The Audacity of Hope

Chapter Three
Our Constitution
THERE’S A SAYING that senators frequently use when asked to describe their first
year on Capitol Hill: “It’s like drinking from a fire hose.”
The description is apt, for during my first few months in the Senate everything seemed
to come at me at once. I had to hire staff and set up offices in Washington and Illinois. I
had to negotiate committee assignments and get up to speed on the issues pending
before the committees. There was the backlog of ten thousand constituent letters that
had accumulated since Election Day, and the three hundred speaking invitations that
were arriving every week. In half-hour blocks, I was shuttled from the Senate floor to
committee rooms to hotel lobbies to radio stations, entirely dependent on an assortment
of recently hired staffers in their twenties and thirties to keep me on schedule, hand me
the right briefing book, remind me whom I was meeting with, or steer me to the nearest
restroom.
Then, at night, there was the adjustment of living alone. Michelle and I had decided to
keep the family in Chicago, in part because we liked the idea of raising the girls outside
the hothouse environment of Washington, but also because the arrangement gave
Michelle a circle of support—from her mother, brother, other family, and friends—that
could help her manage the prolonged absences my job would require. So for the three
nights a week that I spent in Washington, I rented a small one-bedroom apartment near
Georgetown Law School, in a high-rise between Capitol Hill and downtown.
At first, I tried to embrace my newfound solitude, forcing myself to remember the
pleasures of bachelorhood—gathering take-out menus from every restaurant in the
neighborhood, watching basketball or reading late into the night, hitting the gym for a
midnight workout, leaving dishes in the sink and not making my bed. But it was no use;
after thirteen years of marriage, I found myself to be fully domesticated, soft and
helpless. My first morning in Washington, I realized I’d forgotten to buy a shower
curtain and had to scrunch up against the shower wall in order to avoid flooding the
bathroom floor. The next night, watching the game and having a beer, I fell asleep at
halftime, and woke up on the couch two hours later with a bad crick in my neck. Takeout
food didn’t taste so good anymore; the silence irked me. I found myself calling
home repeatedly, just to listen to my daughters’ voices, aching for the warmth of their
hugs and the sweet smell of their skin.
“Hey, sweetie!”
“Hey, Daddy.”
“What’s happening?”
“Since you called before?”
“Yeah.”