 1974. The Lindy Boggs Room became my new-mommy haven for nursing, pumping, showing off pictures, and receiving motherly and grandmotherly advice.
Susan, the woman who works there, was always thrilled to see Henry. Anytime he came with me to work, I’d stop in to see her and update her on life. Now that I’m a senator and no longer work on that side of the Capitol building, I see Susan less often, but she still keeps Henry’s birth announcement, with that picture of Theo holding his baby brother, propped up on a small table in the entryway. Whenever I see it, my first thought is: “How sweet.” My second thought is: “We need more pictures of congresswomen with their babies in here.”
My life over the next few months was a bit unusual. At work, we were focused on getting out of Iraq without risking the safety of the troops. Democrats also wanted to pass an energy bill and a farm bill, and I wanted to preserve a safety net for dairy farmers, so they wouldn’t lose their farms when the price for milk dropped below production costs. Because I was a freshman and essentially a nobody, I had no clout. Not even little Henry could get me a meeting with Senator Patrick Leahy, the small-dairy-farm champion from Vermont. So I crashed one of his fundraisers to hand him a draft of my bill. This was ridiculous, I now realize, as he knew the issue well and was already going to protect the farmers. But as a new mother and a new congressperson, I was a little too eager and earnest, and I was functioning on too little sleep.
Between votes, meetings, and committee hearings, I’d race to nurse Henry. During the first three months, he was home with my in-laws, and after that, in the House of Representatives daycare, about a half mile from my house. Our morning drop-offs there were not graceful: Jonathan and I arrived every morning bungling bags of diapers, wipes, fresh crib sheets, and bottles. Some days both boys were crying when we left them. But by the time I returned, they were always happy. Of course, I was only able to drop by to feed Henry because my whole world fell inside a one-mile radius. Without those quick nursing breaks, and the kindness and attention of the boys’ caregivers, I could not have focused at work and done my job as well.
In the evenings, I skipped the cocktail-party networking—fundraising circuit that many members of the House thrive on when their families are home in their districts. Instead, most days, I picked up the boys from daycare at around 5:00 P.M. (If I had an end-of-day vote, Jonathan would do pickup.) Then we tried to eat dinner together at around 6:30 P.M., so we could play with the kids for a bit before heading into the vortex of baths, books, and bed. Just after the kids fell asleep, I’d go to sleep myself, so I could wake up to feed Henry every few hours around the clock. I know it sounds insane to a lot of people, but I didn’t mind this. The house was quiet; Henry’s crib was only a few feet away from my bed; and that silent third shift was our uninterrupted time. Even now, when Henry or Theo has an early-morning nightmare and sneaks into my room for a cuddle, I don’t feel irritated. I’m grateful I’m there. I know that once the day starts and the boys are at school, there will be times when they need me and I’ll be at the office or traveling. I do my best to be available to them when they need me. But this reality weighs on me, as it does every working mother: You can’t be in two places at once.
Recently in America, we’ve fallen into a never-ending debate about whether women can “have it all.” It’s an absurd frame for many reasons. The first: For almost all mothers, earning money is a necessity, not a choice. Women work to provide for themselves and their children. We need to stop pretending that work is optional for all but the most financially secure American women.
Second: The word “have” in that phrase drives me crazy. It sounds like women are being greedy, trying to finagle more than their fair share, more than they’re due. This is preposterous. Wanting or needing to have a job and a family is not like wanting a second slice of pie. Work and family are both basic tenets of our society. Every government should celebrate and protect both for all of its citizens. That we have come to a place where women seeking work and family can be seen as overreaching, even selfish, is inane.
Last: I hate the phrase “having it all,” because it demeans women who do stay home with their children, by implying that their lives are less than full. One of the main goals of the feminist movement is that all women should be able to make the best choices for themselves and their families, and no one should be belittled, degraded, or disregarded because of what she chooses to do. Women’s work needs to be valued fairly, by everybody, wherever it takes place.
So, please, let’s stop talking about “having it all” and start talking about the very real challenges of “doing it all.” The old debate pits women against one another and distracts the conversation from what truly matters—figuring out how working mothers can get the support they need to achieve economic security and build better, happier, more-balanced lives. We cannot keep talking about choosing to work as a decision women are making. Decades ago, when many of the workplace policies that still exist today were designed, America was very different. In 1960, only 11 percent of families with children under the age of eighteen relied on mothers as the sole or primary breadwinner. Today, it’s 40 percent. Half of families today have dual-income parents. Only 20 percent have a father at work and a mother at home caring for the children.
We need to change the structure of our workplaces to reflect the face of our workforce. Too many of those in positions of power have no understanding of the issue. Too many can’t imagine having to raise a family with few resources and no full-time caregiver at home. We must band together and hold legislators and business leaders accountable. Yes, we need to continue the fight to break the glass ceiling in every industry, but we also need to help women to climb up from America’s sticky floor. Women make up nearly half of the workforce and earn more than half of the college and advanced degrees. Yet today’s workplace policies do not reflect those realities. We are the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t offer some form of paid leave for the birth of a child or an illness in the family. Think about that—even Afghanistan and Pakistan do. Our refusal to acknowledge the change in America’s workforce is undercutting our economy and our growth potential. All of us, especially women, need to fight harder and raise our voices louder. Every day that we don’t, we leave more women behind, and our whole nation suffers.
