فصل 31

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فصل 31

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31

Years rolled on again, and Wendy had a daughter. This ought not to be written in ink but in a golden splash.

—J. M. Barrie

On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in July, my daughter introduced me to the nation. I was backstage, ready to walk onstage the instant she was done. At least, I was supposed to be ready. But I couldn’t pull myself away from the television, where her face filled the screen. Hearing her talk, I was grateful for waterproof mascara. The fact that my poised, beautiful daughter was also standing up there as Charlotte and Aidan’s mother—she had given birth to her son only five weeks earlier—made this even more special.

During a burst of applause near the end of her remarks, Jim Margolis, who was keeping his eye on the clock, yelled to me, “We’ve gotta go!” But Chelsea wasn’t done, and I didn’t want to miss any of it. Finally, Jim yelled, “Now we’ve really gotta go!” I snapped to attention, and we raced down the hall and up the stairs in the dark. I stepped out onstage in the nick of time.

From the moment she was born, Chelsea has captivated me. I suspect a lot of parents know what I mean. My child has me hooked. That night was no different. She looked so happy recounting stories of growing up. It’s always interesting to me to hear her perspective of her childhood. You try so many things as a parent. I remember how hours after she was born, Bill walked around the hospital room with tiny Chelsea in his arms, explaining everything to her. We didn’t want to waste a moment.

Here’s what Chelsea talked about at the DNC: Our weekly trips to the library and church. Lazy afternoons outside lying on the grass and spotting shapes in the clouds. Playing a game of her invention, Which Dinosaur Is the Friendliest? She says I warned her not to be fooled, that even seemingly friendly dinosaurs were still dinosaurs. That sounds like me: wasting no opportunity to impart some practical advice, even in absurd circumstances.

She talked about her favorite books that we read to her and those she later read by herself and told us all about, like the science fantasy A Wrinkle in Time.

Mostly Chelsea talked about me always being there and how she always knew how much we loved and valued her. I cannot express the happiness it brings to hear my daughter say that. This was my number one priority every day of her childhood: making sure she knew that nothing was more important than her. I worried about this, because Bill and I were extremely busy people. We worked long hours, we traveled frequently, and the phone in our house rang constantly, often with urgent news. It wouldn’t be unexpected for a little girl growing up surrounded by all that to feel overlooked. Over the years, I’ve met politicians’ kids who say, “I was pretty lonely. I had to compete with the whole world for my parents’ attention.” That was the worry that kept me up at night when Chelsea was young. I couldn’t bear the thought.

One way we handled that was by not excluding her from our work. We talked about issues and politics with her starting from a young age. In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, she described how hard it was to see me lose the fight for health care reform in 1994, when she was fourteen. She was there to comfort me and help provide diversions, like watching Pride and Prejudice together.

For me, becoming a mother was the fulfillment of a long-held dream. I love children—love just sitting with them and being silly, love bringing smiles to their sweet faces. If you’re ever looking for me at a party, you’re likely to find me wherever the kids are. Before I even met my husband and thought about starting a family, I was a lawyer and advocate for children. When Bill and I learned that we were going to be parents, we were ecstatic. We jumped around our kitchen like we were kids ourselves.

Getting pregnant was not easy for me, but pregnancy itself was blessedly uneventful. Chelsea arrived three weeks early. I was gigantic and more than ready to meet my little one. Neither Bill nor I cared a bit whether the baby was a boy or girl. But when the doctor said, “It’s a girl!” I felt so happy, it was like a sunburst beaming out of my chest. A girl!

I hadn’t realized how much I wanted a daughter until she arrived. She was a wish so secret, I didn’t even know that I had wished it. Then she was here, and I knew: she was what I always wanted.

If we’d had a son, I’m sure I would have been just as over the moon. I would have realized at once that I had always wanted a son—a sweet little boy to raise into a strong and caring man.

But that’s not what happened. We had a daughter. And not just any daughter but someone who brought such joy and love into our lives. It felt like fate. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me by a mile.

