When I was three and we were selling our Midland, Texas, home, the only house I’d ever known, I rode my tricycle in tight, menacing circles around the prospective buyers. It was not polite behavior, and yet my mother thought it was charming that I was a toddler homebody who did not approve of strangers invading our house.
In my parents’ home, when we made mistakes as little people, then later as big people, we experienced their infinite mercy and forgiveness. They never expected perfection. Once we were in the White House, our parents continued to forgive some missteps. There is no guide for being a First Daughter.
I would find it hard to be a parent if I held myself to an impossible standard of perfection. When people ask me how I balance work and small children, I say, “It’s simple. I don’t.” I’ve been blessed with a lot of wonderful things at once. I don’t want to give anything up, so I keep everything going the best I can.
Am I balanced? Of course not. As I write this, I’m at my desk at work surrounded by coffee cups. By my side is a purse that contains Chuck E. Cheese tokens and . . . an old lollipop that Poppy wanted to save for later, now stuck to an important work document.
People never ask men how they manage to balance work and family. It’s woman-focused terminology, designed to make us feel bad about ourselves. What’s more, I find the question of balance to be a signifier of privilege. Such questions are inherently elitist. The moms of the kids I taught in D.C. and Baltimore never indulged in such questions. They were worried about bills and their paychecks and their children’s well-being. With their free time after work, they focused on applying to programs so their kids had chances they didn’t.
When Amy Schumer did a stand-up set just a couple of weeks after giving birth, some moms shamed her for it. She posted a photo of herself with her breast pump, looking utterly exhausted and vulnerable, and sent it out to all the moms trying to make her feel bad. That morning on Today, Savannah Guthrie and I praised Schumer for defending herself. We agreed that if a mom takes a couple of hours out of the house in those first weeks, it can help keep her sane.
I surround myself with women who are flawed and hilarious and don’t take themselves too seriously. On a recent vacation with Savannah and her family, I got a lesson in parenting humility. It began idyllically. Everything you hear about the closeness of the Today show family is real. Every year, Savannah and I take the kids up to her place in the country. It’s on these trips that I understand the value of a village raising a child. You can go for a walk alone while another mom watches your children; then you can watch them all while she goes to the store.
On this trip, in the dead of winter, a thick layer of snow covered the ground. One afternoon I was upstairs taking a nap while Poppy and Mila were hanging out with Savannah’s two children and some other kids. Suddenly, the whole gang burst into my room, all yelling at once, in hysterics: “Poppy has eaten an adult pill!”
This is not my favorite way to wake up from a nap. I immediately went into reporter mode. Quickly I learned that Poppy was not about to start hallucinating. She had just eaten one of the other kids’ chocolate-flavored laxatives. Unlike that child, Poppy is regular and does not need a laxative. As that weekend progressed, she must have asked every person at the house to wipe her.
My first day back from winter vacation, I felt I had achieved my perfect ideal of the balanced life. It was the first Monday of the new year. My productivity was at its peak, my diet still intact. I began my day with a green juice. I had a thousand meetings set up. I was wearing high-heeled boots instead of flats. New year, new you!
At my fifth meeting of the day, I was on a high of checking things off my to-do list. My goals were growing loftier by the minute. To my meeting companions, I was listing all the things I would do. Frankly, I was an inspiration even to myself.
As I made a sweeping gesture with my arm, I caught a glimpse of my watch. It was 3:40.
Mila gets off the bus at 3:45.
I stood up and told the people I was meeting with why I’d just gone pale, then shrieked, “What do I do? My daughter gets off the school bus in five minutes and I’m picking her up!”
Then I looked at Google Maps and saw that I was 0.9 miles away from the pickup spot. Traffic was terrible, so a cab was out. My conclusion: “I have to run.”
My colleagues wished me luck as I sprinted down the hall.
Out on the street, it was a freezing January afternoon, but I didn’t feel the cold because I was running at top speed. I now regretted the high-heeled boots.
“You’ll make it!” strangers called out as I ran in a panic. “Don’t worry! You’re okay!”
“No!” I called back. “I’m not okay! None of this is okay!”
I grew up in suburban Dallas. We carpooled or rode our bikes home from Preston Hollow Elementary. Now I was envisioning my five-year-old daughter, who just started her second semester of kindergarten, getting off the bus on a corner in lower Manhattan, standing there shivering like the Little Match Girl in front of Duane Reade.
Fortunately, I ran track in school. Unfortunately, I was a lousy runner. I often came in last and once faked a hamstring injury when I realized the race was lost (and not just by a little), because it was just too humiliating to lose every time without some extenuating circumstances.
Now, though, I was fast enough that I arrived at the bus stop, breathing very heavily, in almost no time at all—my feet aching, my mind racing, my shame spiraling!
My baby was not standing there on the corner whimpering. Had she already been kidnapped? As I contemplated dialing 911, the bus pulled up. It was blessedly late—due to the traffic caused, no doubt, by all those suddenly productive New Yorkers. It was late on the very day I needed it to be late, which is just the type of serendipitous thing that rarely happens.
That was the best wake-up call I could have gotten in the new year. In my zeal to check everything off my to-do list, I’d forgotten what was most important.
Another wake-up call came when Poppy asked me this question as I was putting her in her cotton pajamas: “Mommy, is there a babysitter, or are you going to be babysitting us tonight?”
“You know I don’t babysit you,” I said. “I’m your mom.”
To which she responded, “Okay, Mom, are you mothering us tonight?”
Oh no. Was I going to be mothering them tonight?
In fact, I was supposed to go out. But what was I supposed to say to my baby: “No, no mothering for you”?
“Yes, I will be mothering you,” I said, as I picked up the phone to cancel my plans.
The Wrong Movie
If you’d asked me twenty years ago if I would one day pursue a career in media, I would have said absolutely not. This was the industry that had plastered “freshman fifteen” photos of Barbara and me everywhere after we were caught drinking underage. And yet for a full year when I was in my mid-twenties, a producer at the Today show kept calling to ask if I would consider coming on as a correspondent.
For many months, the answer was a firm no. The press were not my friends. My students and fellow teachers were. I had just finished another year as an English teacher at a school in Baltimore. I had also written a couple of books: Ana’s Story, about a teenage mother with AIDS whom I’d met working for UNICEF, and a children’s book, cowritten with my mother, called Read All About It!