I’d been waiting a year—or my entire life, depending on how you look at it—for this envelope to arrive. It was a self-seal bubble mailer in standard-issue manila sent via messenger from a major publishing house, containing a single copy of the finished version of my first book, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns and One Intact Glass Ceiling.
What I hadn’t anticipated during all those years I’d dreamed of becoming a real published author was that when this package finally arrived, I’d be sitting on the sofa soaked in a frothy mix of milk after a full bottle burst open and spilled all over me and my screaming infant son.
It felt like some cosmic life realignment that the finished edition of my memoir about covering Hillary Clinton for The New York Times, arrived during this mini-fiasco called new motherhood. I held my baby in my arms, the envelope taunting me from the floor, where it would remain unopened for the next several hours.
There was a time in my life when the pull of that envelope would’ve been impossible to resist. Instead, my son and I both wailed.
I’d hardly learned how to write when I began to imagine myself writing a book. I could see the pencil scrawls in my Big Chief notebook published and bound, perched on a shelf at the B. Dalton in North Star Mall in San Antonio, where I grew up. I thought if I worked hard enough and wrote every day, it would happen for me.
I’m a fifth generation Texan, a product of a public high school with metal detectors and an A.P. English teacher whose primary reading material was the J. Crew catalogue. In 1996, when I was 17, one of the teachers at the middle-school school where my mom worked took me to hear Hillary promote her first book, It Takes a Village. I was entranced by what she had to say.
Two weeks after college graduation, I moved to New York with no connections in media or politics and quickly realized how naive I’d been about becoming a writer. I ran around midtown clutching clips from The Daily Texan in a leather Trapper Keeper. I lived on a stash of savings from working in a snow cone stand in Austin. When that ran out, I took temp jobs all over town, at insurance offices and nonprofits, mostly. My writing submissions were either rejected or ignored; things got so bad that I actually contemplated law school. Little by little, I came to understand that winning the Young Author’s Conference of South Texas wasn’t going to open any doors.
After months with no job offers, my sister met a New York Times political reporter through a mutual friend and this reporter generously agreed to have coffee with me. I’ll never forget standing in the crusty lobby of the old Times building in a suit I’d bought at an outlet mall. The reporter never showed.
Three years later, a friend I’d met while temping at Conde Nast Traveler put me up to replace her as the foreign news assistant at The Wall Street Journal. That was my foot-in-the-door. I never imagined that a decade later, I’d be a political reporter at the Times covering the leading candidate for president. (The reporter who never showed is now my colleague.) I wasn’t about to let go of that for anything.
In 2013, when I was 34, then Times executive editor Jill Abramson plucked me out of relative obscurity covering media companies and put me on the Hillary beat ahead of the coming presidential election. I knew this wouldn’t just be a job, but an all-consuming, cross-country marathon that would stretch on for years and require countless nights in a Holiday Inn Express in [insert swing-state city here]. I’d covered Hillary and Barack Obama’s 2008 campaigns, an endeavor that brought me to 48 states, got me enough Marriott points to cover honeymoon lodging in Mexico and left me with an 20 extra pounds from eating whatever sandwich was thrown to us on the campaign bus.
At that point, I hadn’t given much thought to having a baby. I thought I wanted one, but the timing was terrible. I asked my doctor how much it would cost to freeze my eggs until after the election. She told me to get pregnant immediately and take an au pair on the campaign trail. I left the appointment convinced that the baby could wait a couple more years—and resolved to find a new doctor.
Whenever the subject of babies came up with my husband, Bobby, or with nosy but well-meaning friends, the conversation always found its way back to the same question: “What about Hillary?” Ever since she’d spoken about the cracked ceiling in her 2008 concession speech, I’d dreamed of doing it all over again. Thankfully, Bobby and I were in agreement on one thing: the chance to cover the election of the first woman President for the paper of record was too important to pass up—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We decided to put off the baby for a few more years. I might not have been so willing to put my personal life on hold had the path to covering a presidential campaign for the Times been even a tiny bit easier.
Two years later, after Hillary had become the first woman to capture the Democratic nomination for president and the Times’s Upshot data model projected that her lead against Trump was insurmountable, Bobby and I started to think ahead. We had the baby talk, again punctuated by the same question—What about Hillary?
After all those years of covering her, I didn’t want to stop when Hillary finally reached the White House. I wanted to see what happened when the candidate morphed into Madam President.
I suppose the good people of Wisconsin made our decision for us.
It was late on Election Night. I stood on the floor of the Javits Center surrounded by Hillary’s crestfallen supporters. I’d just emailed my editors a tip I’d heard from a campaign source. “Wisconsin,” I told them at exactly 11:51 p.m., “Not gonna happen for them. Gone.”
