From This Day Forward (16 page)

 

CR: All this time in California, I had never had any kind of decent child-care situation. At first, I hired people from an agency, but that cost a fortune. Teenagers on our hill could sit when school was out, but that still didn't solve my daytime problems. I tried to work when Steve was at home, but he was unreliable. Finally, Millie introduced us to neighbors of
hers, a family of four girls, three sisters in their late teens and a baby sister who was five. They would sit for us and bring the little sister to play with Lee. It was the first child care I could count on.
It's Academic
went off the air, but KNBC then hired me to produce another show, called
Serendipity,
which featured filmed field trips for kids. Most of the filming was on weekends, when Steven was more likely to be available to help.

 

SR: One Saturday I took the kids to a local park. Becca was so tiny she was still in an infant seat. There was a group of guys about my age playing basketball on the court next to the playground, so I wandered over and said, “Gee, guys, can I get a game?” They said, “Sure,” so I parked the baby next to the court while Lee was off in the playground. We had a good time, and the guys told me they played there every Saturday. It turned out many of them also had kids running around the playground.

 

CR: Who were also awfully little!

 

SR: So this became our regular Saturday. If Cokie wasn't working it would give her an afternoon off. I would take the kids every week to the park. She thinks we didn't pay enough attention to them, but we had a very clear rule—you could interrupt the game to take care of a kid if blood was showing.

As Lee got a bit older and could manage money, I would give him a couple of dollars at the beginning of the afternoon to buy ice pops for him and Becca at the little refreshment stand in the park. At the end of the day Cokie could tell exactly what each of them had eaten, because it was right there on their shirts.

 

CR: But that kind of caretaking, such as it was, on his part was unusual. The whole understanding we had was that his
work mattered more than anything. It certainly mattered more than my work, and I didn't disagree with that. But it was beginning to get to me more and more. Steve worked at home when he wasn't on the road, and I was supposed to somehow keep these babies quiet and out of his hair. I was exhausted from it all. I fell asleep everywhere we went, even in the middle of a basketball playoff game at the Fabulous Forum, because I was so tired. I used to joke that everybody in California was fantasizing about sleeping with everybody else, and I was fantasizing about sleep, period. When I flew to Miami to join Steven for the Democratic Convention in 1972, I didn't want to get off the plane. It was the first time I'd had to myself in months.

 

SR: I was traveling a lot and missing the kids, so I tried to figure out stories where the family could travel with me. One was about an old gold-mining town, another about a protest march led by Cesar Chavez, head of the grape workers' union. At first, that didn't work so well because Cokie and the kids would hang around waiting for me to finish, and she started to feel she would be better off at home, where she could control the schedule. But then we got into a rhythm where they would go off on their own to a park or a pool and I would meet up with them at the end of the day. Fine, if we were staying someplace where they had something to do, but then I had the brainstorm of renting a big camper and touring the West. I decided to do a summertime series of pieces about Americans on the road. It didn't work out so well.

 

CR: First of all, it's important to understand, I think the outdoors is vastly overrated. I am not an outdoor person. When we got in this camper the thing smelled to high heaven, just start there. Then we forgot to lock the refrigerator, so as we pulled out of the driveway, the food all spilled out. I did more housework in that stupid camper than I did at home for a
year. Steve would go off in the morning and interview people and I'd be stuck in a camper with two babies.

 

SR: Without much ability to get them clean.

 

CR: There were no bathtubs anywhere and the kids were pretty little for showers. Becca wasn't even a year old and she was still in diapers; she would also eat dirt. By the time I got her dressed, and turned around to get my purse, she was dirty again. Then there was the day she almost climbed out of the Ferris wheel seat when we were at a county fair in Red Bluff. Steve was off interviewing people and I took the kids on the rides. Becca wouldn't sit still in my lap, and as I desperately tried to hold on to her, she rocked the seat around and came close to falling from the top of the wheel. The guy running it thought I was just scared when I hysterically shouted at him to stop the thing, so he laughed and kept it going. When we finally got off, I told Steve he had to carry that baby in a backpack for the rest of the day so Lee and I could have some fun. Steven took Becca, but while he was doing an interview with someone from the National Rifle Association, she methodically unwound all of the crepe paper from the booth.

