One Sunday in December 2011, after waking up early, kissing my boys goodbye, catching a 9:44 A.M. flight from Reagan airport to Newark, speaking at a women’s fundraiser in New Jersey, holding a press conference in midtown Manhattan, interviewing a candidate in my New York City office for a community-outreach position, and attending a lunch for State Senate Democrats, I escaped to my friend Angela’s house on the Upper East Side.
I don’t think I have ever been so happy to walk through a friend’s door.
I knew in advance that the day was going to be long (and it was far from over—I still had a finance meeting and a fundraising dinner to attend). But I clung to the saving grace on my itinerary, a single line toward the bottom of the page: “2:30 P.M. to 4:30 P.M., Personal time.”
“Personal time” on my schedule can mean many things: a doctor’s appointment, a concert at school, a squash match. But that Sunday it meant visiting Angela. The two of us had bonded over a thousand late nights during my years at Davis Polk.
The minute I walked into her apartment, I felt a wave of relief. You know what I’m talking about, that letting go that comes from the bone-deep comfort of being understood and unconditionally loved, knowing you can let your guard all the way down? I tossed my suit jacket, kicked off my shoes, and sat on a kitchen stool as Angela, five foot two with a smile that lights up a room, piled dishes in the sink from her children’s late lunch. Her life is exactly as hectic as mine. She’s now a partner at Davis Polk and she has two kids under five, which means she never has enough time to exercise, or be by herself or alone with her husband, or read a book for fun, or just exhale. But in spite of that—and because of it, too—we’ve always made time for our friendship. Friendship is the glue that holds me and all the parts of my life together.
We didn’t talk about anything important that day—no cases, no elections, no sick parents, no pregnancies, no angst about our kids. Just the silly complaints we never get to share: how all that our British husbands want to do is go away for the weekend and race cars, how those husbands expect us to be parenting savants, how miserable grueling diets are. Angela had recently lost ten pounds, so she was down to a size four while I was back up to a six. I’d made a point of bringing a suitcase of suits and dresses for her to try on. Some of them I’d barely worn; others I shouldn’t have bought in the first place. My girlfriends and I have always shared clothes. Angela pulled out for me some clothes that didn’t fit her just then, including a red-and-black strapless Burberry dress that Jonathan had bought me pre-babies, which was now coming full-circle from my closet to Angela’s closet back to mine. Sometimes a borrowed dress is exactly the boost you need.
Just as some men trade power tools, my girlfriends and I trade clothes. Since I started losing weight in 2010, I’ve borrowed tennis whites from my sister-in-law, Liz, and work clothes from my friend Rachel. Even Rachel’s sister gave me some hand-me-downs, which was a real gift, as she has fabulous taste and exactly the kind of elegant but serious outfits I need for work. Over the past five years, I’ve been every size from four to sixteen. Who can afford seven full wardrobes? I happily give away anything that I can’t use. (When I was losing weight, I purposefully gave away my old smaller dresses. I liked the reward of buying new clothes when I dropped a size.) I even give my old work suits to my female staff. My general counsel, Michele Jawando, who’s had three pregnancies, has made good use of whatever size fits her at the moment; the others take the rest. Jess often looks bewildered when he sees a junior staffer walking around in a blazer he’s sure he’s seen on me.
Before I left Angela’s house that Sunday, I promised to send her a beaded dress that I bought when I was single but hadn’t put on in years. We also made a plan for New Year’s Eve so we could get together and wear our “new” elegant outfits. Then I was shot back out the door, into my finance meeting and my work dinner, the reality of my daily life.
Women talk a lot about juggling work and family, and it’s a crucial conversation. But for me, the third leg of the stool, the one that keeps my life from toppling over, is friendship. It’s a choice, not a responsibility. It’s my respite from demands, the place I go to recharge myself so I have energy for all the rest: raising my children, nurturing my marriage, serving my constituents to the best of my ability, and caring for my extended family.
