Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (13 page)

In Congress and on the campaign trail, I often find myself speaking to victims of the IRS and the tax code. I tell them: “I know what you're going through. I've seen it from the inside. And as bad as the tax code looks from the outside, it looks even worse from the inside!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Our Twenty-nine Children

IN any case, the home front was changing too.

In 1988, while I was just beginning work as a federal tax litigation attorney, I became pregnant with our third baby. Although unexpected, Marcus and I were so happy. Our two sons, Lucas and Harrison, were then five and two. Lucas had already developed his own little personality as a demanding, willful “leader of the pack,” while Harrison, alas, was in his “terrible twos,” although we could imagine that he would grow up to be an actor or a dancer—he was a happy baby. What great little boys they were! I could have had five boys—boys are so much fun. They were good brothers to each other; they would take turns playing spacemen, and then cowboys, and then cowboys again—or maybe they would be back in time with the dinosaurs.I had three brothers, no sisters. And Marcus had two brothers, no sisters. We already had two boys, so I presumed that there were no girl genes between us; so no girls in the cards, it seemed.

But it was not to be. Three months later, I lost the baby in my womb—a miscarriage. It seemed as if my waist had stopped expanding; something was off. Marcus took me to the doctor for an examination. An ultrasound was ordered, and we anxiously awaited our first look at our new baby. Something, I could see, was wrong. I asked the technician why the baby was lying down at the bottom of the screen, as if it were sleeping. The technician got up and left the room and called in a midwife. The midwife looked at the screen, paused for a moment, and then told us: Our baby wasn't sleeping, our baby was no longer living. We were completely unprepared for this news; it was devastating.

The midwife advised me to go home and that over the next few days, the baby would naturally expel. And then, even as she was speaking, my water broke as I was lying on the table, and the baby instantaneously delivered. The midwife put the baby on a paper towel and held it in her palm. Marcus was overcome with emotion; he couldn't bear to see the baby and left the room. I needed to see our baby, who was now gray and lifeless, the umbilical cord had disintegrated. But nonetheless, that tiny baby was perfect, maybe four inches long. I memorized every feature of that baby, although I didn't touch the baby, nor did I know its sex.

I had to have an emergency dilation and curettage, because my body wouldn't stop bleeding. Afterward, the momentousness of what had happened struck us. We had lost our child—this miscarriage was as real to us as if we had lost Lucas or Harrison. Marcus and I wept in each other's arms. Friends called, but I couldn't muster the ability to speak with them. I didn't speak to anyone else for three days. I was profoundly affected by this loss of life. My little sons would crawl into bed with me, and I would just hold them tight—tighter than ever.
Life is so precious,
I thought to myself. And as so often has happened during our marriage, Marcus picked up the load of family duties. Both of our hearts were broken, but he knew that our lives had to go on.

Although Marcus and I hadn't considered ourselves to be overly career minded and certainly not overly materialistic, we made a new and life-changing decision. We resolved to receive however many children God chose to give us. Moreover, the loss brought us even closer together as a couple, in a depth of feeling that we hadn't experienced before. Afterward, women at church and at work shared their stories of miscarriage with me. I hadn't heard much about miscarriage before, and now it seemed that so many women had also gone through the same tragic experience. Our respect for human life, for the primacy of children and the family took deeper root.

And of course, Marcus and I prayed. We knew that death comes to all of us here on earth, and yet through our faith in Christ Jesus, we also knew that God will come again for us, taking us to Himself, so that where He is, we may be also. And so too our baby. Amen.

We told God that our hearts were broken but that we were absolutely committed to life, and so we would gratefully receive into our lives as many more children as He wished. And even if it was only for a short time, well, we would be grateful for those precious moments.

The ambulance had taken me to St. Mary's, a Catholic hospital. In the midst of the frenetic activity at the hospital, we hadn't thought about the burial arrangements. Once home, Marcus called the hospital. We waited and prayed, hoping to be able to bury our baby. And because the Catholic Church is so profoundly pro-life, the hospital had buried our little baby in a proper grave. The hospital hadn't even asked us—it was just the right thing to do. We cannot thank the hospital enough for burying our baby. Later, we drove out to the burial site, and there, in a little patch of sacred earth, nestled in the grass, we saw the small marker. Lot 24, row 18—a place that would be etched forever on our hearts. We dropped to our knees and wept again. We thanked the hospital for doing right by our baby, and we prayed again to God, thanking Him for allowing our baby's body to find a holy resting place, even as He carried its soul up to be with Him. Someday, with abiding hope, we look forward to reuniting with that baby, whom we count as our third child, now in heaven. Meanwhile, here on earth, we dedicated our children and our family to God.

More than two decades later, tears come to my eyes as I think back to that day. Yet I have often thought that sometimes events are so sad that just at the moment when you think they can't get any sadder, a new event opens up and reveals a new kind of wonderment.

Soon, thankfully, I was pregnant again. Marcus and I prayed constantly, beseeching God to bring that baby to term. And yes, Elisa Laura Bachmann—her middle name after my mother's mother—was born on April 14, 1990. Our first daughter! Marcus had only brothers growing up, as did I. Finally, we had a baby girl to grace our lives. She was pretty in pink—and, if I may be permitted a boast, pretty in every other color.

One day Marcus and I were sitting together in the kitchen, watching her. That's all we were doing—watching her every wiggle and gesture. In that moment, I thought of Whittaker Chambers's famous discussion of his baby girl's ear in his soul-searing book,
Witness
. Chambers had once been a communist—a spy for the Soviet Union, in fact—but then he saw the light. He took his story to the FBI and so became not only a witness against other Soviet spies in the 1940s but also, in a larger sense, a witness against godless communism. Chambers's moment of epiphany came to him as he watched his baby:

 

My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears.

