Blog Verité

I knew something was off even before I opened my eyes. It was April 26, 1996—a Friday—around 4 in the morning, and my sheets were damp. It took me a moment to realize what had happened: My water had broken. Here, at last, was the day I’d been waiting for my whole life. I was going to become a mother.

“It’s happening,” I told Bill as I nudged him awake. Before calling the doctor, we shared a moment together, giggling at the bizarre and wonderful notion that, before the day was over, there would be three of us. 

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

We got ourselves to the hospital pretty quickly. The baby, however, was in no such hurry. I had been warned that with a first pregnancy, labor can last an astonishingly long time, and, as it turned out, mine was no exception. My contractions still hadn’t really started yet—at least not that I could feel—and the doctor even debated sending us home to wait there instead. Ultimately, we settled on a compromise. I stayed at the hospital. Bill went to the office.

Before you roll your eyes, keep in mind that there really wasn’t anything for him to do yet. Plus I had a good book with me—The Custom of the Country (I was on an Edith Wharton kick at the time)—so I was happy to send him off with a promise to call as soon as there were any developments.

It wasn’t until much later that afternoon that I started active labor. Once it began, though, things got intense fast.

When Bill got back, he was fascinated by everything that was unfolding. His wide-eyed wonder made me feel proud of the amazing thing my body was doing—and less self-conscious about some of the mechanics. (I did ask him to take his sweater off, though, because it smelled like the hamburger he’d eaten on the way, and I was far too nauseated to deal with that.)

Read More: Melinda French Gates Is Going It Alone

After a long, slow ramp-up during the morning came hour after hour of really hard labor. The baby descended incrementally, only to retreat again. Toward the end, the doctor started to warn that a C-section was imminent. In a frantic effort to avoid that, I submitted to an indescribably painful attempt to draw the baby out with the help of a vacuum. I knew something was wrong when my doctor, who until then had been cool as a cucumber, suddenly started shrieking, “Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off right now!”

But then, after 14 and a half hours of labor, all of that faded away. Because at 6:11 p.m. on Friday, April 26, 1996, my daughter, Jennifer Katharine Gates—my Jenn—arrived into the world.

I was absolutely exhausted. I was overcome with relief. I needed a lot of stitches. But when they handed me that baby, what I was more than anything was happy, unbelievably happy.

I have known my whole life that I wanted to be a mother. And in the dusky hours of that spring evening, as I lay there with a damp little person all covered in vernix squirming on my chest, a new chapter began.

As anyone who has been there knows, early parenthood is a time of steep learning curves. That’s true no matter how badly you wanted to be a parent, and it’s true no matter how hard you tried to prepare. In the days and weeks after Jenn’s birth, at times I felt completely incompetent as a mother. At other times, I felt wildly, overwhelmingly terrified—like when an earthquake struck Seattle, rattling our house, and even though Jenn was perfectly safe, I couldn’t make myself stop screaming.

Every parent has lived through some version of that moment, whether it’s watching a child struggle for breath through one of those childhood illnesses or glancing desperately back at the car seat after a close call with a reckless driver. Whatever the threat, at some point, every parent is confronted with a simple, terrible fact: there’s really only so much we can do to keep our kids safe and secure.

This is the 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.

My journey to finding the balance started with what you might call an overcorrection. Consider this: the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that a pregnant woman gain between 25 and 35 pounds with each pregnancy. I gained 79.

To me, that weight was the external projection of something I began feeling the very second I saw the plus sign on the pregnancy test: freedom. Freedom from the crushing, relentless societal pressure to look a certain way and carefully maintain that appearance. Freedom from eating what I thought I was supposed to eat instead of what I really wanted. I was done with all that, I decided. Done. My body was growing a baby, and I was going to feed that body whatever it craved.

My doctor and I had some pretty contentious conversations about this at first. At every visit, I would step on the scale, and at every visit, he’d let me know exactly what he thought about how high and fast that number was rising. Eventually, I had to force a truce. Once we established that my health wasn’t at risk and, more important, that the baby’s wasn’t either, I let him know quite forcefully that I didn’t want to hear a single additional word about the topic.

So that was one way my newfound feeling of freedom manifested itself in my life. There was another, more drastic manifestation, too: I quit my job. I decided to leave Microsoft almost as soon as I got pregnant and planned my exit so that I would be retired by the time Jenn was born. My reasons were twofold. First, I already knew that I was going to love being a mother, and I felt very lucky to be in a position to devote myself to it full-time. Second, Bill’s responsibilities at Microsoft meant that he was working many long hours and traveling a lot. I wanted to make sure this child (and any future children) would have at least one parent who aimed to be as present for them as my mother was for me.

I have a lot of happy memories from those early days. When Jenn was born, we lived just six houses down from a lake beach. Most mornings during her first few months, I’d put her in the stroller, hang all her toys on one handle, hang our lunch on another, and off we’d go down to the water, just me and my “Jenny-Jenn-Jenn.” For the first time in my adult life, I was completely in control of my own time.

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.

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. The more time I spent away from Jenn, the louder I heard an ominous voice in my head asking myself again and again in the same menacing whisper: Are you doing enough for this baby?