I travel a lot, but I have final control over my schedule, so I try to squeeze in visits with friends as often as I can. Sometimes it’s just twenty minutes (and if I’m lucky, an hour or two) in Albany, Los Angeles, Denver, or London. Even a short check-in can keep me sane, especially when I’m feeling stretched too thin. My childhood friend Elaine once threw a birthday dinner party for me because I was too busy to plan anything and she knew I’d be depressed if December 9 rolled around and I was working yet again. Paige, who I’ve known since high school, more than once invited my family over for Halloween because our house in Hudson was too rural for Theo and Henry to trick-or-treat door-to-door when they were very young. Caroline and Jennifer always find time for weekend summer barbecues.
My childhood friends have kept me centered more times than I can count. During my run for Congress in 2008, before my big debate with Sandy Treadwell, Elaine and Paige joined me back in the green room with snacks, because they know everything about me, including the fact that I get anxious, short-tempered, and unreasonable when I’m hungry. They joked with me about the absurd parts of the campaign to settle my nerves. Then they checked my teeth before I went onstage.
Being there for them means just as much. If one of my friends has a major life event, I do anything within my power to attend, even if it means planning my schedule six or nine months in advance. When my friend Alisandra asked me to be her daughter’s godmother, I made sure I was in Los Angeles for the christening, just as I was sure to be in New York City for Lucy’s daughters, in London for Gillian’s son, and in Albany for all of Erin’s kids. My girlfriends and I have held one another’s hands through breakups and pre-wedding jitters, including hair and makeup crises that felt insurmountable at the time. We’ve absorbed all the bitching about swollen ankles and aching backs that come with pregnancies. And of course we’ve been there for one another in the hard moments, too. When Elaine needed someone to take care of her children for the day so she could move her mother, who was suffering with Alzheimer’s, into an assisted-living facility, there was nowhere else I would have been.
Like too many working women with young families, I’ve had to rely on my children to help me make new friends in this phase of my life. I just don’t have a spare second to meet new people and to build relationships from scratch. I’ve now spent two Valentine’s Day dinners with Stephanie, a mom from Theo’s school, the mother of his friend Wilson. (I must say Theo has excellent taste in friends.) Both our husbands travel a lot and were out of town, so the first Valentine’s Day that we spent together with the boys, I cooked steak and vegetables, and we ladies shared a nice bottle of wine. The second, we planned to meet at La Loma, a local Mexican restaurant. That night turned into a bit of a fiasco, as La Loma has three locations (two related La Lomitas), and each of our families went to a different one, and my phone battery died from Henry playing too much Plants vs. Zombies. But we all met up, ordered lots of carne asada (no nachos—we were both on low-carb diets), and had a laugh.
Political friendships are different from personal ones, but they provide balance and warmth, as well. I say this in interviews a lot, but I think it bears repeating: One of the reasons why women in Congress have been so effective is that we actually know and like one another. In April 2009, my friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz organized a women’s congressional softball team. The prior year, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. She didn’t tell any of us on Capitol Hill about her illness until she’d recovered from her double mastectomy. But when she returned to work, she filled us in and asked if we would join a team to raise money for breast-cancer awareness among young women. I had never played softball. I didn’t know the first thing about the game, and I was in terrible shape, still nursing Henry and having just started playing tennis again. But I jumped at the chance to play. Only one member of our team was under forty; the median age was well over fifty. We represented profoundly different districts. I was thrilled.
Our first practice took place in a small park for dog walkers, nicknamed “X Park” because the sidewalks cross in the middle. At that point, just swinging the bat and bending down to field a ball without pulling a muscle presented a major challenge for nearly all of us. But if there’s one thing all members of Congress have in common, it’s that we’re competitive and willful. We wanted to win. So we practiced hard, learned the game, and took the field for our one matchup of the season with the gusto of Little Leaguers. I played shortstop and pitched a few innings and had one big hit. Our other pitcher was Grace Napolitano—age seventy-two and one of our ringers, because she’d played in high school. We were trounced by the young staffers from the Democratic and Republican National Committees, 15–8. But I was hooked.