All around me, Hillary’s supporters sobbed. They held cupped hands over open mouths. Grown men collapsed on the floor. A Muslim woman in a hijab dove into the press area and grabbed my arm. “Tell me she can still win!” she said. I didn’t say a word. I was still in deadline mode, thinking only of the next story, reporting out my “how she lost” piece for the next day’s paper. Old habits die hard.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but after three years, visits to all 99 counties in Iowa (twice) and countless renditions of “Fight Song” and—in that instant, under the glass dome that had been set to spill two hundred pounds of confetti shaped like glass shards down on a victorious Hillary—I finally faced a future in which the “What about Hillary?” question no longer loomed.
Not long after Election Day, still in a sleep-deprived fog, I told my very understanding husband, who had visited me on the campaign trail, put up with my constant travel and only occasionally yelled at me to stop looking at Twitter, that I was ready to have a baby.
By then we’d been married for eight years and liked our life—tramping around Southeast Asia, fishing in Montauk, tubing down the Guadalupe River in Texas. He’d left the baby decision entirely up to me. “I could take it or leave it,” he’d say whenever I brought it up. But now that I’d made up my mind, he was all in.
In the weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, when I began my (coincidentally) nine-month book leave, I struggled to pull myself away from the adrenaline that comes with a byline, the warm bath of breaking news and re-Tweets. There was a lot about the campaign that I didn’t miss, the exhaustion, the ugliness, the campaign trying to control every word I wrote, but I loved the other “girls on the bus” who covered Hillary and the way that every day had the feel of a traveling circus. This was a far cry from sitting at my dining room table, staring at a blank screen.
But by June 2017, two remarkable, life-transforming things had happened– I’d written 80,000 words about Hillary’s pursuit of the presidency —and, at 38 years old, I was pregnant with our first child. A book and a baby—the two most terrifying, all-consuming things a procrastinator like me would ever do—now forever intrinsically linked.
Ten days after our son Cormac was born, I read a final version of Chasing Hillary. This was my last chance to (gulp!) make factual changes. He lay in my lap, my perfect little peanut, as I reviewed 384 printed pages. I posted a picture of us on Instagram. A friend called me Wonder Woman, another told me I made it look easy. What I left out of the caption: the fact that I had dried baby vomit in my hair. That the vomit had been there for 24 hours, probably longer. Who could be sure?
The author and her infant son, putting the finishing touches on Chasing Hillary.
For years, when parents warned me how emotionally and physically grueling new motherhood would be, I nodded but thought: If I can function on no sleep for Hillary, I can do it for my own child.
This turned out to be only partly true. I could indeed endure three hours of sleep, down a cold brew with a shot of espresso and crank out a reasonably coherent front-page story. And, unlike Hillary’s campaign, my baby took a long afternoon nap. But the new baby knocked me back in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. For example, no one told me, that I’d be in so much pain that for the first five weeks just walking from couch to crib would be a challenge. Or that I would irrationally yell at my saint-of-a-husband over dirty bottles and diaper changes, unable to scream about my real frustration—that men, even the best ones, don’t have to go through any of this.
And even if someone had warned me, I wouldn’t have believed them that I would be so hopelessly, inexplicably in absolute, all-consuming love that I would start to see the book, my first “baby,” as an unwanted distraction. I couldn’t have imagined a scenario in which the arrival of my first book would essentially amount to an afterthought. And then it coincided with the arrival of a delightful little baby who filled a piece of me that, it turned out, newsprint never could.
However, I will admit that in recent weeks I’ve spent several sleepless nights agonizing over questions like: will my vagina still hurt while I’m on a multi-city, weeks-long book tour with my baby and my mom in tow? Is there any under-eye cover on that planet that could brighten the dark circles under my eyes? Will my raging hormones cause me to burst into tears on “Morning Joe”?
I had cabbage on my breasts (an old trick to reduce the pain) and an ice pack in my underwear when the publisher needed me to sign off on the jacket design. I wished I were staring into my baby’s eyes (even if they were closed). Or napping beside him. Or doing just about anything (changing a heaping diaper!) other than arguing with the fact checker about whether the bomb sniffing dogs used by the secret service were German Shepherds or Belgian Malinois. (They are the latter, in case you’re wondering.)
People always told me that you are supposed to read to your baby in utero, I’d considered talking to my bulging stomach a bridge too far. Then I realized that in recording the audio version of my book while nine months pregnant, I’d already read 80 hours of my own words to Cormac.
He’d been with me the whole time, kicking as I wrote. I couldn’t have done it without him, without the promise of him. We would open that envelope together. Just as soon as I found a pacifier.
Amy Chozick is a writer-at-large for The New York Times and the author of Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns and One Intact Glass Ceiling.
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