Karine Jean-Pierre shared in a heartbreaking essay this week that she had a “second full-time job” whereas serving as White Home press secretary: caring for her mom, who has most cancers.
She wrote in Vainness Honest that she visited her mother in New York each weekend for 18 months whereas sustaining a secret she saved from even her workmates.
“If I were to share the news of my mother’s diagnosis or any other issues in my personal life, it would be seen as an excuse,” she wrote. “Society doesn’t allow women of color to be vulnerable at work.”
One in all her few confidants was an understanding Joe Biden regardless of a plea from her mom to not inform anybody, together with the president.
Her mom was identified with stage 2 colon most cancers someday after Jean-Pierre had returned from a visit to Poland in early 2023 with Biden, who additionally made a shock go to to Ukraine, in accordance with the essay.
“From behind the lectern in the briefing room, every day, I faced the press, the American people, and the world,” she wrote. “And every day, I kept my personal life hidden. In fact, it won’t be until reading this that the people I have worked 16-hour days with, traveled across continents with, will learn that for almost two years, I have been silently working a second full-time job, which is navigating my mother’s care.”
Jean-Pierre relayed that she would commute to New York in outsized sun shades and a masks to hide her id to see her mother. She’d nonetheless make it again to D.C. for a couple of hours of sleep earlier than arriving on the White Home at 7:30 a.m. on Mondays. “But I was losing my grip,” she confided. “I told my mom I wanted to move to New York so I could help her full-time. ‘You are not quitting your job,’ she said.”
Jean-Pierre’s final day as press secretary was on Monday, Biden’s closing day in workplace. In an entry on her private X account, she wrote with a photograph of herself, the president and first woman Jill Biden, “Serving in this role for this Administration and this President has truly been the honor of a lifetime.”
She reported that her mom completed remedy a couple of yr in the past, marking the event with the ring of a bell at a clinic in New York.
HuffPost has reached out to Jean-Pierre for remark.
Alex Wong by way of Getty Photographs
