2 Dads in the U.S. Congress

[arminnie]

This is a great article about two fathers who are serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. I know Bobby, he's the nicest and smartest person I've ever met. Rep. Larson sounds like a great guy also.

Happy Father's Day to all!

June 14, 2006Two congressmen, two stories of fatherhood
By Betsy Rothstein
May elicits both dread and delight for Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.).

It’s baseball season, and he loves to watch the look in his 10-year-old son Raymond’s eyes as he heads out onto the field for a Little League game. It’s also the month when excruciating pain, the cause of which harkens back to medieval times, grips his son’s little body and forces him into intensive care in a Hartford children’s hospital for weeks at a time.

Across the country, Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) has also known the pain of watching a child suffer. A week after son, Shaan, was born, doctors heard a murmur that later indicated Shaan had holes in his heart. Jindal watched his 3-month-old boy being wheeled by attendants into an operating room for open-heart surgery. That was in August 2004, amid Jindal’s campaign for Congress.

For both lawmakers, Father’s Day this Sunday will be sweet and simple, spent with family, at church and at home for a quiet meal. Larson plans to visit his father’s grave. Jindal may receive a homemade card.

While Shaan, now 2, is mostly out of the woods medically, he still sees physical therapists, speech therapists and doctors and will likely never play rough sports such as football.

Raymond Larson’s prognosis is unclear. For three of the past four Mays, including last month, he has suffered from St. Anthony’s fire, a disease in which ergot, a substance found in grass, rye and wheat, builds up in his body and causes crushing intestinal pain.

St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost causes, to whom Catholics turn when they’re feeling hopeless. In medieval times, people thought the disease indicated the presence of the Devil.

Raymond needs strong painkillers. Two months ago, Larson left his responsibilities in Washington to spend 12 days at his son’s hospital bedside. He took the night shift, feeling that he had to be nearby when his son woke up scared from the hallucinatory side effects of the drugs.

“It’s not that you want that type of bonding experience,” Larson says, “but I’m glad I’m there for him.”

Doctors still don’t know why Raymond reacts this way in May. When he first suffered symptoms, he was 7 years old and doctors believed it was acute appendicitis. After operating in 2002, the doctors found nothing extreme.

The lawn at Larson’s home and the grass on neighbors’ farms have been tested for ergot but have come up clean. Raymond’s blood has been sent to labs in Canada and Germany for further testing.

Last week, Larson and Jindal sat down for extensive interviews with The Hill about fatherhood. Though he had a waiting room full of meetings begging for his attention, Jindal took time to contemplate what fatherhood has meant to him as well as the intricacies, likes and dislikes of each of his two children, Shaan and Selia, 4.

He and his wife have another baby due in August. They won’t learn the sex before the child is born. Jindal wants to know, but his wife does not.

“She says when I’m pregnant we can find out,” he said, laughing.

Larson, amid caucus meetings and votes, also took time to discuss fatherhood. He recounted endearing tales of how his daughters are at that awkward teenage stage in which they are both proud and embarrassed by their father and wouldn’t mind if he dropped them off at the curb. One daughter is 13, a cheerleader, and “thinks she’s 21.” Another is 16 and into volleyball.

And of course, there is Raymond’s Little League.

“I don’t make all of his games,” Larson said, “and that’s the big heartache of a parent who serves in Congress. You try to make their events.”

Larson lingered on his relationship with his own father, a man he says he’ll never measure up to as a parent.

“I always hoped that I would be the kind of father mine was to me, but they are tall shoes to fill,” Larson said, explaining that his dad, who died in 1988, worked three jobs to support the family and was only around for significant time on Sundays.

“He had incredible respect for my mother. Any time he had an opportunity to be there for us, he was, and he was there for us in his work.

“Everything he did was for his family. He didn’t have any time for himself. We never went hungry. He put food on the table — that was it. He was so unselfish in terms of sacrificing everything for his family.”

Both Larson and Jindal say their families mean far more to them than politics; at the end of their lives their most important memories will involve their wives and children. They both insist that they commit themselves to politics because they believe their children will see their accomplishments and be proud of them.

But it’s never easy.

“The hardest time for me is at night. When I finally get home it’s a lonely place ... a lonely feeling,” said Larson, who spends three nights a week in a Hill House apartment on Capitol Hill. “You miss not being able to kiss your kids goodnight.”

Jindal too, has his hard feelings, so he turns to his faith. “My faith teaches me that God won’t give me more than I can bear,” he said. “It also means that sometimes bad things happen. Just because I pray doesn’t mean my children will be healthy. There are things you cannot control.”

Jindal says he always assumed he’d be a husband and a father, but between 1992 and 1994, while attending Oxford University, he contemplated joining the priesthood. He prayed and ultimately decided that the priesthood was not for him.

“My parents were immigrants, [and] for them parenthood is extremely important,” Jindal said.

He grew up poor, living in rented apartments until he was 7, when the family moved to a house. “My parents stressed that they would sacrifice everything for us,” he said, “but it was understood that we would do that for our kids.”

Jindal said he never understood fatherhood until he had children of his own: “I sometimes laugh at some of my preconceptions of what fatherhood would be like — not only the joys but the sacrifices. You don’t realize how tired and busy you are until you have kids. You don’t realize how much you can love a child until you have your own.

“I literally go in the middle of the night to make sure she’s breathing,” he said of his daughter, explaining that it’s hard to watch her grow up and get bigger but that as she does “she’s even more amazing.”

Larson, who describes himself as a “cherubic little Irishman,” spoke of his own father and recalled a man who practiced tough love. “He wasn’t the type of person who would come up and tell you he loved you, but he would tell you that he was proud of you,” said Larson, one of eight children. “He never bragged nor boasted. He was always doing things for other people.”

Larson’s brand of fathering is different. “I think I tell my kids every opportunity I get that I love them,” he said.

When Jindal speaks of fathering, it’s a matter of being focused and pragmatic. When he learned of his son’s illness, he was scared, of course, but also pragmatic, working to find the best possible doctors to undertake the operation.

He tries to make his children’s needs and likes a priority. His daughter loves cotton candy, riding the carousel at the White House picnic and spending time at convenience stores when her father stops the car for gasoline. So they go and he makes sure to allow her the 20 minutes it takes for her to pick out what she wants. For his son, it’s time at the park to “jump off things” and play. So they go, no matter if Jindal has other, more political, responsibilities.

“To me, those are magical moments,” he said.

Larson, too, doesn’t miss the details. On a recent Sunday he watched a Little League game; Raymond got two hits and a great catch in the outfield.