Happily, I soon had two more babies to worry about. My son, Rory, joined our family in 1999, and my daughter Phoebe followed him in 2002. In between their births, Bill and I started the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I hadn’t planned on going back to work so soon, but suddenly there I was, feeling the need to be in meeting after meeting, doing mountains of reading to get myself up to speed on the issues, and traveling around the world to see the foundation’s work in action.

In the beginning, I put strict limits around my foundation role so that I could keep my focus at home. I knew I was incredibly lucky to be in a position to organize my life this way. But as the foundation grew, the amount of time I needed to spend there did, too. In 2005, our dear friend Warren Buffett privately let us know that he was going to transfer a significant portion of his wealth to our foundation. It was an incredible act of generosity, a massive gift that was going to enable us to dramatically expand our foundation’s work, potentially touching millions more lives. We were, obviously, overcome with gratitude—and still are.

And yet. Jenn was nine. Rory was six. Phoebe just two. The undeniable fact was that Warren’s gift would mean that their mother was going to be around a lot less, and that was a hard pill for me to swallow.

When I look back on that chapter of my life, I remember three things: immense pride in the work we were doing at the foundation, overwhelming joy at watching my beautiful children grow up, and intense anxiety as I struggled to balance the two.

What I needed to learn—but hadn’t yet—was that the guilt I felt about not being a perfect mother wasn’t serving anyone well. Not my children. Not my work. Not myself. It was a distraction—worse, an indulgence—that focused my attention inward instead of outward toward the people and work I loved. I was making it about me when it should have been about them. What I needed was a new framework, one that would allow me to make peace with being less than perfect instead of obsessing over my faults and failures. Eventually, I found that framework in the concept of the “good enough” parent.

The concept traces back to a British psychologist named Donald Winnicott, who coined the phrase in the 1950s (although, in keeping with the times, he was specifically focused on the “good enough mother”). Even though some of his assumptions about families and gender roles are now quite outdated, the notion of a good enough parent has had notable staying power across generations of parenting experts. Here’s the central idea: 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.   

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. 

If I’m honest with myself, I knew even before I got Jenn home from the hospital that I wasn’t going to be a perfect mother. But am I a good mother? I think so. And once that became the standard to measure myself against, the answer to the ever-present question “Are you doing enough for this baby?” (which later became the ever-present question “Are you doing enough for these three children?”) was, in fact, yes. Of course there were a million ways I could have been a better mother. I’m sure there are also a million ways I could be a better person. But for their sake and mine, I learned to believe that while I would never be perfect, I could absolutely be good enough. 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.

In February 2023, on one of those gray and windy winter days in New York City, Jenn and I were back in labor and delivery together. But this time, she was the one bringing a daughter into the world. In one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me, she and her wonderful husband, Nayel, invited me to be part of that special day. Among the many other things I felt as I watched Jenn prepare to give birth, I was blown away by her calm and competence. Anyone who saw Jenn playing with her dolls as a child could have guessed she’d make a great mother. Since then, she’s earned a degree in biology from Stanford, a master’s of public health from Columbia, and a medical degree from Mount Sinai. She was as prepared to step into this role as anyone could possibly be.

As the night of Jenn’s labor wore on, I stepped away so that she and Nayel could be together as a couple for the beautiful birth that followed. The next morning, I woke up to an early-morning call from my younger daughter, Phoebe, who had hounded Nayel for updates from the delivery room until she became the first to know. “The baby came!!” she squealed through the phone, the most excited new aunt you’ve ever heard. I got ready as fast as I could and headed to the hospital, driving along the Hudson River under the wet gray sky. When I got back to their room, Jenn and Nayel introduced me to my first grandchild. Her name is Leila, which means night in Arabic. Leila Grace.

As Jenn and Nayel rested after a long, intense night, I sat on a small sofa in their hospital room, holding little tiny Leila against my chest. I sat there like that for hours, long enough to watch the sun break through the clouds and light up the sky with pinks and reds, until it finally sank down somewhere back beyond the bridge. Jenn slept fitfully through the early evening, frequently slipping out of bed to check on her newborn daughter. “I just want to see her,” she told me. We both gazed at this miraculous little creature until, secure in the knowledge that her baby was OK, Jenn was ready to go back to try to rest some more.

With my daughter sleeping in her bed, and her daughter sleeping on my chest, I felt my heart spilling over with love and tenderness for them both. I knew that even as she slept, Jenn’s world was changing. That she would wake up the next day to find herself at the beginning of her own journey as a parent, one that would ignite her own raging maternal love, one that would test her strengths and limits, one that would teach her how terrifying it is to love someone as deeply as I love her and Rory and Phoebe—and one that I hoped would lead her to a place as happy and at peace as I felt that day.

Whatever this journey brings you, Jenn, I hope you will always remember, my love—for your sake and your children’s—that exactly who you are is exactly what they need, and that even more important than giving them everything is trusting yourself to know that you are already enough. So much more than enough. And to any other parent who is reading this, know that this is every bit as true for you. When it comes to taking care of your family—some of the most important work you’ll do in this world—I hope you’ll refuse to let perfectionism rob family life of precious joy. Allow yourself, too, to feel the ease of letting go.

Excerpted from The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward by Melinda French Gates. Copyright © 2025 by Melinda French Gates. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.