Becoming

by Michelle Obama

The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.

The theory was that when it came to minority candidates, voters often hid their prejudice from pollsters, expressing it only from the privacy of the voting booth.

What I heard was relative silence.

Am I good enough? Yes I am.

There was kindness running beneath all of it, a genuine love of country that I will always appreciate and admire.

One of the surprise blessings of the final few months of campaigning had been an organic and harmonious merging of our family with Joe Biden’s.

“On this day,” he said, “we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”

We were the First Family now, but we were also still ourselves.

I was heartened one afternoon during a snowstorm when I caught sight of the two of them through the window, sledding on the slope of the South Lawn, using plastic trays lent to them by the kitchen staff.

As an added bonus, he was showing up for dinner on time.

Kids care about fame, it turns out, for only a few minutes. After that, they just want to have fun.

I wanted more kids around, because kids made everything better.

our country’s leaders, an ocean of whiteness and maleness dressed in dark suits. The absence of diversity was glaring—honestly, it was embarrassing—for a modern, multicultural country.

As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.

One of the more experienced butlers, a white-haired African American man named James Ramsey, had served since the Carter administration. Every so often, he’d hand me the latest copy of Jet magazine, smiling proudly and saying, “I got you covered, Mrs. Obama.”

Forget that she sometimes wore a diamond crown and that I’d flown to London on the presidential jet; we were just two tired ladies oppressed by our shoes.

I knew they’d have to push back against the stereotypes that would get put on them, all the ways they’d be defined before they’d had a chance to define themselves.

Several months before Barack was elected, I’d told a magazine interviewer that my primary focus in the White House would be to continue my role as “mom in chief” in our family.

The truth was, I intended to do everything—to work with purpose and parent with care—same as I always had. The only difference now was that a lot of people were watching.

School lunches in the United States were a six-billion-dollar-a-year business.

She’d tried to do too much too quickly, it seemed, and had run straight into a wall.

Grief and resilience live together.

If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received, I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery. This was resilience.

Despite his pain, he was trying to stand up and salute the wife of his commander in chief.

Barack, who’s always been good at compartmentalizing, managed to be admirably present and undistracted when he was with us.

I was learning that each child took in what she could and from her own perspective.

Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.

She’d heard, in Malia’s answer, both the resilience and the vulnerability, an echo of all that we lived with and all we tried to keep at bay.

a young composer named Lin-Manuel Miranda stood up and astonished everyone with a piece from a project he was just beginning to put together, describing it as a “concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop…Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.”

“Hey, good luck with the Hamilton thing.”

Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses like these, swapped back and forth and over again.

the first Sunday in May 2011,

an elite team of U.S. Navy SEALs had stormed a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, looking for Osama bin Laden.

what America got that night was a moment of release, a chance to feel its own resilience.