Staying True (9 page)

Though Mark thought doing so was a waste of money, the next morning, I called a pest control man named John to make sure the bats were gone. John discovered that a cap on the chimney had been torn back, allowing space for the bats to enter the house through the fireplace. He did what he felt was needed and told me once the bats left to feed that evening, they would not be able to return. But at dusk, the bats were swooping through the kitchen, and I was a nervous wreck! Bats in the house seem to swoop right at your face, making you want to dive for the floor. Mark killed a few more that evening and then chuckled at my fright as he departed for DC the next morning.

I couldn’t take another night of them. I vacated the house before dusk and took the boys to sleep at a friend’s down the street, while giving the keys to the house to my new friend John.

It turns out bats can hibernate inside. We needed to be patient a bit longer as he enticed them all to leave. Not a job for me. I felt I was wearing out my welcome with the three little boys at my friend’s house and also felt little empathy from Mark, safe in his batless office in DC.

So, on Thursday I moved with the three boys to a suite in a local hotel and called Mark to tell him that I was not moving back in until he had slept in the house for at least two nights without seeing a bat. Facing the prospect of paying for an extended hotel stay, Mark sprang into action, effectively dealing with every last bat. We happily returned to live together as a family Sunday night.

Mark described his time in Congress as similar to being a member of a fraternity, bantering about ideas with colleagues and remaining friendly despite disagreements. He also enjoyed standing on principle to nudge change in one direction or to keep change from happening too fast in another direction. As engaged and happy as he seemed, I began to wonder if remaining true to what he believed was making him a very lonely or unsatisfied man.

As a staunch fiscal conservative, Mark was on the fringe of his party in Congress. He was one of a handful who opposed the relaxing of our nation’s mortgage rules in the 90s, for example, when few could conceive of being against a law that claimed it would encourage home ownership for everyone. He made many lonely votes against large military bills too, because of the tendency to bloat military spending with unnecessary earmarks. His principles required him to oppose things—opposition that later would be used to portray him as heartless. He was one of the sole votes against a breast-cancer stamp because it cost money and he thought it was merely feel-good legislation that would ultimately lead to more government creep. In some cases, it was he and just one or two others voting together on an issue.

At one point in the middle of his second term, we rented a house on the South Carolina coast for a much-needed vacation and the differences in our pace and lack of connection caught up to us. I was feeling the strain of living apart, and I was also exhausted by my time alone juggling the demands of the boys. On a walk together alone along the shore, I tried to explain my frustration. I didn’t begrudge Mark his time away from the doctor’s appointments, the school events, and later the homework, because I saw Mark’s career as a family effort. But his work protected him from the ordinary, day-in, day-out connection with the boys, I explained, and as a result I felt he was becoming out of touch with us. My job was tapping into the most tender parts of my heart and soul. His job demanded that he be calculating and sometimes manipulative. I was growing more vulnerable, and he was forming a hardened shell.

For his part, Mark complained that I didn’t understand the stress and pressure he was under. We didn’t say it in so many words, but it was clear that while both of us were rarely alone, in our own distinct ways, we were lonely.

What we did say led to tears—mine—and to a soul search about whether we should even stay married. I know many marriages weather similar discussions, sometimes with one spouse threatening to leave. Neither Mark nor I threatened to leave, but we were both working hard to be understood and falling short. Our geographic distance was yielding a real emotional distance as well. I questioned then whether he really understood me. I assume he questioned that about me as well. His seeming inability to understand my needs and my worries also made me question if he truly loved me. I don’t know if he could say the same, but in many ways I think we were discovering things about our marriage that made us each afraid for the future of it.

At the same time, this heart-to-heart served as a wake-up call of sorts. We were acknowledging that life had become hard, but we still loved each other and also had a family that we both dearly wanted to hold together. We both hoped that life would get easier, that we would enter into a new and more manageable “season” once his time in Congress was through. In the meantime, we agreed that his career was an important part of both of us, and that we didn’t want to upend it by continuing to move apart. Divorce just wasn’t an option. We wanted to stay together and we would. Besides, I believed him when he said he would end his service in Congress after six years. At the moment of this painful argument, we were about halfway through.

SEVEN

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VEN WITH A RENEWED AND EXPLICIT COMMITMENT AFTER OUR argument on the beach, Mark and I spent less and less time together during his last term in Congress. By then our home was on Sullivan’s Island. We had sold our house in Charleston and bought an informal and seemingly indestructible cinder-block one near the beach on Sullivan’s, an island at the mouth of the Charleston harbor. I had instantly fallen in love with life on Sullivan’s. The pace, the proximity to the sea, and the simplicity of the home itself suited me and gave me great happiness, even with Mark gone so much. This still-cherished year-round beach retreat has given us all some needed space—indoors and out—though Mark has taken refuge in its walls less than the rest of us. Indeed, at that point he was returning home infrequently on the weekends, travelling more often, expanding his knowledge of the issues in South America, Khazakstan, Bosnia, India, you name it. I got used to having him gone and justified it by his need for adventure and travel and, yet again, reminding myself of that finish line that I could see coming toward me in the distance. This was a fairly lonely existence for me all the same. Mark was seeing the world, but I wanted him to see that this world that he and I created was just as interesting. I worried that so much of it was slipping away from him unnoticed, never to be reclaimed. That restlessness and drive I had admired so much when we were courting was causing him to look outside the home for adventure, while I believed the adventure of my life was nestled in my arms.

