Los Angeles Times Interview : Liz Carpenter : After a Busy Public Life Parenting, Again, in her 70s

If charity truly begins at home, then set a place at the head of the table for Liz Carpenter. At age 70, when most folks are content to rock and contemplate years past, she took on the stand-up task of raising three teen-age kids. Her brother had produced the brood, the result of a late and failed second marriage. Upon his death, no one, it seemed, was willing to take in the kids. No one except Liz Carpenter.

When Carpenter was 6, she was bitten by a mad dog. She survived, intact. At the ripe age of 22, Carpenter set out from her native Texas for Washington. There, she established a news bureau with her husband, Leslie, and, during the postwar years, was one of a handful of women covering Capitol Hill. In 1960, she answered her fellow Texan’s call, and traded in her press pass to work in the White House for Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. It was Carpenter who wrote the words Johnson spoke to a stunned nation when he, the new President, landed at Andrews Air Force base on Nov. 22, 1963. “I will do my best,” said Johnson. “That is all that I can do. I ask for your help--and for God’s.”

Carpenter may have repeated those words three years ago when Mary, 13, Tommy, 16, and Liz, 17, moved into her Austin, Texas, home. Almost two decades a widow, with her own son and daughter grown, Carpenter had become accustomed to her freedom--to baying at the moon in the company of friends her age. Suddenly, she was confronted by dirty jeans and T-shirts, loud and strange sounds made by musical groups with even stranger names, and the physical, psychological and fiscal demands of tending after three typical teens. Perhaps to preserve her sanity, she decided to write about the experience. The result is her third book, “Unplanned Parenthood: The Confessions of a Seventysomething Surrogate Mother.”

Johnson once said Carpenter would “storm hell with a bucket of water.” Yet, it’s clear it was not without trepidation that she took on this late-in-life parenting challenge. Carpenter, now 74, was a pre-feminism feminist, and today has become an advocate for the elderly. She insists if we are going to make a society that functions in the new millennium, we must all be more willing to open our hearts, and homes, to generations younger and older.

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Question: How are kids today different from when you grew up, and how are they the same?

Answer: I was born in 1920, and grew up in the country until I was 7 or 8, when we moved to the big city of Austin, Texas--then a town of 50,000. It was an enchanted childhood, unhampered and at ease. There were no worries. I grew up in a house with lots of pictures of ancestors who had come to Texas in the 1830s, and so I knew what my roots were. I had a mother who would constantly say, “Remember who you are.” I may not have always known who that was, but I knew I was supposed to behave myself.

Today’s kids are mostly urban dwellers. Many are children of divorce. They live in a very contentious world. They are smart, and we should never underestimate them, but many do not know or understand their roots. I think the mixing of generations can offer kids that--an understanding of where they come from.

I try to do that with mine, because there really isn’t anyone else to tell them that they had a teen-age ancestor, William Sutherland, who died at the Alamo when he was 17. That kind of knowledge is important, because it gives kids a stability and sense of continuity that’s not present in other aspects of their lives.

Q: There’s quite a gulf between your generation and the kids you were suddenly raising. What about these children most surprised you?

A: The high divorce rate has created what my nephew, Tommy, calls the “Orphan Generation.” He says he has only one friend who lives with both his natural parents.

One impact of that is to make kids very diplomatic, because they have to deal with a mother on one side of town and a father on the other. I hear these kids talking on the phone in my house, and I think they may be born diplomats in the way they juggle two angry people. Maybe it’s hoping for too much, but perhaps this generation will be the peacemakers.

One of the things that pleased me was to find that English teachers today are encouraging kids to keep journals. And sometimes a journal is the only thing that’s listening to these kids.

I’ve also seen that this young generation is colorblind and gender-blind. When we used to have friends who were boys, we always saw them as potential husbands. Today, kids have friends of the opposite sex who they never, ever think of romantically, and race doesn’t seem to enter the picture. I think that gives these kids a real head start on our generation in seeking justice, without all the inhibitions that we inherited.

Q: What do these disparate generations have to give to each other?

A: The thing that my generation can give is a sense of history. Because we are storytellers, we can make these young people feel that they have roots. I was very fortunate to be a reporter with a front-row seat in Washington for such a long time. And so I’m shocked when kids’ memories don’t go back before Ronald Reagan. As my kids have come to appreciate their aging, gray-haired aunt, I’ve become more of a resource for them when they are studying history.

They were thrilled, for instance, to learn that I had interviewed Gore Vidal, that I had known Sam Rayburn, and that I had been there in that room when Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss confronted one another. These are things I try to tell them about. They don’t always listen, but sometimes what I’m saying comes floating back.

Q: The operative word in this experience with you and these kids seems to be adaptation. Does youth have a lock on resilience, or are older people actually more able to adapt?

