Bill and I had a hand in all of this, I’m sure. But Chelsea has been Chelsea from the very start. I think most parents find that their children are more formed when they arrive than we expect. It’s like Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “Your children are not your children. They come through you but not from you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you, for life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.”
Like all moms, I wanted to protect Chelsea from illness and injury, bullies, disappointments, and a dangerous world. I also had a different set of threats in mind, which are particular to the daughters of public figures. She grew up on the front page of newspapers. She was attacked by right-wing personalities on the radio and mocked on television when she was just thirteen years old—it still makes my blood boil. There were plenty of nights when I wondered if we had made a terrible mistake by subjecting her to this life. I worried not just that she’d feel self-conscious but also that she’d become too practiced in the art of putting on a happy face for the cameras. I wanted her to have a rich interior life: to be sincere and spontaneous; to own her feelings, not stifle them. In short, I wanted her to be a real person with her own identity and interests.
The only way I knew how to do that was to make her life as normal as possible. Chelsea had chores at the White House. If she wanted a new book or game, she had to save her allowance to buy it. When she was bratty—to her credit, an extremely rare occurrence—she was chastised and sometimes punished. Our go-to was no TV or phone privileges for a week.
But there’s a limit to how much you can make life normal for the President’s daughter. So we also decided to embrace and celebrate the incredible opportunities that her unusual childhood and adolescence afforded. She went on visits overseas with us: touring the Forbidden City in China, riding an elephant in Nepal, having conversations with Nelson Mandela. She even found herself at fourteen discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude with Gabriel García Márquez. Since she had always been interested in science and health, Bill made a point of introducing her to just about every scientist and doctor who visited the White House. She relished these conversations and experiences. “This is so cool!” she said the first time we saw Camp David, on her first flight on Air Force One, when she came along as I led the U.S. delegation to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway. I watched her—the questions she asked, her excited reflections on everything we saw and experienced—and was delighted. She never grew bored or acted entitled. She knew how special it all was.
Perhaps most important to me, Chelsea never needed to be reminded to thank everyone who made our lives both extraordinary and ordinary: the White House staff, her teachers, her Secret Service detail, her friends’ parents. She treated them all the exact same way—even heads of state. Her gratitude toward the people in her life ran deep. It led to many “proud mom” moments for me, as the kids would say.
Over the years, I worried about Chelsea less and less, as it became clear I didn’t have to. I also learned from her more and more. In stressful moments, she’s the calmest person in the room. She also seizes every chance to be silly with her friends and, now, her kids. These are the actions of someone who understands that life will throw a lot of challenges your way, and you should build up your inner resources of peace and happiness whenever you can.
And as was particularly evident in the 2016 campaign, she’s intrepid. Chelsea traveled far and wide campaigning for me, and she did it with Aidan, whom she was still nursing. It’s like that line from the late Ann Richards, the Governor of Texas: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, just backward and in high heels.” Chelsea did everything an energetic campaign surrogate would do, just with a tiny baby attached to her and all the gear that he required.
She’d call me from the road to tell me everything that she was seeing and hearing. “I’m not sure we’re breaking through,” she said, both during the primary and the general. “It feels really hard to get the facts out.” Her time on the 2016 campaign trail started with a bang. On her very first day, when she politely raised questions about Bernie’s health care plan—she has a master’s degree in public health and a doctorate in international relations with a focus on public health institutions, so she knows what she’s talking about—she got absolutely hammered for it.
I remember our conversation on the phone that night. Chelsea was frustrated with herself that her words didn’t match what she knew or felt. (I can empathize!) She left some people with the impression that she thought Bernie wanted to get rid of all health care—an absurd notion and of course not what she meant or said. She felt awful—awful that she had left a false impression about anything, with anyone, and especially because it was related to something that she understands and cares about deeply. I wished I could give her a big hug. Instead, we talked it out.
Our conversation might seem a little different from the average mother-daughter talk, but underneath, it’s a lot like anyone’s. We started in problem-solving mode. We reviewed the policy and how better to talk about the differences between Bernie’s plan and mine. Chelsea had been right on the specifics that day: at that stage in the campaign, Bernie’s health care plan called for starting over to get to single payer, which is what she said. But we both knew that wasn’t going to matter at this point. We returned to the basics: why my plan to improve the Affordable Care Act and add a public option was the right one to get to universal coverage. As you can tell, Chelsea and I are thought partners on this topic in particular, and her approach to thinking through problems and solutions is a lot like mine. (We recently shared a smile and a sigh when we heard Bernie called for improving the Affordable Care Act immediately by embracing the approach that I proposed as a candidate: a public option in fifty states and lowering the Medicare age to fifty-five.)
We gave ourselves a few minutes to vent about all the hate that at times seemed visceral toward me, our family, and all women stepping out. Then we switched gears and put the frustrating day behind us. We laughed about a photo of Charlotte at ballet class that Marc had sent us. We talked about how glad we were that Chelsea’s low-level nausea seemed to have passed. (She was a few months pregnant.) And we said our I-love-yous and hung up, knowing that tomorrow would be another opportunity to make our case and grateful that we had each other’s backs.
Every day, I was humbled by her fierce support of me. As a candidate, I was glad to have her in my corner, working diligently to explain important issues and why she believed so deeply in my plans—and me. And as her mom, I was and am so proud that she continues to rise above the attacks hurled at her every single day.
More than anyone else, it was Chelsea who helped me to see that my stance on same-sex marriage was incompatible with my values and the work I had done in the Senate and at the State Department to protect the rights of LGBT people. She impressed upon me that I had to endorse marriage equality if I was truly committed to equal human dignity, and as soon as I left the State Department, I did. Later, when I received the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign, I thought of her. And it was Chelsea who told me about the Zika virus long before it was in the newspapers. “This is going to be a huge problem,” she said, and she was right. We’re still not doing enough.