As 2018 comes to a close, I always appreciate the opportunity to pause and reflect on the year – to give thanks for the bright spots and find lessons in the challenges. Here are some of my favorite memories from this year.

A post shared by Melinda Gates (@melindafrenchgates) on Dec 29, 2018 at 8:58am PST

The Sunday Times has a new interview with Melinda Gates to promote her book out just this week called The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. Melinda covers her own journey in her marriage to Bill Gates to becoming co-founder of the largest private foundation in the world, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She also writes about finding worthy women-focused causes to support and about the incredible women she’s met in her work. I was impressed with some of her quotes in this interview and I wanted to talk about it. Oh and a couple of months ago Bill and Melinda were on Colbert. I didn’t cover it here but it’s a great interview where they say we should tax the wealthiest people more. Here’s some of what she told The Sunday Times [via People]:

“He needs a little training, and he’d tell you that too,” Melinda told the outlet, noting that he’s generally easy to live with but recalling a time when she got angry with her husband after she needed help packing up the family car and getting their three children ready to go while Bill, now 63, was deep in a book about Winston Churchill.

Patience, she shared, has been the key: “When he was having trouble making the decision about getting married, he was incredibly clear that it was not about me, it was about, ‘Can I get the balance right between work and family life?’ ” Melinda, 54, told The Sunday Times.

Melinda “wasn’t going for a certain type, obviously, when I fell in love with Bill,” she explained, but admitted she “was a little bit predisposed because I’m a computer science major, so when I was in college the people I spent a lot of time with were young men and a lot of them were geeky.”

“We’ve just gotten to a point in life where Bill and I can both laugh about more things,” she said. “And, believe me, I can remember some days that were so incredibly hard in our marriage where you thought, ‘Can I do this?’ “

“It’s absolutely a partnership of equals,” Melinda said [in 2017] “It’s important to both of us that the world understands that we are running this place together. This is our joint values being played out in the world.”

[From People]

I like that Bill was clear with Melinda in the beginning that his reluctance to marry wasn’t about her. That can be a really tough thing to navigate at that stage in a relationship. So many guys seem gun shy about marriage but then go on to marry the next girlfriend. In a lot of cases they’re just not ready though. Also a lot of couples go through really tough times and just act like everything is fine and don’t talk about it. You hear about your friends splitting and you think “them, really?” You never know how things are behind closed doors. So it’s reassuring when people who have been together for decades admit that they had tough times too. I’m really interested in this book and want to read it now. Melinda and Bill have absolutely changed the world in far-reaching ways and they seem like really decent people committed to learning about people’s needs and doing whatever they can to help, in the most efficient way. I am always so impressed by them and you can tell that they’re in this together.

Here’s a cute video where Melinda talks about her relationship with Bill. She met him when she first started working at Microsoft!

When I moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft, I would never have imagined Bill and I dating, let alone falling in love and getting married. That’s been one of the best surprises of my life. What have been some of the best surprises in your life? #HappyValentinesDay!

A post shared by Melinda Gates (@melindafrenchgates) on Feb 14, 2019 at 3:37pm PST

A post shared by Melinda Gates (@melindafrenchgates) on Apr 22, 2019 at 10:41am PDT

A few weekends ago, I got to see “On the Basis of Sex” with my daughter Phoebe, a few of her friends, and their moms. Felicity Jones is wonderful as a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg fighting for women’s equality. We were all so moved by her story and learned a lot, too. Highly recommend this film.

A post shared by Melinda Gates (@melindafrenchgates) on Feb 4, 2019 at 7:08am PST