What motivates first lady Jill Biden? Love, family.
Editor’s Note: First lady Jill Biden is set to make a Wednesday visit to Allentown. It’s part of a swing through several states for “listening sessions” with the Hispanic community.
When 26-year-old Jill Jacobs married widower, Sen. Joe Biden in 1977, she reflected, as she began the loving, yet demanding routine of caring for his two young boys, that “it was not lost on me that I was living a love story intended for someone else.”
In the years that followed, Dr. Jill
Biden and President Joe Biden have created a life built on love, that is hard to imagine was not destined from the start. And yet, from the five proposals it took for her to say “yes” to the young senator, to her fierce determination to keep her career as a community college instructor, Dr. Jill Biden remains true to herself.
Dr. Jill Biden, our nation’s first lady, wrote a 2019 memoir, “Where the
Light Enters,” after the heartbreaking death of her stepson Beau Biden. In it we can gain a deep understanding of her, her husband, their life challenges and choices, their faith and their family.
While she served as second lady, her spotlight in that role was decidedly dimmer than it is now as first lady of the United States. While her name was known nationally and internationally because of her husband’s long career in politics, and his time as vice president, the story of Dr. Biden remained largely unknown.
And in this tenderly written autobiography, her ethos as a family-centered woman and dedicated educator shine.
The central theme of her autobiography is love. Love for parents and grandparents, her spouse, her children and
grandchildren.
At the same time it is about her need for independence and her own career when no one ever expected her to have one, let alone keep it in the years after her husband achieved the vice presidency and the presidency of the United States.
Dr. Biden is a vibrant and active political spouse, with a focus on military
families and education. And, in an admirably modern stroke, Dr. Biden is also a working woman with a decadeslong career that fueled her passion and independence beyond family life and political spouse duties, making her a very modern, and quite singular figure of a first lady of the United States.
In “Where The Light Enters,” Dr.
Biden describes herself as “a mother and a grandmother, a friend and a teacher, a wife and a sister.” She is the first first lady in the history of the United States to remain employed in her chosen field.
As a young girl growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, Jill Biden learned the meaning of love from her family. Her paternal grandmother was an especially loving figure in her life.
She also found in her parents a role model of romantic love, that it could be “unstoppable, indomitable, and full of hope.” Her parents were so close, that even at the dinner table her mother chose to sit right next to her father, instead of at the other end of their dining room table.
It was a model of married love that Jill aspired to, and it is the theme of the book; love in all its incarnations that she returns to again and again. To read of Jill Jacobs’ early life is to rip a page from a popular teenage magazine, Seventeen. She was concerned with all the things young girls and soon-to-be women were of the time, mostly finding true love.
The model of her parents’ relationship provided her with a strong ideal. And yet, like so many women of her era she also pursued her career with just as much determination.
It may be why she opens the book with a prologue that describes her wedding photo. She says: “A girl I barely know anymore stares out at me from a grainy wedding photo.”
She describes her stepsons, Beau and Hunter, also in the photo: “She walks behind two little boys — frozen forever in their earnest jackets and ties — who already have my heart.”
She quotes a poem her daughter Ashley wrote: “Like branches of a tree/I am an extension of you/my heart and soul/firmly and effortlessly/ embedded in your roots.”
Welcome to the Lehigh Valley, Dr. Biden. Many of us here in the Lehigh Valley find it easy to identify with your dedication to your family, and your belief in the power of education.
The details of our lives may differ, but love is the common denominator.