There’s just something about daughters. From the very beginning, I felt a rush of wisdom that I wanted to impart to her about womanhood: how to be brave, how to build real confidence and fake it when you have to, how to respect yourself without taking yourself too seriously, how to love yourself or at least try to and never stop trying, how to love others generously and courageously, how to be strong but gentle, how to decide whose opinion to value and whose to disregard quietly, how to believe in yourself even when others don’t. Some of these lessons were hard-won for me. I wanted badly to save my daughter the trouble. Maybe Chelsea could skip all that and arrive more quickly at a place of self-assurance.

My desire to be the best mother in the world didn’t translate into knowledge about how to do it. At first, I was pretty inept. In those early days, she wouldn’t stop crying. I was nearly frantic. Finally, I sat down and tried my best to make eye contact with this squirming infant. “Chelsea,” I said firmly, “this is new for both of us. I’ve never been a mother before. You’ve never been a baby. We’re just going to have to help each other do the best we can.” Those weren’t magic words that stopped her wailing, but they helped, if for no other reason than that they reminded me I was completely new at this and should be gentle with myself.

Over the years, I’ve met so many frazzled new mothers who can’t figure out how to soothe their babies or get them to nurse or sleep, and I see in their eyes that same discombobulation I felt in those early days of Chelsea’s life. It reminds me all over again how having a newborn is like every switch in your body being flicked on simultaneously. Your brain becomes a one-track mind—is the baby okay, is the baby hungry, is the baby sleeping, is the baby breathing—playing on an endless loop. If you’re a new mother reading this, sleep-deprived and semicoherent, maybe wearing a tattered sweatshirt and dreaming of your next shower, please know that so many of us have been right where you are. You’re doing great. It’ll get easier, so just hang in there. And maybe ask your partner or mom or friend to take over for a few hours so you can have that shower and get some sleep.

Chelsea was born in 1980, a time when opportunities for women were greater than ever before in human history. She wouldn’t face some of the closed doors I had. Bill and I were determined that our daughter was never going to hear “Girls can’t do that.” Not if we could help it.

What I couldn’t know back then, holding this tiny baby in my arms, is how much she would teach me about courage, confidence, and grace. Chelsea has an inner strength that amazes me. She is smart, thoughtful, observant, and even under stress or attack, conducts herself with poise and self-possession. She is gifted at friendship, always eager to meet new people but also comfortable with solitude. She trusts her mind and feeds it constantly. She stands up for what she believes. She is one of the toughest people I know, but her toughness is quiet and deliberate, easy to underestimate. That makes her even more formidable. Her smile is full of real joy.

Bill and I had a hand in all of this, I’m sure. But Chelsea has been Chelsea from the very start. I think most parents find that their children are more formed when they arrive than we expect. It’s like Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “Your children are not your children. They come through you but not from you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you, for life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.”

Like all moms, I wanted to protect Chelsea from illness and injury, bullies, disappointments, and a dangerous world. I also had a different set of threats in mind, which are particular to the daughters of public figures. She grew up on the front page of newspapers. She was attacked by right-wing personalities on the radio and mocked on television when she was just thirteen years old—it still makes my blood boil. There were plenty of nights when I wondered if we had made a terrible mistake by subjecting her to this life. I worried not just that she’d feel self-conscious but also that she’d become too practiced in the art of putting on a happy face for the cameras. I wanted her to have a rich interior life: to be sincere and spontaneous; to own her feelings, not stifle them. In short, I wanted her to be a real person with her own identity and interests.

The only way I knew how to do that was to make her life as normal as possible. Chelsea had chores at the White House. If she wanted a new book or game, she had to save her allowance to buy it. When she was bratty—to her credit, an extremely rare occurrence—she was chastised and sometimes punished. Our go-to was no TV or phone privileges for a week.

But there’s a limit to how much you can make life normal for the President’s daughter. So we also decided to embrace and celebrate the incredible opportunities that her unusual childhood and adolescence afforded. She went on visits overseas with us: touring the Forbidden City in China, riding an elephant in Nepal, having conversations with Nelson Mandela. She even found herself at fourteen discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude with Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez. Since she had always been interested in science and health, Bill made a point of introducing her to just about every scientist and doctor who visited the White House. She relished these conversations and experiences. “This is so cool!” she said the first time we saw Camp David, on her first flight on Air Force One, when she came along as I led the U.S. delegation to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway. I watched her—the questions she asked, her excited reflections on everything we saw and experienced—and was delighted. She never grew bored or acted entitled. She knew how special it all was.