A: I think it’s harder for children. But it’s hard for old folks, too. What helped me the most was that I began to think of it as a running story--as though I was covering it. And when I started writing the book, it was very therapeutic, because I could back off a little and take a less personal look. But it was hard for me to have these kids come into my house. I had a free life--for 17 years, I could just pick up and go any time I wanted.

Learning to let these kids go, and do what they wanted, was hardest for me. Even though I might disagree with what they want to do--say, go off somewhere on their spring-break vacation and you can just picture all the disasters happening--you have to recognize that these kids have being reading Jack Kerouac and they want to roam around and see the world. You have to remember that, way back when, you did, too.

I have been more elastic than they have been in a lot of ways. I’ve tried to use humor. And I’ve tried not to worry--but I always do. The thing that’s important to older people who are set in their ways is to realize there’s a great satisfaction in being needed. The biggest factor in making one old is feeling no one needs you. God knows I feel needed. And I know that I have to keep my health and keep on living, because three people are depending on me.

Q: The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article about people who’ve waited until their late 30s or 40s to have children, and it focused on how their bodies were no longer flexible enough for all the demands of lifting and moving around toddlers. Do you think that the wisdom and patience that come with age outweigh any physical infirmities?

A: Absolutely. But I don’t think that 40-year-olds should have any trouble lifting babies and moving car seats. I think the real danger of the baby-boomer parent is that they try to be pals with their teen-agers. Teen-agers don’t want a 40-something-year-old pal. They want guidance--though they’ll never say that. But they are testing, testing, testing all the time. What are the limits? And when you are reluctant to give them some limits, I think you are inviting disaster.

Q: These kids got dealt a pretty bad hand, losing their father, and then you write a book, with a lot of personal things about the traumas of growing up. Did you worry that you might be betraying a trust by writing about them?

A: Yes, I did worry. But I made the manuscript available to them the whole time I was writing, and I would talk to them about the book and ask them for ideas. And they were helpful. The biggest thing that worried them was that I would list an outmoded rock group as an example of the music they liked. You know, they wanted to be right up to date with Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails. So we were editing the rock groups right up to deadline.

Q: What is it about you that made you volunteer for this task, to raise these kids?

A: I know exactly--my mother. I could not be my mother’s daughter and not open the door. Nobody else was stepping forward, and my house is in a part of Austin that has a wonderful school district. There was no reason I couldn’t accept these kids and live with my own conscience. But it has not been easy, and I don’t know how it will all turn out.

And now we need each other. Each generation has something to give to each other. I look back at my grandmothers, who always wrapped the prettiest packages for Christmas, even though they were modest gifts, and took such pride in the way things looked. I know that’s had some influence on me. I hope I have some influence on these children. I think they will know more about their country, because my house is full of books and pictures that are from the pages of my life, from Franklin Roosevelt on. I think conversation is a lost art, and I really try to get everybody talking around the dinner table. When I grew up in the Depression, you were talking about the country, and the fact that it was hurting. You did not turn away the man knocking at the back door for a plate of food.

The house I grew up in, in Austin, was right on the fringes of the University of Texas, and it was almost like an informal think tank. We always had lots of people around, and they talked about problems with the country, and how we could solve them. We listened to the radio, and we were conscious of national and world events, living in the state capital, next to a great university. A love of learning was part of the scene. I hope I’ve given some of that to these children, and think I have.

Q: We hear politicians on both sides of the aisle talking about family values. What do those two words mean to you?

A: They mean love, and love expressed, and spoken and practiced. It doesn’t mean a whole lot of inflexible rules to me--which is what I think it means to the religious right. We have to say “I love you” to children--especially to children who tend to feel some neglect. And I think you have to say it, whether you mean it or not, because there are days when you may love the child but you don’t much like them that day because of some conflict. I think it’s a need in everyone to be told they are loved, and that’s what family values means to me.

Q: So do you see older people like yourself raising children for the second, or even third time?

A: I already see more grandparents raising their children’s children, and the biggest reason has to do with divorce. Sitting and signing my book at store after store, I hear the human story that backs up the statistics. Somebody’s daughter has just gotten a divorce and she’s going to have to go back to school, and the grandparent absorbs the kids for a while. Sometimes that “while” stretches out to a pretty long while. And I also hear from young people who have been raised by grandparents, and they often talk about it with a lot of pride. And so I hope that these children whom I’ve raised for a while will talk about me with pride, too.

Q: How has being involved with three kids, who seem pretty typical of children today, left you feeling about the future of their generation?

A: There’s a quote in my book from Mary White’s “The Quilter,” which is written in the words of an illiterate woman. She says:

“Sometime you don’t have no control over the way things go. Hail ruins the crops or fire burns you out. And then you’re just given so much to work with in a life and you have to do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

That’s taught me a lot. And I do think that this piece of life, these children who I didn’t expect and who landed on my doorstep at age 70, has given me a glimpse at the future, and more than a glimmer of hope. It’s made me feel more alive and needed, and--tough as it is sometimes--I’m grateful for it.