Women ask me all the time how I manage work and family. I understand the interest, but as I always say, I’m not the issue. I have it easy compared to most parents. Serving in Congress gives me a level of flexibility that’s exceedingly rare. I can work from home if I have an emergency. I can bring my children to work if I need to. (My staff can bring their children to work, too.) Henry has a box of markers in my office that he especially loves, and he relishes the rides on the Capitol’s underground train system. Just yesterday, Theo had a fever and spent hours on my office couch, reading books and playing Minecraft. My day was more complicated, and I had to cancel a couple of meetings, but I managed.
Yet even with all the support I have and the flexibility my job provides, my life is not simple. For me, the biggest challenge is exhaustion. After an intense day of lobbying or negotiating with colleagues, often on emotionally charged issues, I go home and spend two or three hours taking caring of two growing boys—and for the last two years I’ve done this with my husband working in another city during the week. As tired as I am, after the boys go to sleep, I try to empty the dishwasher or fold some laundry, and if I can’t wait another day, I sweep and spot-clean the floor where Henry’s dinner landed instead of in his mouth. Still, I am thankful to my children for keeping me focused on what matters. If b
oth boys claim that they’re “staaaarving” when they get home, I take it as a challenge to make them something healthy within fifteen minutes that they’ll actually eat: steak or turkey burgers, broccoli and carrots, maybe pasta or potatoes. About 90 percent of the time I succeed, and that simple victory feels good.
I fail more than I’d like to admit. Theo hates being late for baseball practice—and after 5:30 votes, he often is. Henry feels life deeply and can have a temper, and I don’t always redirect it well. When he fires off insults—“You’re the worst mommy ever!”—I attempt to state his feelings back to him so he can see that under his anger he’s usually disappointed or frustrated. Sometimes this works; other times, it doesn’t and he tries to kick me in the shins (tae kwon do–style, of course). At that point, do I scold the bad behavior or keep engaging on the feelings? These decisions don’t feel intuitive to me. For advice, I call Erin (my parenting guru) or talk to Henry’s teachers and the school counselor. It all helps, but still I feel like a failure for not knowing what the hell I’m doing myself.
The one task in my house that I truly hate is cleaning the bathrooms. I avoid it as long as I can, but with two young boys, the toilet area needs a lot of wiping up. (Aiming is apparently a learned skill, and Henry’s not quite there yet.) Jonathan’s favorite joke is a takeoff from the movie Ghostbusters, which the boys have seen. When the two boys are competing for who gets to go first, Jonathan says jokingly, “Don’t cross the streams!” Naturally, this creates more mess and more kneeling on the bathroom floor with a Clorox wipe in hand. God gave me boys for a reason: They keep me humble.
Henry tends to be my household equivalent of the canary in the coal mine. Days before Jonathan is telling me that enough is enough and I should “do something about it”—meaning get my staff to pare down my crazy schedule—Henry gets clingy before he goes to bed. The more minutes of cuddling and mommy time he insists on right before sleep, the worse our family balancing act is.
Sundays when I am scheduled to work are the worst. One recent Sunday, when I was in the kitchen getting ready for a dreaded drive to the airport, I sighed.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Henry asked.
“Oh, nothing, I just don’t want to go to work today,” I said.
Henry touched my hand and said, “Don’t worry, Mommy. All mommies have to go to work.” I nearly cried. I was so proud of my son for recognizing that work is part of who I am and that it’s both necessary and good, if difficult at times.
But I mean it very sincerely: No one should worry about me. We should worry about the woman who cleans the office at night, or who puts in double shifts as an emergency-room nurse, or who works full-time for minimum wage and still lives in poverty. We should worry about women like Tiffany Kirk, who is struggling to raise her daughter while working as a bartender, earning $2.13 an hour, the tipped minimum wage. She works eight- to fourteen-hour days, and still she must rely on food subsidies and her local shelter. At times she shuts down her electricity or phone in order to save money for rent. But by far the worst trade-off Tiffany is forced to make is between enduring sexual harassment from patrons and earning less in tips. In her life, she says, she faces “many instances of being degraded by men—guys reaching across the bar and demeaning me because they know I depend on them to pay my bills. If I don’t stroke their egos or play along, then they don’t tip me, and that’s literally taking food out of my daughter’s hands.”
These women don’t want our pity, but they do need our advocacy and support. A year and a half ago, Laurie Greenstein’s daughter, Leah, was in a terrible car accident and her legs were crushed. Laurie did not have any paid leave and could not afford to take unpaid time off, so she had to ask her elderly parents to care for Leah while she recovered. Amber Dixon faced a similar bitter trade-off: care for a child in need or put food on the table and a roof overhead?
