The Next Day - by Melinda French Gates
Published:
The Next Day - by Melinda French Gates
Read: 2025-05-03
Recommend: 10/10
I admire Melinda French Gates for her courage. She bravely says no to things that aren’t right for her, such as staying in an unhappy marriage. She prioritizes doing right by her children—spending time with them and being present in their lives. She also nurtures her friends, like John, offering them support and care. Melinda emphasizes the value of counseling, which helps her find her inner voice. As she says, “Therapy made it possible for me to respond to the betrayals in my marriage without betraying myself in return.” She believes in making gratitude a daily family ritual.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
My parents had long recognized my own ambitions and were intentional about supporting them. My mother told me constantly that I could be anyone I wanted to be. “Set your own agenda or someone else will set it for you” was one of her mantras, and the answer I still give when people ask me about the best advice I’ve ever received.
But the good news is that even at my lowest lows, I never seriously considered giving up. I still managed to trust that I was the kind of person a place like IBM would one day want to hire. And that’s because my father had sent me to college with a gift more valuable than any typewriter: a belief in my own potential.
That’s the role my father has always played for me. He is my small wave. While it took me some time to see a place for myself among the ambitious, confident young men at Duke, my dad had seen me as a future scientist or mathematician since before I’d ever stepped foot on campus. His perspective made it possible for me to power through—to remind myself that no one was born knowing Pascal and that doing big work meant doing hard work.
When we held hands to say grace together before dinner, we all went around and shared one thing about my dad we’re thankful for. Picking just one was hard, but if I’d tried to list them all, the food would have been ice-cold by the time we started eating. I hope, though, that I’ve let him know in other ways how much gratitude I have for all he’s done for me, from standing up for me in fourth grade, to buying that computer for my sister and me, to the ways he showed up later in my life, when things grew more complicated (like the time I was in a relationship in college that he knew I needed to get out of, and he found subtle, persistent ways to make sure I knew I deserved better).
But now I recognize that moment for what it was: a first, flailing attempt to rise to meet a fundamental challenge all parents face. We need to give our kids structure and security—without stifling their ability to learn and grow. We need to make our presence felt and our unconditional love known—without overstepping or becoming overbearing or pushing our children away. We need to remain vigilant and concerned—without allowing our own emotions and anxieties to distract or hijack our attention. Most of all, we need the discipline to separate our own needs from our children’s and the wisdom to know when to let go, at least a little.
Our children, they told her, come into the world already 80 percent formed into who they are going to be. As parents, we can affect only the 10 percent of our children’s personalities on each end, helping them to maximize their best qualities and trying to keep them from falling prey to their worst. That means that our job as parents is to accept our children for exactly who they are and to help them nurture their strengths and manage their weaknesses—not to turn them into someone else, but so they become the best possible version of themselves.
I think it’s a great injustice in our society that not every new parent gets the chance to step away from work after a baby’s birth. This time is essential—not only to recover from a delivery and adjust to a new routine but to bond as a family. That’s a large part of why, in my work, I’ve become a passionate advocate for universal paid family leave for both men and women. Being able to focus on a new baby should be a right, not a privilege. For my part, I could have lived that life forever. But inevitably, other priorities began to tug me away from the little world I’d created around Jenn and me.
I put strict limits around my foundation role so that I could keep my focus at home. “I am a mom first,” I told my new chief of staff on his first day. “There are some boundaries around my time and my family that we are going to have to work around.” I surrounded myself with people who understood that as much as I cared about the foundation’s work, I also cared about doing right by my kids. I knew I was incredibly lucky to be in a position to organize my life this way. And although there were definitely times when the work crept into time I’d tried to reserve for us at home, for the most part, it worked well—or at least well enough.
The guilt. Oh, the guilt. I felt guilty for feeling ambivalent about Warren’s generosity. I felt guilty for being on the phone instead of over there with Jenn and her doll. I felt guilty that I wasn’t going to be able to give the other children as much time as I’d been able to give Jenn. I felt guilty that I hadn’t given Jenn more time while I still could. And then, I felt guilty for feeling guilty because the undeniable fact that I had every possible advantage a person could ever have made me even more disappointed in myself for all the ways I still wasn’t a better mother.
A good enough parent is one who cares for their child and tends to their needs without expecting perfection of either themselves or their child. In fact, Winnicott and others argue that a good enough parent is actually more effective than a “perfect parent” (whatever that means) because perfectionism has no place in a healthy relationship between parent and child. A parent shouldn’t waste their time and energy striving to meet some impossible standard of parenting, and they shouldn’t let themselves hold their children to impossible standards either. Perfection is an unreasonable thing to expect from anyone, period.
For me, the notion of the good enough parent wasn’t just permission to let go. It made letting go feel essential, something I had to do for my children.
By releasing my grip on perfectionism and feeling the ease of letting go, I think I got a little bit closer to being the best version of a mother I can be.
John was so desperate to live for Emmy and the kids, but he knew the odds weren’t good, and, after so many painful treatments, he was simply exhausted. The change wasn’t just physical. John had never been religious, but in the last few months of his life he became extremely spiritual.
