Members of Congress Juggle Family Life, Killer Schedules : In Washington, House Is Not a Home (Neither Is Senate)

The California congressman stalked into a meeting and announced that his Easter vacation, as usual, didn’t coincide with his children’s time off from school. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m quitting.”

Maybe that wasn’t the only reason Tom Rees retired 10 years ago.

But in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, in the corridors and over dinner, talk often turns to the difficulties many congressmen know all too well, the compromises they make in trying to balance family life with what amounts to two other jobs--serving constituents at home and making laws in Washington.

“It’s a great job,” said Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), “but it’s a lousy life.”

Not even a chief executive officer in the corporate world has to put up with 3:30 a.m. floor votes, weekends on the road and--particularly for House members with two-year terms--near-continuous campaigning to survive the next election.

Weekends on Tour

“When other people are having weekends working around the house, riding a bike, playing touch football . . . what we do is go out and stay in Ramadas (Inns) and make speeches, tour factories,” said Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) “I don’t say that to complain. It’s part of my job and I love the job. But I say it as a matter of fact. Most people wouldn’t consider that a bang-up weekend.”

The logistics are complicated, starting with whether to leave the family at home or bring the wife and kids to Washington. The psychological aspects are tough; lawmakers themselves describe their job as self-centered and preemptive. And the demands on members, from weekend travel to late-night legislating, often create or aggravate tensions between husbands and wives.

“It’s easy to feel rejected,” said Beverly Hubble Tauke, wife of Rep. Tom Tauke (R-Iowa). “It can be traumatic. A relationship that could otherwise be a wonderful thing could be destroyed quickly.”

There are only 23 women in the House and two in the Senate, the great majority of them unmarried or mothers of children already grown. So the typical congressional spouse is a wife.

She often gets a taste of her new life the moment the moving van arrives and her husband isn’t around to help with the kids. Then there’s the daily unanswerable question: Will he be home for dinner? And there’s the annual hassle of trying to plan holiday vacations. Congress aims for October adjournment each year but has made that deadline only twice since 1979; in 1982 the final gavel didn’t come down until Dec. 23.

Despite the pressures on political couples to stay together, a recent survey found 10 divorced or separated senators and 28 divorced or separated representatives. That doesn’t include the many who have divorced and remarried.

“I know members who have spouses who don’t like politics--they don’t have a commitment to public service,” said Rep. Tauke. “Under those circumstances, it’s very difficult for a marriage to survive service in Congress.”

Rep. Phil Sharp (D-Ind.), and his wife, Marilyn, author of best-selling thrillers such as “Sunflower” and “Falseface,” are beating those odds with some accommodation on both sides. She strives to maintain her literary identity. He no longer assumes, as he did at first, that he is exempt from household chores and child care.

“This environment for me is very hostile,” Marilyn Sharp said in an interview published in Washington Woman magazine. “I would go so far as to say that I am fighting for my survival, not in the sense of living but in having my dreams squashed.”

Wined and dined and a celebrity in New York publishing circles, Marilyn Sharp was disoriented by her new role. She was taught how to send 250,000 Christmas cards, how to find a good caterer. On a Pentagon tour with other wives, she was advised to note a ship’s kitchen.

Congressional wives “can often be treated as appendages. They’d better have a very strong self-image to deal with it,” said Beverly Tauke.

“When you go to a party, a lot of times you are sort of left out if you’re not standing beside your husband--or even if you are,” added Frances DeWine, wife of Rep. Michael DeWine (R-Ohio).

The two women say they don’t let that kind of thing bother them. What matters more, they say, is squeezing family time into their husbands’ packed days and weekends.

“If you don’t plan it, pretty soon you don’t spend any of the times that are supposed to be special together,” said Beverly Tauke, who was in Iowa the day of the interview to see her husband on her birthday.

“I call up the scheduler,” said Frances DeWine. “If you don’t say your kid has a Boy Scout banquet he’d like his father to come to, he’s not going to be able to do it. You have to call early and get your name in.”

Danforth, DeConcini and several others formed an ad hoc “quality of life” committee in the last Congress with the aim of making it possible for senators to lead less pressured personal lives.

“We were wasting a lot of time and not accomplishing anything but enormous amounts of wheel-spinning (in the Senate). That had an impact on family life,” Danforth said. But the effort disintegrated with the crush of business.

“This is not what I had in mind,” DeConcini said wryly last fall as the Senate grappled with a spending bill at 3:30 a.m.

The quality-of-life campaign was revived over the summer with a slightly different spin. Proponents now refer to the “quality of work” and are seeking rule changes to improve efficiency. But the goal is the same: There should be time for life outside the Senate.

Scheduled Around Football

In the House, the length of a debate and the amendments to be offered are decided ahead of time. But House members still say they do not have enough advance notice of holiday recesses, late nights and votes clustered around weekends.

