When Charlotte was born, I felt the joy that comes with seeing your child take the great reservoir of love she has and enlarge it to include her own children, along with a true partner of her own. Marc is a great dad, and together they are fantastic parents. Sometimes Chelsea and I do a dance that I expect is familiar to a lot of new moms and grandmothers out there: I’ll go to put the baby down for a nap or feed the toddler a snack, and Chelsea will swoop in. “Mom, that’s not the way I do that.” She can recite the latest American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines on sleep, infant feeding, and screen time, and I get to enjoy the special pleasure that comes from being a grandparent and knowing you don’t have to worry about the baby, because your child is handling the worrying. You can just focus on being the most loving and helpful grandparent you can be.
Chelsea has been by my side at every difficult moment since she arrived on this planet, and I’ve leaned on her more than I ever thought I would. Late on election night, when it was clear I had lost, she was sitting next to me, looking at me with a face full of love, sending all her considerable strength and grace toward me as hard as she could. As always, she helped see me through the darkness.
I was confident that Bill would be great at parenting. His father died before Bill was born; he knew how lucky he was to have this chance that his own father never had. Still, a lot of men are thrilled to be dads but not so thrilled about all the work that a child requires. The writer Katha Pollitt has observed how even the most egalitarian relationships can contort under the strain of child rearing, and all of a sudden the mom is expected to do everything, while the dad pitches in here and there. She calls it becoming “gender Republicans”—a nifty phrase, if perhaps a little unfair to all the feminist Republicans out there, who really do exist.
I knew that I had enough energy and devotion for two, if it turned out that Bill wasn’t a co-equal in the child-raising department. But I really hoped that wouldn’t happen. Our marriage had always been a true partnership. Though he was Governor and then President—jobs that would seem to “beat” a lot of others, if you were the kind of person who ranked jobs like that—my career was important to me, too. So was my time and, more broadly, my identity. I couldn’t wait to become a mother, but I didn’t want to lose everything else about myself in the becoming. I was counting on my husband not just to respect that but also to join me in guarding against it.
So it was a wonderful thing when Chelsea arrived, and Bill dove into parenting with characteristic gusto. We arrived at the hospital with Bill clutching the materials from the Lamaze classes we had attended together. When it turned out that Chelsea was breech, he fought to be in the operating room with me and hold my hand during the C-section. Being Governor came in handy when he asked to be the first father ever permitted by that hospital to do so. After we brought her home, he handled countless midnight feedings and diaper changes. We took turns making sure the parade of family and friends who wanted to spend time with Chelsea were looked after. As our daughter grew up, we both read her good-night stories. We both got to know her teachers and coaches. Even when Bill became President, he rearranged his schedule as much as he could to have dinner with us nearly every night that he was in Washington. And when he was somewhere else in the world, he’d call Chelsea to talk about her day and go over her homework with her.
Every year, our daughter adored her father more and more. As she entered adolescence, I wondered if that would change at all. I remembered how my own dad and I grew somewhat distant from each other once I became a teenager. I provoked him with a lot of fiery political arguments. He was at a loss to navigate the occasionally stormy seas of teenage girlhood. Would that happen with Chelsea and Bill? As it turned out, no. He lived for their debates; the fiercer the better. He didn’t leave me to deal with the “girl stuff”: heartache, self-esteem, safety. He was right there with us.
Did I handle more of the family responsibilities, especially while Bill was President? Of course. He was President. This was something we’d talked through before he ran, and I was more than up for it.
But I never felt like I was alone in the work of raising our wonderful daughter. And I know a lot of wives of busy men who would say otherwise. Bill wanted to be a great President, but that wouldn’t have mattered to him if he wasn’t also a great dad.
Every time I see my husband and daughter laugh over some private joke that only they know… every time I overhear a conversation between them, two lightning-quick minds testing each other… every time I see him look at her with total love and devotion… I’m reminded again that I chose exactly the right person to have a family with.
I don’t want to be married just to be married. I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.
My marriage to Bill Clinton was the most consequential decision of my life. I said no the first two times he asked me. But the third time, I said yes. And I’d do it again.
I hesitated to say yes because I wasn’t quite prepared for marriage. I hadn’t figured out what I wanted my future to be yet. And I knew that by marrying Bill, I would be running straight into a future far more momentous than any other I’d likely know. He was the most intense, brilliant, charismatic person I had ever met. He dreamt big. I, on the other hand, was practical and cautious. I knew that marrying him would be like hitching a ride on a comet. It took me a little while to get brave enough to take the leap.
We’ve been married since 1975. We’ve had many, many more happy days than sad or angry ones. We met in the library at Yale Law School one evening and started chatting, and all these years later, that conversation is still going strong. There’s no one I want to talk to more than him.
I know some people wonder why we’re still together. I heard it again in the 2016 campaign: that “we must have an arrangement” (we do, it’s called a marriage); that I helped him become President and then stayed so he could help me become President (no); that we lead completely separate lives, and it’s just a marriage on paper now (he is reading this over my shoulder in our kitchen with our dogs underfoot, and in a minute he will reorganize our bookshelves for the millionth time, which means I will not be able to find any of my books, and once I learn the new system, he’ll just redo it again, but I don’t mind because he really loves to organize those bookshelves).
I don’t believe our marriage is anyone’s business. Public people should be allowed to have private lives, too.
But I know that a lot of people are genuinely interested. Maybe you’re flat-out perplexed. Maybe you want to know how this works because you are married and would like it to last forty years or longer, and you’re looking for perspective. I certainly can’t fault you on that.
I don’t want to delve into all the details, because I really do want to hold on to what’s left of my privacy as much as I can.
But I will say this:
Bill has been an extraordinary father to our beloved daughter and an exuberant, hands-on grandfather to our two grandchildren. I look at Chelsea and Charlotte and Aidan and I think, “We did this.” That’s a big deal.
He has been my partner in life and my greatest champion since the moment we met. He never once asked me to put my career on hold for his. He never once suggested that maybe I shouldn’t compete for anything—in work or politics—because it would interfere with his life or ambitions. There were stretches of time in which my husband’s job was unquestionably more important than mine, and he still didn’t play that card. I have never felt like anything but an equal.