I thought I knew what he was getting at, and then he made it even clearer. “So if she gets to the point, Melinda, where she questions if she should marry somebody again, I want you to remind her that I thought that that would be a good path for her to choose.” That was John—always thinking of others, even in the face of death. I felt like he implanted some small part of himself within me—his selflessness, his enormous capacity to love—in that moment, and I wanted to live up to what he had asked of me. Yes, I promised him. I would be there to help Emmy find love again. Eventually, he got tired and told me it was okay to go back to my hotel now. Before I shut the door behind me, my eyes lingered on my friend, contemplating all that fierce love and loyalty blazing beneath his thin and pale skin.
“Be a greenhouse for each other.” I’ve always found that turn of phrase so beautiful, that aspiration so generous and wise. Maybe, the poem suggests, the most important thing we can do for a friend is to cultivate a place within us where the things they plant can grow. As John’s friend, I could carry forward some of his selflessness and enormous capacity for love. As Emmy’s, I could carry forward her unbelievable courage and indescribable grace. Even just the thought made me feel closer to them.
Saint Francis of Assisi. “For it is in giving that we receive,” he says. “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
At Microsoft, which was a real pressure cooker back then, my boss used to hate that my colleague Charlotte and I insisted on going out for a late-afternoon run every day. Too bad, I told her, because without these runs, I’d never last here. (She eventually came around.)
Going in, I think I had two important misconceptions about therapy, the first being that it was transactional. I went in looking for a solution to this one specific problem that was causing me so much grief. I thought therapy was a product, not a process. My second misconception was that a therapist would try to lead me around by the nose, taking charge of my life and telling me what to do. I was definitely not in the market for that.
For me, it was somewhere in between. What’s indisputable, though, is that I needed more help than I thought. Without years of my wonderful therapist’s wisdom and guidance, I would never have found my inner voice again. And I certainly never would have had the courage to trust it that winter day in New Mexico when it told me what I had to do. Therapy made it possible for me to respond to the betrayals in my marriage without betraying myself in return.
How many times in our lives had we gone to get a burger together, him driving, me in the passenger seat? It was a scene that had played out hundreds of times between us. But this time, we were talking about how we were going to separate our lives, to move forward into a world where we didn’t do these things together anymore. We were jointly planning out a future that we weren’t going to share.
Sure enough, there were nights when I took her up on it. Not every night, but some nights. Other times, when I felt the first waves of panic starting to set in, I’d go outside for a sweaty jog, just enough activity to shift my energy and give my anxiety a place to go. When I could, I meditated. And when my mind was too frenzied to focus on the sound of my breath, I listened to audiobooks, letting them relax me to sleep.
Now, whether I’m talking to young people or other women my age, I often find myself sharing what I’ve learned about how important it is to distill the sound of your own inner voice—to develop the skills to distinguish between the scripts you have been handed by others and the story you are writing for yourself. Often, I tell them, the first step to turning up the volume of your inner voice is to put what it’s saying to you out into the world. Write it in your journal. Tell it to your spouse or a friend you trust. Tell it to someone in your family. Tell it to a therapist. Therapy made all the difference for me, and I hope my experience might encourage some other skeptics out there to consider that it could make a difference for you, too.
in April of 2019, I was asked in an interview, “Who or what is the greatest love of your life?” and the answer came to me in a heartbeat. “It’s an unbreakable tie,” I said, “between the foundation we started, the man I started it with, and the three children we have together.” The answer felt so obvious and fundamental that it required no thought at all. And yet, just five years later, I found myself preparing to enter a world where I had severed ties with both Bill and our foundation.
I also tried to incorporate a sense of ritual into the 360 days a year that weren’t the birthday of anyone in our immediate family. Starting when Jenn was quite little, we’d all go around the dinner table and name something we were grateful for. When I first proposed the idea to Bill, he wasn’t totally sold. While I’d grown up saying grace before dinner, his family got straight to the food, so he worried it would feel stiff and forced. Plus, he thought that at three years old, Jenn might be too young to get it. But the first night we tried it, she ended up being the one to convince him herself, and all it took was four words: “I’m thankful for Daddy.” With that, another tradition became firmly established.
Over time, the ritual acquired its own set of rules. One was that you couldn’t repeat someone else’s answer—you had to come up with your own. Another was that you couldn’t judge or negate someone else’s contribution. (This was helpful for me, who frequently made my three children indulge me as I went on about the sun peeking out through the gray Seattle sky or the beautiful song of a tiny wren I’d noticed while walking outside. No judgments, kids!)
All these years later, I still take my work very seriously. And, yes, I still prepare intensely for meetings. But these days, I’m no longer driven by the same kind of insecurity. I finally believe that it’s okay if I can’t instantly summon exactly the right statistic to substantiate the point I’m making or if the limits to my knowledge reveal themselves. Now that I’m finally okay showing up as no one but myself, I no longer treat every appointment on my calendar as a referendum on whether I deserve to be there. It’s a much gentler way to live.
Andrew Oswald from England’s University of Warwick and David Blanchflower from Dartmouth. These two scholars examined data on two million people from eighty countries and found that our happiness levels tend to follow a U-shaped curve. We enter adulthood with a high level of happiness, experience a dip in our 40s and 50s, then rebound. “Encouragingly,” Dr. Oswald told The New York Times, “by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit, then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old.”