I admit. I didn’t walk into the bookstore looking for First Lady Dr. Jill Biden’s book. I was vaguely aware of it, but it wasn’t at the top of my ever-growing want-to-read list.

Yet, turns out I couldn’t resist the buy 2 get 1 display. And Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself  was one of the books I purchased that day as part of that sale. And even after buying the book, it didn’t sit on my shelf for months before I picked it up. I felt there was something about this memoir. And I was right. 

This week, I’d like to share some of the passages that touched me:

“Every scene on those walls, every role I’ve played, has taught me so much about what family means. I’ve learned — and am still learning — about 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.”

“I realized early on that teaching was more than a job for me. It goes much deeper than that; being a teacher is not what I do but who I am.”

“There’s always a part of you that wants to step into your children’s lives and make the right decisions for them — pick them up when they stray and put them on the safest, easiest path, just as we did when they were small. But the tragedy of being a good parent is that the better you are at your job, the less you will be allowed to swoop in and protect the people you love most in the world. You have no choice but to trust that they’ll do their best and hope that fate will be kind.”

“Over the years, I’ve heard so many people talk about teachers in a way that doesn’t reflect the reality of teaching that I know at all. They think it’s a job for people without ambitions, that teaching doesn’t take a lot of skill, and that teachers have short hours and summers off. I’ve taught in a lot of different environments, but one thing is always the same: teaching is rewarding, but it’s a tremendous challenge, too.”

“There’s something profoundly optimistic about teaching. We are taking the best of what humans have to give — lifetimes of knowledge, wisdom, craft, and art — and handing it over to the next generation, with the hope that they will continue to build, continue to make our world better. It’s a conversation with our past and future selves at once, a way of saying, Look what we’ve done! Now what will you do with it?”

“So why do we do it? We do it for that spark in a student’s eye when an idea falls into place. We do it for the moment when a student realizes she’s capable of more than she’d thought. For the chance to hold a student’s hand as she begins to explore this wild, incredible world through books and equations and historical accounts. We do it because we love it.”