Nineteen eighty was a big year for us. We were new parents, and Bill was running for reelection.

Bill's Republican opponent, Frank White; began running negative ads.

Exit polls showed Bill winning by a wide margin, but he lost, 52 to 48 percent. He was devastated.

Bill had now lost two elections―one for Congress, one as an incumbent Governor―and many wondered whether this defeat would break him.

Before the week was out we found an old home to buy in the Hillcrest section of Little Rock, near where we had lived before. On two lots, it had a converted attic that we used for Chelsea's nursery.

Chelsea was the only bright spot in the painful months following the election.

It was in our new house that Chelsea celebrated her first birthday, learned to walk and talk and taught her father a lesson in the perils of multitasking. One day Bill was holding her while watching a basketball game on television, talking on the phone and doing a crossword puzzle. When she couldn't get his attention, she bit him on the nose!

Bill took a job at Wright, Lindsey and Jennings, so a Little Rock law firm. He was unofficially campaigning to get his job back as governor .

The pressures on me to conform had increased dramatically when Bill was elected Governor in 1978.

Because I knew I had my own professional interests and did not want to create any confusion or conflict of interest with my husband's public career, it made perfect sense to me to continue using my own name. Bill didn't mind, but our mothers did. Virginia cried when Bill told her, and my mother addressed her letters to "Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton." Brides who kept their maiden names were becoming more common in some places in the mid-1970s, but they were still rare in most of the country. And that included Arkansas.