Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [81]
“It is not someplace I can reach, hon,” trying to hand them back to him.
To which he responded, “Then we will have to figure something else out, because I do not want to give you shots.” Cate, always helpful, was very clear: if Dad wasn’t doing it, neither was she. But John solved the problem. A warm nurse who reviewed files in his office stopped by the house every day—it was only about two blocks from work—and gave me my shot. When John started campaigning across the state more often for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, I was particularly glad Gail Campbell and not John was my shot giver. John would arrange his schedule around weekly appointments, but it would have been much too limiting to arrange it around daily shots. When I finally got pregnant—around Wade’s eighteenth birthday—John was there to celebrate our real but muted joy. And Gail was there to teach me how to give the next round of shots I would need, which were fortunately in a place I could reach. And when Emma Claire was born, Gail was there, as proud as if she were the mother, snapping pictures and giving hugs. It went smoothly—well, pretty smoothly; as a result of the medication I did get a uterine cyst, which had to come out, and I did get gestational diabetes, which I controlled with diet. But I kept going to softball games and the cemetery and the Learning Lab, and John kept campaigning until, ten days before the Democratic primary, Emma Claire was delivered by Watty Bowes, who treated me as if I were his granddaughter—which, given my age at the time, forty-eight, I particularly appreciated.
Emma Claire developed jaundice because her blood and mine, like Wade’s and Cate’s blood and mine, were incompatible. She required transfusions and special lights, and John stayed with me, with us, when he ought to have been campaigning. Finally Cate and I made him go, and Cate took care of me and her new sister, with the help of Nancy Speroni. And by the day of the primary, ten days later, Emma Claire was strong, and John’s three girls—Emma Claire in a tiny onesie embroidered with John’s campaign logo, made by the campaign staff—stood with him onstage as he accepted his party’s nomination and prepared for the fight to come. After the klieg lights were turned off and the television cameras were packed away, Cate and I went back to the room in the Velvet Cloak hotel where we had waited for the evening’s results. She spread out across one of the beds. Harrison Hickman, our friend and pollster, came in and asked her, “Isn’t this a great night?” Her response: “I just want to go home.” It was hard on her, I could see that. And there was more to come. When John won the Senate seat, I told him the truth: in our house, if you were not a baby or a candidate, you didn’t get much attention. Take her on a trip, I said. And that Thanksgiving he did. He and Cate went to London.
Although I had a busload of teenage girls and nearly as many empty-nest mothers who would have been glad to care for Emma Claire, allowing me to go out on the trail, I stayed out of the campaign for Senate and remained with Emma Claire. I did listen to the television and, on the way to the cemetery, to the radio, and I would call the campaign office when new commercials against John broke or with something I had heard, but I barely campaigned.
I liked the campaign—from a safe distance from the cameras—and I particularly liked the young people in the campaign. They were smart and committed and poorly dressed. They were happy and energetic, and did I mention poorly dressed? The older folks—most younger than I—were fine, but it was a job for them, yet another job in a long line of political campaign jobs. They dressed like they had taken time doing it, not like the young people, who dressed like it was a blasted necessity every morning that slowed them on the way to what they really wanted to be doing. For these young people, for David Ginsberg and Christina Reynolds, for Brad Anderson, John Dervin, Hunter Pruette,