I now have some perspective on how this snuck up on us. Our entry into this unreal world started quickly and, at first, we were both caught up in the excitement of it all. As soon as we won that first campaign for Congress, the phones were ringing with other politicians congratulating Mark on his win and suggesting one course of action or another. The press wanted interviews and sound bites for the evening news. Congressional tabloids asked for photos and bios to profile the newest members of this exclusive club. Lobbyists called to flatter Mark as they pitched their causes and successful businessmen wanted to meet him for lunch or dinner to ensure their interests were protected. The accumulation of this special treatment was no doubt a big part of what disconnected Mark and me from each other and what disconnected Mark from the values and priorities he once held dear. On Wall Street, I saw many a man whose ego grew as his income rose and he got more attention from those around him, but nothing I saw there compares to the immediate and transformational ego-stroking of politics.

I can see now that it was naïve to think that marriage and family would take the edge off Mark’s frenetic hunger. After all, right at the moment when I had achieved a lifelong goal—the birth of our first son Marshall—Mark said he was bored. He wanted to be stretched to the limit, and as much as he loved me and our growing family, domestic life didn’t do that for him. Motherhood was stretching me physically and emotionally in ways he couldn’t share and that he didn’t appreciate.

Many marriages suffer when the partners start to prioritize differently and then grow apart from one another. The more I saw Mark pack his schedule, the more I tried to become the antidote; I worked to balance the frenzy. I supported his campaigning and entertained with him as much as possible when he was home on weekends, but I also would regroup and slow down during the week when he was away. When he pulled us into his freneticism, I pulled the other way, trying to carve out time for us to recharge instead of deplete our batteries.

This push-pull was probably futile. I grew to see I couldn’t fix him and he didn’t want me to slow him down. I couldn’t find his happiness, but I could make the effort to connect with my own.

Though I admired the way Mark persevered in the aftermath of his father’s death, over time I less charitably saw the mirror trait of that perseverance: stubbornness. He did things his way, and his way only, on a host of fronts. Still, I knew the stresses Mark was under and the challenges he faced so I had to pick my battles with him carefully. We had our shared goals, our family, and our focus on his career to bind us together. My feeling was that anything that distracted from those things was something I could let go of since there were so many pressing responsibilities that needed our full attention. As a modus operandi, this more or less worked because our basic values remained shared.

Call it perseverance or stubbornness, Mark didn’t make it easy for himself to succeed in Congress. He would regularly return from DC frustrated that he had “nothing to show” for his valiant efforts; at least, he said, I had the babies to show for my hard work. His popularity was sky high with the voters in our district because he took a stand against wasteful government spending. This made him a maverick among his peers. Fighting so many majority-supported big bills made it hard to champion laws of his own; he wouldn’t support other representatives’ bills so they had little motivation to support his. Opposing legislation often did succeed in keeping federal spending lower than it would have been but it wasn’t like a notch on the belt of success to be remembered for. He also wanted to enact laws he believed in, including some that would further restrict rampant government growth, and on that front, he frequently faced defeat.

I tried to help Mark see that success—as he was coming to define it in his day-to-day work—didn’t correlate to self-worth. Through the highs and lows of his own life, my father has demonstrated that success is a personal thing defined by the way you live your life every day, and by what you do with the skills you have and the blessings you have bestowed on you. I praised Mark for his hard work. I praised him for the hard work of opposition. My praise was never quite enough. Like many men, his personal bar for success is satisfied by more tangible things. On the weekends at home when not campaigning, I would often find Mark on a track hoe at Coosaw from dawn till dusk creating a pond or even digging a giant pit for the boys to play in (and, possibly, risk their lives!), complete with a PVC pipe for chicken fights and a zip line. He explained he loved seeing his progress “one scoop at a time” and knew at the end of the day just what he had succeeded in creating. In this—building something—he could feel satisfied.

One brilliant fall Sunday at Coosaw, we took the boys deep into the woods for a picnic. I spread a blanket under the bright blue skies in a large clearing, while Mark got the boys to help him start a fire in a grand stack of logs left by a crew that had been logging timber there. Shortly after the fire was lit, the wind began to pick up. After finishing our simple lunch, I had to pack away the blanket and leftovers as the breeze strengthened. In no time whatsoever, the flames were two stories tall and the wind was blowing some of the flames in the direction of the neighboring stand of pines. I was terrified watching our little boys trying to beat back the flames with skimpy branches. Alarmed, I drove with the baby to a local store to ask the old men gathered there to help while the storekeeper called the fire tower. Eventually a small plane dropping water from above helped get everything under control. As we left for Charleston and the airport so that Mark could catch his flight to DC, a passing fireman asked him if he was related to Congressman Mark Sanford. Neither denying nor confirming his identity, Mark just smiled and moved along.