“We always seem to be able to schedule around the golf tournaments, key football games. We used to schedule around the Boston Red Sox. We can accommodate the Paris Air Show and the Kemper Open,” Tauke noted dryly.

Wilson Morris, an aide to House Speaker Jim Wright, compares scheduling to the weather: “Everyone complains about it, but there’s not much you can do about it.”

The lurching progress of bills through committee often makes it difficult to pin down the legislative schedule, Morris said. Furthermore, he added, you can’t schedule recesses that coincide with vacations in every school district in the nation or three-day Washington workweeks that meet the needs of West Coast members who have to go home.

Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, has sons ages 18 and 22. When it comes to living arrangements, “we’ve had it every which way.” His younger son wanted to go to high school in California, so that is where the family lives now. Miller goes home every weekend with five other members from his area.

“The gift is that it lets you absolutely focus on the job,” Miller said of the current setup. “To do that requires very long days . . . then on weekends you concentrate your time on your family.”

Miller calls a congressman’s job “very, very selfish.” He said: “We consume a huge amount of energy. We can drain the energy right out of another person. We’re takers. We absorb the work product of our staff. We absorb the adulation of our constituents.”

Miller lives with three other congressmen in a Capitol Hill apartment. The group provides a mechanism for releasing stress, he said, as well as “little reality checks” to keep egos in line. “Our living group sometimes said, ‘Hey, knock it off. You can’t talk to your wife like that. You’ve got to call her back and straighten this out.’ ”

Danforth has five children, ages 15 to 27. “They know that despite my odd schedule, they come first,” he said. His advice to other Senate fathers: “Constantly remind yourselves that long after the Senate is gone from our lives, the family will be there--unless you’ve become so wedded to the Senate that you lose your family in the process.”

When Tauke arrived at the Capitol in 1979, he was single and unattached and spent a good many evenings with lobbyists representing corn growers, home builders and other groups. No more. He married Beverly Hubble, a former Senate press secretary, in 1984, and the couple had a son a year ago.

Beverly Tauke is still active in politics as a communications consultant and co-chair of Sen. Bob Dole’s Iowa presidential campaign. Both Taukes say his job was a factor in her decision to work only part time. “For me to have a new child and the demands of Tom’s job and a full-time job of my own, frankly, was just too much,” she said.

A congressional family’s biggest challenge, said Beverly Tauke, is to detect and defuse problems before they become patterns. “Every once in a while I have to catch myself because I begin to misunderstand his weariness,” she said of her husband. “Obviously when you’re courting, when a person sees you, their eyes light up. Well, if someone’s batteries are dead, nothing lights up. If there’s a pattern of exhaustion, you can begin to think it’s you.”

Her advice to congressional wives has an old-fashioned ring: “Find some interests of your own and pursue them. You’ll be a healthier person for it. And he’ll be more interested and stimulated by you than if you’re inevitably just a minor cog in his system.”

Understanding Spouse

The Tauke family lives in the Washington area, but that may change as their son, Joseph, grows up. “I would prefer to have him raised in Iowa rather than raised out here,” said Tauke.

DeWine met his wife in first grade and married her in college. They had two of their seven children before he graduated.

“Her story is that when she married me, I told her I was going to be a schoolteacher,” the boyish-looking lawmaker said with a laugh. His children range from 6 months to 19 years old.

“You have to have a spouse who understands what you’re doing and is committed to what you do. It has to be a team effort if you have a family,” said DeWine, whose brood makes his campaign posters and campaigns with him across his sprawling district.

The day of the interview, Frances DeWine was at the family’s Ohio farmhouse baking pies, with the help of friends and relatives, for the 2,500 people expected to attend the DeWines’ annual ice cream social. “I like to start out with 75 to 100 pies,” she said.

Frances DeWine is trained as a home economics teacher but said she hasn’t missed working outside the home--even in status-conscious Washington, even with a husband in Congress. “I know a lot of congressional wives who are lonely because their husbands are so busy, they feel neglected,” she said. “But I’m so busy with the family that I don’t really feel neglected.”

DeConcini feels strongly about the quality-of-life movement although his three children are no longer living at home. “When I first came here, I really was upset,” he said. “I felt I neglected my family. I was rarely home.” Even now, he said, it’s hard to schedule time with a daughter who is a doctor practicing right in Washington.

DeConcini’s wife, Susie, a social worker, was active in her field for only three years. “It was her choice,” the senator said. “She likes to travel with me. She’s very involved. She’s the best asset I have.”

Susie DeConcini did an informal study of the Senate divorce rate in 1980 and found it below the national average. “That does not mean everything is just romantically Cinderellaland around here,” she said. “This is a hard job for spouses, really hard. This town is very non-oriented toward women participating generally, so spouses are not included in a lot of events. I just don’t go to them anymore.”