I’ve played every season since, and over the past two I’ve started running early in the morning before practice with our coach, as well as Senator Kelly Ayotte and Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito. They are all much faster than I am, but they’re kind enough to slow down so we can chat about Shelley’s son’s wedding and Kelly’s weekends with her kids. We all have distinct policy ideas and commitments to different causes, but none of that matters while running. Over three miles and an hour-long practice, we connect just as people. The first question I ask when a new female colleague joins the House or Senate is, “Do you want to play softball?” (I recruited Senator Heidi Heitkamp based on her campaign ads alone—she knocked several pitches out of the park.) The team binds us together in a way that is hard for many to fathom in political life.
The women in the Senate make time for one another off the field, as well. In 1988, Senator Barbara Mikulski initiated quarterly dinners. (At that point, the only attendees were Barbara and Nancy Kassebaum, from Kansas.) Her goal was to create a neutral space for female senators to talk and connect. The dinners have grown quite a bit since then, but we still uphold the three original rules: no staff, no leaks, no memos. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to create a space in which we think of one another not as potential votes or allies but as daughters, wives, mothers, and friends. None of us thinks of each other as cooks—my female colleagues are some of the most accomplished and effective leaders in the world. But recently we’ve started taking turns hosting those dinners, and at risk of sounding like I’m trying to sell you a Junior League cookbook, Susan Collins makes an amazing sweet potato salad, Amy Klobuchar makes the best wild-rice salad I’ve ever eaten (she wins all sorts of Minnesota recipe contests), Claire McCaskill makes a delicious low-sugar berry cobbler, Lisa Murkowski cooks the salmon her husband catches in Alaska and stores in their freezer, and Barbara Mikulski knows exactly where to buy the best Maryland crab cakes.
We even once had a women’s dinner in the Blue Room in the White House. One day I suggested to President Obama that he host a dinner; he said yes; and then, just as I had years earlier when Hillary asked me to host a fundraiser, I refused to let staffers back out of the idea and insisted we set a date. Lisa had been planning to host that quarter, so the White House chef served Alaskan halibut in her honor. That dinner was a little more formal than our usual get-togethers. We sat at a long table and President Obama listened as we each presented our ideas and raised issues. It was a great chance for the women in the Senate to amplify one another’s voices. We are stronger when we can work together. More gets done.
I’ve also been lucky enough to form friendships with a few truly extraordinary women who have lived public lives. One is the actor Connie Britton. She and I went to college together, and the summer after my sophomore year we traveled to China. From the moment we stepped off the plane in Beijing, the experience was so overwhelming that a small group of us (Connie, myself, and two other friends, Amy and Dana) bonded. The coal dust in the air burned our eyes and left a film of soot on our skin by the end of each day. Our dorms were cement boxes with straw mats to sleep on, a hole in the floor for a toilet, and cold-water showers. The first night, at a ceremonial dinner, our hosts served a crispy whole fish, his big eyes staring up at us from the table like no Chinese food any of us had ever seen.
We fused as a group immediately, out of emotional need and a desire to help one another process what we were seeing—the poverty, the exotic (to us) culture. We also worked through the mundane stuff, too, like why it took my boyfriend so long to write. After about a month, Connie, Amy, Dana, and I found our bravery, taking trains to explore the country every weekend. We even geared up to lip-synch to Madonna at the American Embassy on the Fourth of July. Without one another, that trip would not have been nearly as rich. As a foursome, we were fearless—not that we realized it at the time.
