February 15, 2007

Serving in the House and Keeping Up With a Household

By Lois Romano

WASHINGTON – In this new, kid-centric House of Pelosi, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is not a bit self-conscious about trying to raise her young family from afar while serving in Congress.

It didn’t faze the Florida Democrat, for instance, to be pulled out of a meeting with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) in order to arrange a ride for her son to baseball practice — in Florida. (She got her dad to do it.) Nor when she conducted Saturday business meetings at her daughter’s dance studio.

Not even when she volunteered to lead her daughter’s Brownie troop — and then planned all the meetings around the congressional schedule.

Although a record 87 women serve in Congress today, there are still only a handful who are faced with balancing the pressures of politics and mothering young children. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not run for Congress until her children were grown, often the case with women who have served in Congress. The House floor may have been packed with kids on the day the members were sworn in, but most were the offspring of the gentlemen of the House.

Among the few female members with little ones: Freshman Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) resolved her balancing act by moving her 3-year-old son to Washington, where he attends the House child-care center. Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), a single mom, opted to leave her 4-year-old daughter back in Ohio, where extended family can care for the girl, a spokeswoman said.

Wasserman-Schultz, 40 and in her second term, may have it the roughest, trying to be hands-on mother 1,000 miles away to three children — 7-year-old twins and a 3-year-old. She says her husband, a banker, does heroic work to hold the family together — but an enormous amount of logistical planning falls to her.

She is running the Brownie meetings, she said, because “I don’t want my kids to feel I didn’t make every effort.” And she says her children have indeed noticed that the House is now working a five-day week and that she’s around even less.

Wasserman-Schultz was forced to defend her choices when she first ran for Congress in 2004 and her female opponent suggested that Wasserman-Schultz should not be elected because she would not have enough time to devote to Congress because of her children.

“She was trying to make me look bad,” Wasserman-Schultz said.

Her conservative opponent, a divorced mother of grown children, complained to a reporter when Wasserman-Schultz couldn’t find a pen and took notes with a crayon.

Now Wasserman-Schultz proudly incorporates her response to the complaint in her speeches: “I may not always have a pen in my purse, but I always have crayons.”