Jill Biden - Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself

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For my children:
Beau, Hunter, and Ashley,
you brought love and light into my life

A girl I barely know anymore stares out at me from a grainy wedding photo. She has feathered hair and wears a delicate tea-length white dress. She walks behind two little boysfrozen forever in their earnest jackets and tieswho already have her heart. As she approaches the stark, slatted door of the U.N. Chapel, her smile gives no hint of the journey that brought them to this day.

All these years later, as I sit on the big, soft couch in the sunroom in my home in Wilmington, Delaware, fragments of the promise made that day fill the room around me like a keepsake boxcovering every inch of wall space with mementos, artwork, souvenirs, and pictures of our family.

The sunroom is one of my favorite places in the world. The small room overlooks the lake behind our house, and I like to sit with my feet tucked up on the sofa, wrapped in a throw, grading papers from my classes at Northern Virginia Community College, where Ive taught English and writing for the last ten years. Its a room made for homeyness and comfort.

When I look up from the sofa, I see a photo of my daughter, Ashley, and me. Were both smiling in that way that makes us look most alike, and it reminds me of all our similarities: our sense of humor, the candor we save for each other, our stubbornness. She gave me the picture for Mothers Day, printed along with a poem she wrote: like the branches of a tree / I am an extension of you / my heart and soul / firmly and effortlessly / embedded in your roots.

There are posters from my husband Joes Senate campaigns, and one from his 2012 debate with Paul Ryan at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Its in the style of a boxing match and announces, Thrill in the Ville II. Theres also a poster from my son Beaus run for attorney general of Delawarealways following in his fathers footsteps.

A side table holds a photo of my son Hunter, captured when he fell asleep on the couch one afternoon. On his chest is his sleeping daughter, Finnegan, in a navy-blue jumper, her hair the delicate golden curls of a preschooler. Almost all of my pictures of Hunter are with his children, Finn, Maisy, and Naomi, and the frames can barely contain his love and pride for them. Hes the heart of our family in so many ways.

Theres a small paperweight of the White House seal, one of our mementos from the experience of a lifetime: eight wonderful years as part of the Obama-Biden administration. Not far from that is a candid shot of my parents, both gone now; a picture of my sisters, all four of them; and a formal portrait of four generations of the whole boisterous Biden clan.

On a wall nearby hangs a painting of a dockthe same dock that I can see if I open up the French doors just to my right. After Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, thats where I most often imagine him, with the ripples of reflected light framing his face. In my mind, he is looking out at the water in his Penn baseball cap or showing his kids, little Hunter and Natalie, how to hook a worm on their fishing poles. I would give anything to be able to go back to those days for just a moment.

When I put my feet up on the worn wood coffee table, I usually have to push aside a stack of Joes daily media clips, a pile of student essays, or a box of colored pencils from the kids visit. Natalie left a note taped to the mirror in preparation for our annual Thanksgiving trip to Nantucket that reads, We cant wait to go to Nana-tucket! It hangs next to finger paintings of cats and salamanders, an acrylic man, and a pen-and-ink blue-footed dragonall original artwork from the grandkids.

The sunroom is where all the parts of my life meet: the career that has sustained my passions and independence for more than thirty years. The political adventure I never expected. The boys who made me a mother after their own was stolen away. The daughter who completed our family. The grandkids who pieced together the wreckage of our lives. The parents and sisters and in-laws and friends who helped shape the woman Ive become. The man Ive built this life with.

I am a mother and a grandmother, a friend and a teacher, a wife and a sister. Every scene on those walls, every role Ive played, has taught me so much about what family means. Ive learnedand am still learningabout the bonds that make up a family. Few of us would reduce those bonds, that gravitational force, to something as simplistic as blood. Families are born, created, discovered, and forged. They unfold in elegantly ordered generational branches. They are woven together with messy heartstrings of desire and despair, friendship and friction, grace and gratitude.

Strong love, we hope, is the mortar holding us together. Without it, we scatter like a pile of stones in the face of the inevitable: resentments, slights, betrayals, or just time. But love makes us flexible and resilient. It allows us to forgive the unforgivable. To become more than ourselves, together. And though love cant protect us from the sorrows of life, it gives us refuge. Inside its walls, we can huddle together and draw strength. Inside, we are always home.

This is the truest thing I know: that love makes a family whole. It doesnt matter if youre blending a family with biological and nonbiological children, or healing the wounds of losing a loved one, or inviting an aging parent to live with you. The details may differ, but love is the common denominator.

This is the story of how Joe and I created our familythrough traditions, through laughter, through the simple ways we found joy. We had no road map or master plan. We faltered at times, but we never stopped working hard to keep the family strong. And we did it all together. We built our family, rebuilt it when we had to, and discovered along the way the meaning behind the beautiful words of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi from the poem Childhood Friends:

Let a teacher wave away the flies

and put a plaster on the wound.

Dont turn your head. Keep looking

at the bandaged place. Thats where

the light enters you.

And dont believe for a moment

that youre healing yourself.