Becoming

by Michelle Obama

Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an “angry Black woman.” I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it “angry” or “Black” or “woman”?

Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.

There were days, weeks, and months when I hated politics. And there were moments when the beauty of this country and its people so overwhelmed me that I couldn’t speak.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

Looking back on it now, I think my parents appreciated my feistiness and I’m glad for it. It was a flame inside me they wanted to keep lit.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t “bad kids.” They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

helped, too, to debunk various myths about who was who and what was what around the neighborhood, reinforcing the possibility—something that had long been a credo of my dad’s—that most people were good people if you just treated them well.

Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.

Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.

It’s because of my mother that still to this day I catch the scent of Pine-Sol and automatically feel better about life.

I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.

The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly.

AS SOON AS I ALLOWED myself to feel anything for Barack, the feelings came rushing—a toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder. Any worries I’d been harboring about my life and career and even about Barack himself seemed to fall away with that first kiss, replaced by a driving need to know him better, to explore and experience everything about him as fast as I could.

I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of streetlights outside. He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his father? “Hey, what’re you thinking about over there?” I whispered. He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking about income inequality.”

It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.

“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

The second was that I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine. I saw it coming already, like a barreling wave with a mighty undertow. I wasn’t going to get out of its path—I was too committed to Barack by then, too in love—but I did need to quickly anchor myself on two feet.

IT HURTS TO LIVE AFTER someone has died. It just does.

I knew I was no smarter than any of them. I just had the advantage of an advocate.

I didn’t much appreciate politicians and therefore didn’t relish the idea of my husband becoming one.

He was getting battered already, but it wasn’t bothering him. It did seem he was built for this. He’d get dinged up and stay shiny, like an old copper pot.

A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not.

Or maybe I was just feeling the acute burden of being female.

None of this was his fault, but it wasn’t equal, either, and for any woman who lives by the mantra that equality is important, this can be a little confusing.

I walked around with a secret inside me. This was my privilege, the gift of being female. I felt bright with the promise of what I carried.

We were thinking not about country but about family as Malia Ann Obama, one of the two most perfect babies ever to be born to anyone, anywhere, dropped into our world.

When there’s a baby in the house, time stretches and contracts, abiding by none of the regular rules. A single day can feel endless, and then suddenly six months have blown right past.

In an ideal world (my ideal world, anyway), Barack would do something like become the head of a foundation, where he could have an impact on issues that mattered and also make it home for dinner at night.

“Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community,” Donne Trotter told the Chicago Reader. Speaking to the same publication, Bobby Rush said, “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool. We’re not impressed with these folks with these eastern elite degrees.” He’s not one of us, in other words. Barack wasn’t a real Black man, like them—someone who spoke like that, looked like that, and read that many books could never be.

Sasha, we planned to call her. I’d chosen the name because I thought it had a sassy ring. A girl named Sasha would brook no fools.

Even as I was still rather fanatically devoted to neatness, I was losing the battle. Our condo was strewn with baby toys, toddler books, and packages of diaper wipes.

I now tried out a new hypothesis: It was possible that I was more in charge of my happiness than I was allowing myself to be. I was too busy resenting Barack for managing to fit workouts into his schedule, for example, to even begin figuring out how to exercise regularly myself. I spent so much energy stewing over whether or not he’d make it home for dinner that dinners, with or without him, were no longer fun.

It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.

I’d given myself over to the idea that being away was just part of his job. I didn’t like it, but for the most part I’d stopped fighting it. Barack could happily end a day in a faraway hotel with all sorts of political battles brewing and loose ends floating. I, meanwhile, lived for the shelter of home—for the sense of completeness I felt each night with Sasha and Malia tucked into their beds and the dishwasher humming in the kitchen.

He reminded the audience that a country couldn’t be carved up simply into red and blue, that we were united by a common humanity, compelled to care for the whole of society. He called for hope over cynicism. He spoke with hope, projected hope, almost sang with it, really.

Looking back, I think it was then that I quietly began to let go of the idea that there was any reversing his course, that he’d ever belong solely to me and the girls. I could hear it almost in the pulse of the applause. More of this, more of this, more of this.

This for me felt like a true and odd measure of his fame: Even white people were recognizing him now.

From my point of view, my husband was doing plenty already. If he was going to even think about running for president, I hoped he’d take the prudent path, preparing slowly, biding his time in the Senate, and waiting until the girls were older—until 2016, maybe.

Anytime a reporter asked whether he’d join the race for president, Barack would demur, saying simply, “I’m still thinking about it. It’s a family decision.” Which was code for “Only if Michelle says I can.”

I lay alone in bed, feeling as if it were me against the world. I wanted Barack for our family. Everyone else seemed to want him for our country.

In the end, it boiled down to this: I said yes because I believed that Barack could be a great president. He was self-assured in ways that few people are. He had the intellect and discipline to do the job, the temperament to endure everything that would make it hard, and the rare degree of empathy that would keep him tuned carefully to the country’s needs. He was also surrounded by good, smart people who were ready to help. Who was I to stop him? How could I put my own needs, and even those of our girls, in front of the possibility that Barack could be the kind of president who helped make life better for millions of people? I said yes because I loved him and had faith in what he could do. I said yes, though I was at the same time harboring a painful thought, one I wasn’t ready to share: I supported him in campaigning, but I also felt certain he wouldn’t make it all the way. He spoke so often and so passionately of healing our country’s divisions, appealing to a set of higher ideals he believed were innate in most people. But I’d seen enough of the divisions to temper my own hopes. Barack was a Black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could win.

I knew the stereotype I was meant to inhabit, the immaculately groomed doll-wife with the painted-on smile, gazing bright-eyed at her husband, as if hanging on every word. This was not me and never would be. I could be supportive, but I couldn’t be a robot.

I was becoming known. And I was becoming known for being someone’s wife and as someone involved with politics, which made it doubly and triply weird.

If America elected its first Black president, it would say something not just about Barack but also about the country. For so many people, and for so many reasons, this mattered a lot.

The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired. It seemed almost like an unwritten rule, especially in politics, where adversaries put money into opposition research—hiring investigators to crawl through every piece of a candidate’s background, looking for anything resembling dirt.

Whether it was originating from Barack’s political opponents or elsewhere, we couldn’t tell, but the rumors and slanted commentary almost always carried less-than-subtle messaging about race, meant to stir up the deepest and ugliest kind of fear within the voting public. Don’t let the Black folks take over. They’re not like you. Their vision is not yours.

A news chyron on the same network had referred to me as “Obama’s Baby Mama,” conjuring clichéd notions of Black-ghetto America, implying an otherness that put me outside even my own marriage.

It was as if there were some cartoon version of me out there wreaking havoc, a woman I kept hearing about but didn’t know—a too-tall, too-forceful, ready-to-emasculate Godzilla of a political wife named Michelle Obama.