Perhaps most important to me, Chelsea never needed to be reminded to thank everyone who made our lives both extraordinary and ordinary: the White House staff, her teachers, her Secret Service detail, her friends’ parents. She treated them all the exact same way—even heads of state. Her gratitude toward the people in her life ran deep. It led to many “proud mom” moments for me, as the kids would say.

Over the years, I worried about Chelsea less and less, as it became clear I didn’t have to. I also learned from her more and more. In stressful moments, she’s the calmest person in the room. She also seizes every chance to be silly with her friends and, now, her kids. These are the actions of someone who understands that life will throw a lot of challenges your way, and you should build up your inner resources of peace and happiness whenever you can.

And as was particularly evident in the 2016 campaign, she’s intrepid. Chelsea traveled far and wide campaigning for me, and she did it with Aidan, whom she was still nursing. It’s like that line from the late Ann Richards, the Governor of Texas: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, just backward and in high heels.” Chelsea did everything an energetic campaign surrogate would do, just with a tiny baby attached to her and all the gear that he required.

She’d call me from the road to tell me everything that she was seeing and hearing. “I’m not sure we’re breaking through,” she said, both during the primary and the general. “It feels really hard to get the facts out.” Her time on the 2016 campaign trail started with a bang. On her very first day, when she politely raised questions about Bernie’s health care plan—she has a master’s degree in public health and a doctorate in international relations with a focus on public health institutions, so she knows what she’s talking about—she got absolutely hammered for it.

I remember our conversation on the phone that night. Chelsea was frustrated with herself that her words didn’t match what she knew or felt. (I can empathize!) She left some people with the impression that she thought Bernie wanted to get rid of all health care—an absurd notion and of course not what she meant or said. She felt awful—awful that she had left a false impression about anything, with anyone, and especially because it was related to something that she understands and cares about deeply. I wished I could give her a big hug. Instead, we talked it out.

Our conversation might seem a little different from the average mother-daughter talk, but underneath, it’s a lot like anyone’s. We started in problem-solving mode. We reviewed the policy and how better to talk about the differences between Bernie’s plan and mine. Chelsea had been right on the specifics that day: at that stage in the campaign, Bernie’s health care plan called for starting over to get to single payer, which is what she said. But we both knew that wasn’t going to matter at this point. We returned to the basics: why my plan to improve the Affordable Care Act and add a public option was the right one to get to universal coverage. As you can tell, Chelsea and I are thought partners on this topic in particular, and her approach to thinking through problems and solutions is a lot like mine. (We recently shared a smile and a sigh when we heard Bernie called for improving the Affordable Care Act immediately by embracing the approach that I proposed as a candidate: a public option in fifty states and lowering the Medicare age to fifty-five.)

We gave ourselves a few minutes to vent about all the hate that at times seemed visceral toward me, our family, and all women stepping out. Then we switched gears and put the frustrating day behind us. We laughed about a photo of Charlotte at ballet class that Marc had sent us. We talked about how glad we were that Chelsea’s low-level nausea seemed to have passed. (She was a few months pregnant.) And we said our I-love-yous and hung up, knowing that tomorrow would be another opportunity to make our case and grateful that we had each other’s backs.

Every day, I was humbled by her fierce support of me. As a candidate, I was glad to have her in my corner, working diligently to explain important issues and why she believed so deeply in my plans—and me. And as her mom, I was and am so proud that she continues to rise above the attacks hurled at her every single day.

More than anyone else, it was Chelsea who helped me to see that my stance on same-sex marriage was incompatible with my values and the work I had done in the Senate and at the State Department to protect the rights of LGBT people. She impressed upon me that I had to endorse marriage equality if I was truly committed to equal human dignity, and as soon as I left the State Department, I did. Later, when I received the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign, I thought of her. And it was Chelsea who told me about the Zika virus long before it was in the newspapers. “This is going to be a huge problem,” she said, and she was right. We’re still not doing enough.

