A Fighting Chance

Jim Warren was the first boy I’d ever dated, and when he came back into my life after my sophomore year, I dropped out of college to marry him. I was nineteen.





Amelia arrived when I was twenty-two; I was amazed that this perfect little creature was now part of my life.





Amelia and I were buddies who ventured out together to explore the world. I went to the state law school near our home in New Jersey. When I graduated, I was very pregnant and thought I might melt in the blistering sun. Once Alex was born, I hung out a shingle and practiced law out of my living room.





Still in braces and taking care of Amelia and baby Alex, I eventually got a job teaching law school. That was tough to manage, but Aunt Bee moved to Houston to help. Even so, Jim and I were headed for divorce.





Teaching law school was the most fun in the world; I even liked grading papers. Bruce and I got married and toasted to a new life. As two young law professors, we spent years teaching at different universities around the country.





My three handsome brothers—Don Reed, John, and David—posed with their baby sister at Thanksgiving in 1980.





Alex was a Boston Celtics fan from early on, which made Christmas shopping easy. In 1996, family dinners expanded when Amelia came home from grad school with her husband-to-be, Sushil.





It was always hard to get Daddy to stand still for a picture, but this time we caught him for a split second.





Socratic teaching means calling on everyone—even the kid hiding out in the back row.





My research on the economic pressures on middle class families began to get attention, and in 1990 I was invited to appear on the Today show. Bruce’s dad took a whole roll of film of me on his television set—just to prove it really had happened.





I love being a grandmother—it’s even better than people say. Here, my first grandchild, Octavia, is three years old, and we’ve got the giggles as we’re dying Easter eggs.





A few years later, when my second granddaughter, Lavinia, needed someone to play a supporting role for her Halloween version of Little Bo Peep, she knew where to turn.





With my two granddaughters and all their cousins, we were ready to take on Legoland. This was the picture I took with me to the first Senate debate against Scott Brown—the one that reminded me why I was in this fight.





After months of worrying that he would come too soon, Atticus arrived fat and healthy and just in time to make Christmas 2010 one of the best ever.





It was clear in the COP hearings that Treasury Secretary Geithner and I had very different views about how TARP money should have been used. Here, the secretary is facing me while a photographer takes his picture.





I was still teaching at Harvard Law School while I was chair of COP and fighting to get a new consumer agency through Congress.





After the president signed the Dodd-Frank bill, which created the new consumer agency, he took a victory lap with the audience cheering him on. He was pumped, and everyone in the front row got a solid smack on the shoulder.





On the day the president named me to set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I was ready to go.





As our work at the new consumer agency got under way, we met with as many people as we could. We wanted to craft regulations that would be tough and effective, and that meant lots of outreach.





The consumer agency was a start-up. Meeting space was pretty limited, so for our all-hands meetings on Tuesdays, we met by the elevators.





I was so knocked out by how many people showed up in Framingham to volunteer a year before the Senate election that I jumped up on stage and took this picture with my cell phone.





On the campaign trail in the summer at the Northampton Pride Festival and shortly before the election near a bridge in Concord.





Organizing volunteers for one of the biggest get-out-the-vote drives Massachusetts had ever seen.





I loved the enthusiasm of the supporters I met during the Dorchester Day parade.





The firefighters union told me that once they were in, they would be in all the way—but I hadn’t realized that “all the way” meant driving a big yellow bus around the state.





Art Ramalho offered up the West End Gym in Lowell for a campaign rally. He said he liked seeing me in a boxing ring—he figured it was good practice for Washington.





Otis helped me with my debate prep.





Octavia and Lavinia introduced me at the State Democratic Convention in Springfield. Lavinia was very disappointed that she was not allowed to do cartwheels during Octavia’s speech.





Amelia and I had been buddies in lots of adventures, including writing books together, and now she was with me during the Senate campaign.