This was the first time I witnessed Mark communicate something less than the truth, an episode that I have considered and reconsidered in different lights over time. Had knowledge of this gotten out, who knows what the media would have done with it?

The longer we stayed in politics, the more contemptuous I became of this media circus and its carnival atmosphere complete with barkers and stunts and people who are trying to trick you. This battle over who controls the image affects everything the politician and his family do. It felt to me as if they were always looking for the slightest mistake or for something they could twist and sensationalize. As a result, we all found ourselves calculating how whatever we did might look to an unsympathetic audience, even if we had done nothing wrong.

Mark had made a mistake building a fire in those conditions, but it’s the kind of mistake that happens all the time and the wind had shifted and strengthened. Would political pundits weigh in, using it as a metaphor for Mark’s judgment? Perhaps a future opponent would use the story to blame Mark for taking advantage of the same state resources whose budgets he cut back. In that way, it is understandable that he wanted to keep this quiet. On the other hand, his fear that the story might show him in a poor light caused him to sacrifice a piece of his own integrity. The same Latin words that mean “not” and “touch” are behind the word integrity. A person of integrity is whole, complete, untouched. People of integrity are the same in the dark as in the light. The fear of how this would look caused him to withhold the truth then, and in time he would do so to the press, and to me, again.

One of Mark’s trips during his last term in office was to India, something that incited a mundane crisis, but one that made me wonder again about our future together. We were flying to Seattle over Memorial Day weekend for my brother’s wedding. Mark thought this would be a good time to pick up some extra income and a way to put into practice something he’d learned watching so many poor in India: Don’t be so attached to things. From his distant perch in DC, he rented our house to some Citadel grads. He didn’t consult with me about this, and then he got the dates wrong, renting it two days before the boys and I were supposed to leave. I was suddenly, frantically, cleaning the house so that it would be presentable to the renters, then we had to move somewhere for two days (an expense in and of itself—the net gain on this weekend was not much!) so that I could attend Landon’s kindergarten graduation before we flew west.

Mark flew directly from DC to Seattle, so I flew with all four boys (all under the age of eight at the time) and met up with Mark there. On the long flight, Blake (one and a half) conveniently got sick and I was more than happy to pass him to Mark’s clean arms upon arrival. My nerves were frazzled from the trip and I was fuming.

Our relationship was chilly that weekend, to say the least. Once alone, I told him I thought he was incredibly self-absorbed and disconnected from reality and from me. I reminded him that the special privilege of marriage is that the two partners get to know each other in a deeper way than the rest of the world, in fact, one hopes, almost better than they know themselves. I thought the world that Mark lived in illuminated the image, the superficial, a part of him that was calculated to be unknowable. It wasn’t the first time I thought it, but it might have been the first time I articulated it: The more he succeeded politically, the more time he spent living in that persona, and none of it served our marriage well.

Mark knew he was still in the dog house even after we returned from the wedding. He sought help by calling the leaders of a fellowship he and several other political figures attended when in Congress and asking them to speak with me. I wasn’t pleased to do so. I figured that Mark had portrayed me as an irrationally angry wife and that they would gang up on me to convince me to drop this issue. They did anything but. All three of the men comforted me by telling me that I was right to be angry with Mark. But a member of the group, whom I’ll call Jack, advised me that staying angry with Mark was not an option. If I wanted to heal the relationship, I had to open my heart and be kind, even if Mark was in the wrong.
They
would work on Mark. We even went so far as to talk about sex, and he told me not to withhold it as punishment as that would make everything worse. The marriage and family mattered more than this one issue, he advised. I was buoyed up by this support and all the new things I had to consider when looking at Mark and the pressures he was under, the strange way public figures live their lives and are with their families. My meeting with these men from the fellowship was the first time I heard an explicit description of the term “disconnect” in reference to politicians, and it seemed apt. I think one even called it “the Congressional Disconnect.” Move on and let go of the anger I did.

I had become pregnant with baby number four just as Mark’s final campaign for Congress began. Mark was so popular in his district that he had no major party opponent so our campaign was fun, consisting mainly of public appearances in front of friendly crowds. But Congress doesn’t stop for childbirth. I was scheduled to have my labor induced so that Mark could arrange to be present for the birth. Right up until that day, however, we worked. Two days before we were scheduled to be at the hospital, Mark and I spent hours on the tarmac at the military base in Charleston shaking hands with folks at the air show as our boys climbed in and out of military helicopters, planes, and tanks. It was hot and humid, and I gripped my hands tightly beneath my giant belly, fearful the baby I was carrying might drop flat on the steaming airstrip if I let go.