The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.”

Chambers then thought to himself, “Design presupposes God.” And so, he wrote, “at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.” Marcus and I were already firm believers, of course, as we gazed on Elisa's little ear, but we revere Chambers and his memory. We revere the author of
Witness
as more than a witness to faith; he was a champion of faith. No wonder President Reagan awarded him, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Meanwhile, in our lives—it was now 1992—we were ready to take our three children out of the city and into the suburbs. We had enjoyed our time in St. Paul, but we needed more room, and the kids needed a safe place to play.

So Marcus, having completed much of his PhD course work, found a new job as a Christian counselor in the suburbs, and we moved to the town of Stillwater, about ten miles east of St. Paul; we have been here ever since. Our little town sits on the banks of the St. Croix River, which serves as the boundary line between Minnesota and Wisconsin. It's not far away from Anoka, where my mother and her husband Ray reside, and it's not far from Marcus's family farm. When you have aging parents, it's always nice to be close.

Stillwater is a place rich in tradition. Along with much of the western Great Lakes region, it was settled originally by the Dakota and Ojibwa, or Chippewa, tribes; they thrived on the abundant local fish and game, as well as wild rice and other indigenous plants. In 1855 poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his famous “Song of Hiawatha,” based on legends of the Ojibwa, describing “happiness and plenty / In the land of the Ojibways, / In the pleasant land and peaceful.”

Stillwater is often called the birthplace of Minnesota. It was here in 1848, right on the corner of Main and Myrtle, that folks from the area convened and set in motion the legal process leading to the formation of the Minnesota Territory and then, in 1857, to the joining of the great State of Minnesota with the larger federal Union.

In the nineteenth century, Stillwater's economy was driven by forestry. Timber harvested upstream flowed down the St. Croix, each log having been stamped by its owner. In the river at Stillwater, a boom, or barrier, was stretched across the water to catch the logs, which were then tallied and tracked as they went on to the sawmill. It was a marvelously intricate system in which people who had never even met one another managed to work together, following a complex process that turned trees into valuable building materials. This process might be called an example of the “spontaneous order” that the economist Friedrich Hayek was later to describe so ably. That is, it's the process of thousands of people cooperating with one another for the benefit of all—and no bureaucrat in some faraway place could have made this system work so effectively. Yes, these loggers might also be competing with one another, but as long as commonsense laws were put in place, and as long as contracts were honored and enforced, then cooperation and competition could occur profitably at the same time. To this day, the St. Croix Boom Site is a notable tourist attraction, reminding visitors of the mighty lumberjacks and their legendary deeds.

In addition to hard workers, Stillwater has had its inventors. Back in 1921, Charles Strite received a patent for the pop-up toaster—the greatest thing since sliced bread, we like to joke! Five years later, Strite opened a factory in Minneapolis. Today Stillwater remains a town full of hardworking folks; the locals, along with visitors, enjoy boating on the river, strolling through the many stores clustered in the downtown, and visiting the local vineyards—and there's even a brewery cave tour!

In other words, Stillwater, population eighteen thousand, has its own proud history, as well as its own homegrown entrepreneurial and civic energy. Indeed, we Stillwaterites continue to be responsible, civic-minded citizens, fully capable of making all the big decisions about ourselves, our families, and our community. We raise our kids responsibly, we make our own local decisions, and we run our lives in an accountable, transparent manner. So here's a question: Why do the state capital, St. Paul, and the national capital, Washington, insist on telling us what to do? How did it happen that individual autonomy and local control were arrogated to state and federal bureaucrats? Here's an even more important question: How can we take our power back, away from the bureaucrats who took it away from us in the first place?

All those questions—and a few answers—were becoming apparent to me during those awakening years. But first, Marcus and I had kids to raise. More kids than we had ever dreamed of.

When we moved to Stillwater in the spring of 1992, we had three kids, and a fourth soon joined us; Caroline Cathleen Bachmann was born on June 15, 1992. These four kids seemed to fill up our four-bedroom house, and yet we asked God for more—and we got more.

Sophia Anna Bachmann—her middle name honoring my father's mother, the
Wall Street Journal
–reading Republican—was born on May 31, 1994. So there we were, at a total of five kids. We would have been happy with more, of course, but after that pregnancy, I realized I couldn't have any more biological children.

During my early thirties, I found that I was developing severe headaches. They were diagnosed as migraines. The word “migraine,” I learned, is derived from the Greek word for “skull,” which is
kranion
, or “cranium,” plus the Greek word for “half,” which is
hemi
. So the term “hemi-cranium” was sanded and silted down to “migraine.” But let me tell you, a migraine hurts your whole cranium. Yet with the right medication, these headaches are entirely controllable; I thought to myself,
Thank God that medical science has developed such effective treatments.
As a child, I had read about how scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk had used their brilliance to identify and alleviate the causes of disease. Thanks to their genius, the blind could now see and the lame could walk. And so God's plan for us unfolds here on earth.

I later learned that some thirty million Americans suffer from migraines, about three-fourths of them women—and that migraine incidence in women spikes after the change of life. At the time, I thought to myself,
Welcome to the club, Michele.
And while I am reluctant to cite sexism as a political issue, sexism certainly can exist. Many years later, when migraines briefly became a campaign issue for me, it appeared that political foes were maybe playing the gender card. After all, at one time or another, all of us, both men and women, suffer pain and get sick.

Meanwhile, back in Stillwater, I threw myself into raising all these kids. During the years 1992 to 2000, I didn't work outside our home, although I certainly was busy. At the Bachmann household, it was “kids r us.” I was always cooking, cleaning, sewing, painting, wallpapering, and generally mothering. I thought of the nursery rhyme, “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe / She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.” Of course, I hadn't seen anything yet.