A Fighting Chance (45 page)

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.