I love anniversaries, and I believe celebrating them is very important. Anniversaries remind us of where we started and how much work/energy/ care it took to get where we are now. They help us to dream about progressing to the next critical milestone.

My wedding anniversary is this September. At 29 years, my wonderful marriage to Bob holds strong, and we both realize the amount of love as well as effort that has gone into earning each annual celebration.

On June 10 this year, I stood onstage at the White House right next to our President as he gave an important speech celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Pay Act. He noted that women in 1963 made 59 cents on the dollar versus men, and are now earning 77 cents. A vast improvement, but with women now making up 40 percent of family breadwinners bringing home the bacon, he asserted that we don’t want them to bring home a smaller piece of bacon than the men. I couldn’t agree more!

This month we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the enactment of FMLA, the Family and Medical Leave Act. It’s a bittersweet anniversary for working moms. Yes, we are extremely grateful to have 12 weeks of job-guaranteed leave when we have our babies. But this legislation is incomplete. When President Clinton signed FMLA into law back in 1993, we all thought it would take two or three years to get mandated paid leave in place. Twenty years later we’re still waiting for the United States to join all other developed countries (with the exception of Papua New Guinea and Swaziland) in requiring paid leave for new moms. This is the lesson of anniversaries.

They show us that we’ve accomplished much, but also that we have so much more we must do.

Bob and I feel the same way about our marriage. We cherish each other and all that we’ve shared and accomplished in our 29 years together, but we know there are goals that still need to be fulfilled. We will work on ours, and our entire country must work to achieve paid family leave—my anniversary dream for real progress.