After college, Connie and I lost track of each other. Years later, when she was back at Dartmouth for a reunion, another friend asked if she wanted to come hear me give a talk. Connie’s reaction was: “Kirsten Gillibrand? Who the hell is that?” (She’d only ever known me as Tina Rutnik.) But we reconnected and have stayed in loose touch since. A few years ago, she called me when she was adopting her son, Eyob. Foreign adoptions can be slow and byzantine. Eyob needed treatment before he turned one year old, and the bureaucracy was churning so slowly that Connie worried he wouldn’t get the care he needed in time. I told her I’d help in any way. I understood panic and urgency. Her son needed help. She was going to do everything possible for him.
Obviously, Connie’s work is very different from mine (hers is far more glamorous). But it’s been interesting to talk to her about the characters she’s created, and there’s a synergy in what we’re both trying to do: make women’s voices heard. In the movie version of Friday Night Lights, Connie played Tami Taylor, the football coach’s wife. It was just an ornamental part, not exactly fulfilling, so when the executive producer, Peter Berg, asked Connie to play Tami Taylor again for the TV show, she hesitated. She’d grown tired of playing women who rarely spoke. After much begging on Peter’s part, she agreed to the role—but with a serious caveat: Tami Taylor would have the strong voice of a strong woman. Connie would make sure of it.
As Connie tells the story, she was a bulldozer on the set, holding Peter to his promise every step of the way. She did it in her graceful Southern way, but she was unstoppable, calling him every week when she got her script, pushing him to let her character go deeper. “I got into this thing and moved to Austin, Texas, and it was like, ‘What the heck, and what was I thinking? Football and all these dudes?’ ” she told me recently. “But I knew it was time to step up and have the guts to find my voice. As a female actor, you bring your whole self to the job, and a big part of what you have to offer is your experience as a woman. You have to take risks. You have to go for it. If you wait to feel safe, if you stay on the sidelines, the big thing will never happen.” Amen.
And then, of course, there’s Gabby Giffords.
I felt bonded with Gabby even before we met, right after that first congressional election when I saw her on TV. We met that fall in Washington, and she’s the closest thing I have had to a sister in Congress. We started at the same time, both of us in our mid-thirties (I’m a few years older), both from historically Republican districts. We grew together and pushed each other to build normal and intimate lives, which is not easy to do in Washington. Just after New Year’s in 2011, Jonathan and I and Gabby and her husband, Mark Kelly, double-dated at Matchbox on 8th Street on Capitol Hill; it’s their favorite spot. Gabby and I talked about tough campaigns and complained about harsh opponents. Gabby and Mark told us about their recent trip to Rome, where they’d attended midnight mass at the Vatican and spent countless hours enjoying the art and architecture.
A week later, on January 8, while Gabby was holding a Congress on Your Corner event at a Safeway near Tucson, Arizona, she and eighteen others were shot, six killed.
When Congressman Heath Shuler, a mutual friend, called to tell me the news, I was standing in a model home, looking at tiles and finishes. Jonathan saw my face crumple from across the room. We left immediately and started driving toward home. Halfway there, we stopped at a restaurant because I didn’t want Theo and Henry, who were home with a sitter, to see me so upset. While we sat at the restaurant’s bar, Debbie Wasserman Schultz called. She was in Florida, driving her seven-year-old to a soccer tournament. She said she’d heard that Gabby’s shot was fatal.
“We just don’t know that yet. We don’t know for sure,” I said, refusing to believe it was true and making Debbie promise that we’d both keep scanning reports until the facts became clear.
For what felt like an hour, I sat there in shock, shaking and crying. Jonathan wrapped his arm around me to try to calm me down. The world felt like it had telescoped to just the two of us and our thoughts and prayers about Gabby. Jonathan kept refreshing the news reports on his iPhone, and we finally learned that the reports of Gabby’s death were false. I called Debbie immediately—she was still driving. Then Jonathan and I drove home, hoping we could keep it together in front of the kids.