 

SR: I only found out years later that Cokie had made reservations to fly home everyplace we went.

 

CR: It was a hard time for young mothers. The effect of the women's movement was odd. Instead of allowing us to make whatever choices we wanted, it made us feel that the motherhood choice wasn't seen as valid. When we went out in L.A., it would have been considered gauche for me to even mention the children. I remember going to one party I didn't particularly want to go to, and I just stood off to the side, not really participating. Some women started talking to Steve, focused intently on the bureau chief of
The New York Times,
and I was completely invisible. Then the husband of one of them asked me, “And what do you do?” A question I hate. But I actually had an answer: “I produce a television show.” All of a sudden it was as if the spotlights came on. These women physically turned around and suddenly I was someone who counted. What I said mattered because I had a title other than mother or homemaker. It's so obnoxious. I can't stand that. It was the first time that Steve had encountered what I had been telling him about this phenomenon—had physically seen it happen. This whole sense of a woman's worth is so discounted. It's still true all these years later.

 

SR: At one point during this period Cokie said to me, “You're getting better when I ask you to do things. If I ask you to take the kids or run an errand, you're happy to do it. But you don't think of these things yourself.” I've learned that's a common pattern. Guys think they're helping out, but taking responsibility, worrying about decisions, is another whole leap.

 

CR: You still don't think about these things. You'll arrange for a house sitter when we're going on vacation, but you don't know what to tell the sitter because you don't know where the thermostats are. So there's a lot that the woman just does. No matter how enlightened we all become, we still just do it, it's so much easier in the long run. We know that we'll do it right. And we'd just as soon not ask.

 

SR: But it's not just that. In many marriages women say they want help, but they don't want their turf invaded, whether it's the kitchen or the nursery or whatever. So when they do accept the help, they fuss about, well, it's not done exactly the way I do it. A friend recently told me the story of a married couple where the woman got ill and the man was taking over a lot of the household tasks while she recovered.
As the woman told it, “The real present my husband gave me was not only doing all of these things around the house, but doing them the way he knew I would do them.” This was an interesting insight. So often men don't think about that, which is insensitive. Or women get angry at them for not doing things exactly the right way, which isn't always fair either.

 

CR: Right. Part of it is noticing, though. Lately, Steve has been trying to set the table the way I like it set—putting out the right napkins with the right plates and glasses. For years he never noticed, or thought I was foolish for caring. It was also important for me to learn not to nag. That's dumb, too.

 

SR: But this is recently acquired wisdom. In California, we were still trying to adjust to married life, and the world around us was going nuts. The counterculture was exploding, challenging every established institution there was, especially marriage. We had not been in Los Angeles long before I made my first visit to San Francisco. A college friend was working there as a reporter, and he took me on a tour of North Beach and other hippie hot spots. I brought home a poster of the Jefferson Airplane, an early psychedelic rock group, and I felt like an anthropologist who had just discovered some strange new sect. I remember saying to Cokie, “Something interesting is happening there.” But it also became quite troubling.

 

CR: We were both from very traditional families. We were East Coast people and this was a whole new world. But I did put the poster up over the babies' changing table.

 

SR: So many marriages around us were breaking up. The wife of one of my basketball buddies ran off with another woman. There was a lot of wreckage, and not just among marriages. It was among children, teenagers turning to drugs.