When Charlotte was born, I felt the joy that comes with seeing your child take the great reservoir of love she has and enlarge it to include her own children, along with a true partner of her own. Marc is a great dad, and together they are fantastic parents. Sometimes Chelsea and I do a dance that I expect is familiar to a lot of new moms and grandmothers out there: I’ll go to put the baby down for a nap or feed the toddler a snack, and Chelsea will swoop in. “Mom, that’s not the way I do that.” She can recite the latest American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines on sleep, infant feeding, and screen time, and I get to enjoy the special pleasure that comes from being a grandparent and knowing you don’t have to worry about the baby, because your child is handling the worrying. You can just focus on being the most loving and helpful grandparent you can be.

Chelsea has been by my side at every difficult moment since she arrived on this planet, and I’ve leaned on her more than I ever thought I would. Late on election night, when it was clear I had lost, she was sitting next to me, looking at me with a face full of love, sending all her considerable strength and grace toward me as hard as she could. As always, she helped see me through the darkness.

I was confident that Bill would be great at parenting. His father died before Bill was born; he knew how lucky he was to have this chance that his own father never had. Still, a lot of men are thrilled to be dads but not so thrilled about all the work that a child requires. The writer Katha Pollitt has observed how even the most egalitarian relationships can contort under the strain of child rearing, and all of a sudden the mom is expected to do everything, while the dad pitches in here and there. She calls it becoming “gender Republicans”—a nifty phrase, if perhaps a little unfair to all the feminist Republicans out there, who really do exist.

I knew that I had enough energy and devotion for two, if it turned out that Bill wasn’t a co-equal in the child-raising department. But I really hoped that wouldn’t happen. Our marriage had always been a true partnership. Though he was Governor and then President—jobs that would seem to “beat” a lot of others, if you were the kind of person who ranked jobs like that—my career was important to me, too. So was my time and, more broadly, my identity. I couldn’t wait to become a mother, but I didn’t want to lose everything else about myself in the becoming. I was counting on my husband not just to respect that but also to join me in guarding against it.

So it was a wonderful thing when Chelsea arrived, and Bill dove into parenting with characteristic gusto. We arrived at the hospital with Bill clutching the materials from the Lamaze classes we had attended together. When it turned out that Chelsea was breech, he fought to be in the operating room with me and hold my hand during the C-section. Being Governor came in handy when he asked to be the first father ever permitted by that hospital to do so. After we brought her home, he handled countless midnight feedings and diaper changes. We took turns making sure the parade of family and friends who wanted to spend time with Chelsea were looked after. As our daughter grew up, we both read her good-night stories. We both got to know her teachers and coaches. Even when Bill became President, he rearranged his schedule as much as he could to have dinner with us nearly every night that he was in Washington. And when he was somewhere else in the world, he’d call Chelsea to talk about her day and go over her homework with her.

Every year, our daughter adored her father more and more. As she entered adolescence, I wondered if that would change at all. I remembered how my own dad and I grew somewhat distant from each other once I became a teenager. I provoked him with a lot of fiery political arguments. He was at a loss to navigate the occasionally stormy seas of teenage girlhood. Would that happen with Chelsea and Bill? As it turned out, no. He lived for their debates; the fiercer the better. He didn’t leave me to deal with the “girl stuff”: heartache, self-esteem, safety. He was right there with us.

Did I handle more of the family responsibilities, especially while Bill was President? Of course. He was President. This was something we’d talked through before he ran, and I was more than up for it.

But I never felt like I was alone in the work of raising our wonderful daughter. And I know a lot of wives of busy men who would say otherwise. Bill wanted to be a great President, but that wouldn’t have mattered to him if he wasn’t also a great dad.

Every time I see my husband and daughter laugh over some private joke that only they know . . . every time I overhear a conversation between them, two lightning-quick minds testing each other . . . every time I see him look at her with total love and devotion . . . I’m reminded again that I chose exactly the right person to have a family with.

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