Amber worked for nineteen years in well-paid industrial jobs because she wanted to create an economically stable life for herself and her son. But this came at a price. On Amber’s first day in a new department for a local utility, she was told, “We never had a girl before,” and “We don’t go home for sick children here; that’s why there are rescue squads and emergency rooms.” Not long after, when at a remote jobsite, Amber received a radio message saying her son was sick at school. Given that she’d driven to the site in a truck with a group of co-workers, she had to wait five hours for someone to show up and give her a ride to her own car so she could take her son to the doctor.
Last year I also met Lucila Ramirez, who works as a janitor at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. She is fifty-five years old and has held the same job for two decades, earning just above the minimum wage. Lucila gets no benefits: no sick leave, no days off. She’s never been given a raise. Every day, Lucila moves closer to the date when she should be retiring, but that date keeps receding. Lucila can barely get by on $8.75 an hour. How is she supposed to save? If you earn federal minimum wage (state minimum wage can be higher) and work full-time, you earn $290 a week, or $15,000 a year. (If you earn state minimum wage, you likely earn about $350 a week, or $18,200 a year.) Think about that. How could you afford your rent or mortgage, decent food, medicine, and heat, let alone your kids’ soccer shoes, a babysitter once in a while, on $15,000 or $18,200 a year? You couldn’t. Sixty-two percent of minimum-wage earners are women, many of them single moms.
In May 2013, Lucila addressed some of my colleagues on Capitol Hill. Minimum-wage workers don’t have lobbyists or powerful advocacy networks, nor do many of them have time to come to Washington and lobby for themselves, because they can’t afford to take the time off. Few have much hope that their stories will make a difference. But when Lucila stepped up to the microphone in the Capitol, clearly nervous and dressed in her dark-blue Sunday best, the room fell silent. Lucila told the assembled she’d worked her whole life and felt fortunate to have a job, but nothing she did could pull her out of poverty. She lived in fear of growing old and infirm. Just before she finished speaking, she said directly to President Obama, with as much dignity as I’ve ever seen anybody summon, “You need to raise the minimum wage.”
This would be good for everybody. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would put more money in the hands of people who need it. Twenty-eight million Americans, including fifteen million women, would start spending more on food, clothes, and other basics. Economists estimate that $22 billion more would flow into the economy, and this would lead to more jobs. But these issues rarely gain traction in Congress, because too few of our representatives can relate. They don’t earn the minimum wage. Most don’t worry about childcare or family-sick-leave policy. The majority are male, well paid, and not the primary caregiver in their homes.
Imagine the choices a mother of two has to make, earning $15,000 a year, which is $3,000 below the poverty line. Does she buy her children healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, dairy, whole grains, and proteins? She probably can’t afford to, and that alone kicks off a bad cycle. When children go hungry or eat less healthfully, their chances of learning well and reaching their full potential fall. Our economic policies are undermining our future. The promise of the American dream was that if you worked hard, you could make it into the middle class. If we don’t raise the minimum wage, provide affordable daycare and universal pre-K, and mandate paid family medical leave and equal pay for equal work, we are allowing that dream to fade away.
—
When I was first elected to the House, I often picked up Theo at daycare at 5:00 P.M. and brought him to the Capitol. We’d enter the huge old building and hold hands as we walked up to the second floor on the marble staircase, the risers worn with age. In the House chamber, Theo could wander around as he pleased, and he loved it when we had a vote. To vote, members have two choices: One, approach the speaker’s desk and hand in a small colored cardboard card—a red one for no, a green one for yes, or yellow for present, if you don’t want to vote either yes or no. Or, two, place a small card si
milar to a hotel-room key in a machine with a slot on top and then push a button—red, green, or yellow. Most of the time, representatives choose the second, and Theo loved pressing the buttons. He’d jump at the chance to help me vote. After, he’d run around voting for anyone who would let him—most of the women and many of my male friends. He’d take the card and say, “Red or green?” Often, thinking he was pretty slick, he’d pretend to vote green when he’d been asked to vote red or the other way around. He always actually voted the right way, and we all watched to make sure he did, but it was very cute.
After voting, I’d buy Theo a hot dog or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an ice cream at the cloakroom snack bar. The cloakroom has a half dozen couches and comfortable chairs where members can talk or watch the news or a game between votes. Theo and I both adored those nights, and I think some of the older members did, too. Congress skews toward people in later middle age. Theo reminded them of their grandchildren.
Theo has made all kinds of guest appearances at my job. When he was about four, I hosted a political fundraiser and Christmas party at Hunan Dynasty and asked Senator Chuck Schumer to attend as my special guest. The event started at 6:00 P.M., so I collected Theo from daycare and brought him with me. (I no longer make the rookie mistake of scheduling my own events at such an awkward childcare pickup time.) Chuck loves kids and is not one to stand on ceremony, so when he arrived, he gave Theo a big hello and boosted him up on his shoulders. The gesture was very sweet, and it made me feel more comfortable that Theo was at the event—right up until the moment Chuck asked Theo if he’d like to use his new bully pulpit to address the crowd.
Off the Sidelines Page 9