 

CR: One friend of ours said proudly that she had shed 175 pounds—25 pounds of her own and a 150-pound husband. To celebrate her new freedom she ordered a new waterbed and the guy who delivered it stayed two weeks. True story! Steve was convinced that the guy didn't have an apartment; he went around delivering waterbeds and hoping something would turn up. And these would be the conversations in the park. I'd be there pushing the kids on the swings and the person next to me would be talking about her affairs. It was very shocking, and it was frightening; could it happen to us? I instituted what I called a “have an affair with your wife” program, where every so often just the two of us would go off together for a night or two and not call each other “Mommy” or “Daddy” the whole time. All this free-floating fantasizing was going on all around us, and it made me more than a little nervous. Here I was this mom at home with two babies and there Steven was out covering the Hollywood set. I didn't mind so much the night he called me at three o'clock in the morning from the Mustang Ranch, where he was reporting on the first legal brothel. But I did draw the line at his traveling with his extremely attractive assistant to a rock concert where God only knows what would be going on in the audience. No matter how strong I thought our marriage was, I didn't see any point in asking for trouble.

 

SR: It was a confusing time. I was so upset, and fascinated, that I did a long series for the
Times
about divorce.

 

CR: One friend called in tears and said, “Can you get over here right away?” So I gathered up the kids and dashed over there. She was absolutely devastated. Her husband had just walked out. Why, I asked, what did he say? As she handed me her baby, she sobbed, “He said he wants to be a hard-living, hard-loving writer on the road.” I burst out laughing. I felt sorry for my poor suffering friend, but what an exit line!

 

SR: During this period I wrote an article for the
New York Times
Sunday magazine about my tenth high-school reunion, and it was called “Old-Fashioned at 27.” So many of my classmates felt the way I did—really lost in this new world. The assumptions we had grown up with—marry young, have kids, stay married—were all in question. I wrote about one woman's painful divorce and remarriage, only to cause her even more pain. Her new in-laws didn't know she'd been married before! Another divorced woman told me that it was her aim to “go crazy” in bed, but every time she slept with a man she wasn't married to, she saw the ghost of her grandfather, a Protestant preacher, and was convinced she was “going to hell.” My job was to write about this world and understand it, and I wasn't immune from the turbulence and the temptation. One night some East Coast journalists came into town and had a party. I went dressed in the fashion of the day, and one of them cracked, “When the
New York Times
bureau chief shows up wearing red corduroy bell-bottoms, things sure have changed!” For my newspaper series on divorce, I talked to a marriage counselor who made a very telling point: the whole question about marriage was different. People were getting up every day and asking, “Do we have a reason to stay together today?” Even in the best marriages, he pointed out, there will be days when you don't have a great answer to that question, so you need an underlying commitment to each other to carry you through the rough spots. What had eroded was that commitment. “Do your own thing” had replaced “for better or worse.” During this period we attended a wedding of two friends—first marriage for her, second for him. Let's start with the fact that the guy had first dated his bride's mother before discovering the daughter! And the vows they exchanged were not exactly “till death do us part.” It was more like “This is cool today, but who knows about tomorrow?” If you look at the statistics it's very striking—this whole notion of disposable marriages grew steadily during the seventies, with the divorce rate reaching a peak in about 1980.

 

CR: Particularly in California, because so many people there came from someplace else. Many of them had gone there to get away from home—from mother and father and sisters and brothers. It makes a difference in a marriage to leave the community. Because community does two things: first, it supports the marriage, and second, it disapproves of divorce. So there is a push-pull. The lack of that support structure made California a much more rootless place.

 

SR: I think that's true. Now, to be fair, looking back on those years we would say that there were certain advantages to being away from home. We could work out our relationship without having to answer to any of our parents on a regular basis, and many of our friends felt the same way. But if couples had more freedom to flourish, they also had more freedom to fail, more freedom to make mistakes, more freedom to ignore the communal pressures and family expectations which help get you through the rough times that therapist was talking about. One of the key elements keeping a marriage together is the community. The people who see you as a couple. The people who expect you to stay married, who reinforce the importance of marriage. Whether it's the high-school buddies you played basketball with or the other young mothers in your kids' play group. So there were enormous pluses and enormous minuses in our situation.