For days, cable news reported on the shooting around the clock, interviewing any member of Congress they could get in front of a camera, many of whom didn’t know Gabby at all. One colleague called her “perky,” which would have annoyed her for sure. I wanted to be left alone in a dark room to worry and grieve. Six people had died. My communications team had been getting dozens of requests for me to do interviews and had been turning down all of them. But when Pia Carusone, Gabby’s chief of staff, contacted Jess to ask if I would please speak about Gabby on TV, I felt I had to say yes. Shining a light on her true character was one thing I could do for her in such a horrible time of need.
Four days later, on January 12, when I was trying to pick myself up and return to doing the work that Gabby and I shared, I received an invitation to join President Obama for a trip to Arizona. He also invited Debbie, Nancy Pelosi, and the whole Arizona delegation for a day of remembrance to honor the victims of the shooting. I raced home to change and was on Air Force One within three hours. I was so grateful to the president for including me. Tragedy makes a person feel powerless and alone. That invitation helped ease my sense of isolation.
That day in Arizona was one of the most emotional of my life. Just after we touched down in Tucson, Speaker Pelosi, Debbie, and I all visited Gabby in the hospital. Mark had warned us that Gabby’s face was expressionless and her eyes were closed. Seeing her was not easy—bandages all over her head, a tube coming out of her mouth.
I stood at her side and held her hand. She’d been my partner in public service since before we met. I didn’t know how much hope was reasonable to have. She was so strong and surrounded by so much love, but her injuries were so grave. But as Debbie and I stood there, talking about the future we prayed we would have together, we saw Gabby struggle to open her one unbandaged eye. Mark grabbed her hand, leaned in toward her, and said, “Gabby, can you see me?” The room became silent and still.
“Gabby, can you see?” Mark said. “Show me a sign!”
Slowly, she lifted her right hand a few inches off the bed and struggled to raise her thumb. We all started to sob. In that moment, Gabby showed Mark and the rest of us that she was with us 100 percent and understood what we were saying. I stood there in awe of her will and determination in the face of evil.
The president’s speech later that afternoon was so powerful. He honored all those who had been murdered: Judge John Roll, who’d dropped by the Safeway to say hello to Gabby on his way home from church; Phyllis Schneck, who had three children, seven grandchildren, and a two-year-old great-granddaughter; Dorothy Morris, whose husband, George Morris, was shot while trying to save Dorothy’s life; Gabe Zimmerman, Gabby’s outreach director, who was engaged to be married the following year; Dorwan Stoddard, who also took a bullet for his wife, and was killed; and nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, the only girl on her Little League team. She’d been born on September 11, 2001, and she planned to be the first woman to play Major League baseball.
“Imagine—imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy, just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship, just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future,” President Obama said, calling on all of us to honor Christina’s life. “She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
“I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us—we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.”
Over the next year, I continued to visit Gabby in various hospitals and at home. One night, I slept in her hospital room so I could be there when she woke at 6:00 A.M. Each time I saw Gabby, her positive spirit and progress amazed me. In January 2012, just a year after the shooting, Gabby flew back to D.C. to attend the president’s State of the Union address. Before the event, we did a little shopping at Forecast, my favorite clothing store on Capitol Hill. Gabby still had a gift certificate from the store that she’d received as a wedding gift. That day we both tried on a few things, and Gabby chose a bright-red top that looked beautiful on her. For a moment I felt like nothing had changed, that we were back to being freshman congresswomen, our lives on a shared course. But of course everything had changed. Gabby had survived such a dark passage. She battled her way through a year of speech and physical therapy, fed by her own spirit and her husband’s love. She had shown the country what resilience looks like.
That evening, when she walked onto the House floor for President Obama’s State of the Union address, the nation’s eyes were on her. Our friends are our foils and our confidants, the people we seek out to make us feel whole in a way that sometimes not even family can. When Gabby waved to the nation, unbowed, I felt so proud to call her my friend. She radiated a triumph of sorts, a refusal to surrender to hate. I felt so moved. I knew she’d be back, fighting to make life better for all Americans, and she is.