Becoming

by Michelle Obama

I know that I am who I am not because of the titles I’ve held or the celebrities I’ve met, but because of the snaking paths and winding roads, the frustrations and contradictions, the constant growth that is painful and joyful and full of confusion.

While sometimes I think about the stories in this book and wonder if they’re too small or trivial, what I’ve learned and re-learned throughout this process is that these moments may in fact be the most important parts of our stories.

This isn’t to say any of this was easy, particularly the experience of baring this truest version of myself for the entire world to accept or leave behind.

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.

I was the First Lady of the United States of America—a job that’s not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once.

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.

“Good night!” she’d exclaim in the middle of the day, with the same blast of exasperation someone else might say, “Oh, for God’s sake!”

Few, it seemed, could live up to Robbie’s standards. The sound of people trying, however, became the soundtrack to our life.

Billy Williams, who lived just around the corner from us on Constance Avenue, had such a sweet swing from the left side of the plate.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention turned bloody as police went after Vietnam War protesters with batons and tear gas in Grant Park, about nine miles north of where we lived.

My father went to work every day dressed in the blue uniform of a city laborer, but at night he showed us what it meant to love jazz and art. As a boy, he’d taken classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in high school he’d painted and sculpted.

He appreciated seeing strong people excel. When my brother, Craig, got interested in basketball, my father propped coins above the doorframe in our kitchen, encouraging him to leap for them.

I’m about eight months old, a pudge-faced, no-nonsense bruiser in diapers and an ironed white dress, looking ready to slide out of my mother’s clutches, staring down the camera as if I might eat it. Next to me is Craig, gentlemanly in a little bow tie and suit jacket,

I came to think of upstairs and downstairs as two different universes, ruled over by competing sensibilities.

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.

Years after his retirement, Terry still lived in a state of numbed formality—impeccably dressed, remotely servile, never asserting himself in any way, at least that I would see. It was as if he’d surrendered a part of himself as a way of coping.

He’d indulge himself by having exactly one cigarette a day and exactly one cocktail a month, and even then he wouldn’t loosen up

The keys on Robbie’s piano had a subtle unevenness of color and shape, places where bits of the ivory had broken off over time, leaving them looking like a set of bad teeth. Helpfully, the middle C key had a full corner missing, a wedge about the size of my fingernail, which got me centered every time.

He lived with my aunt Carolyn, my mom’s oldest sister, and my uncle Steve, her youngest brother, just two blocks from us in a cozy one-story house that he’d wired top to bottom for music, putting speakers in every room, including the bathroom. In the dining room, he built an elaborate cabinet system to hold his stereo equipment, much of it scavenged at yard sales. He had two mismatched turntables plus a rickety old reel-to-reel tape player and shelves packed with records he’d collected over many years.

He didn’t trust the police, and he didn’t always trust white people, either, being the grandson of a Georgia slave and having spent his early childhood in Alabama during the time of Jim Crow before coming north to Chicago in the 1920s. When he had kids of his own, Southside had taken pains to keep them safe—scaring them with real and imagined stories about what might happen to Black kids who crossed into the wrong neighborhood, lecturing them about avoiding the police.

had made a point of pumping jazz into his seven children, often waking everyone at sunrise by playing one of his records at full blast.

I learned one song in the piano book and then another. I was probably no better than her other students, no less fumbling, but I was driven. To me, there was magic in the learning. I got a buzzy sort of satisfaction from it. For one thing, I’d picked up on the simple, encouraging correlation between how long I practiced and how much I achieved.

When I thought I had a good idea about something, I didn’t like being told no.

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

My family made trips into the heart of the city only a handful of times a year, to visit the Art Institute or see a play, the four of us traveling like astronauts in the capsule of my dad’s Buick.

religious about the maintenance schedule, taking it to Sears for tire rotations and oil changes the same way my mom carted us kids to the pediatrician for checkups.

I was sitting at a perfect piano, it turned out, with its surfaces carefully dusted, its internal wires precisely tuned, its eighty-eight keys laid out in a flawless ribbon of black and white. The issue was that I wasn’t used to flawless. In fact, I’d never once in my life encountered it.

Our neighborhood was middle-class and racially mixed. Kids found one another based not on the color of their skin but on who was outside and ready to play.

In 1950, fifteen years before my parents moved to South Shore, the neighborhood had been 96 percent white. By the time I’d leave for college in 1981, it would be about 96 percent Black.

In her eyes, we were a class of “bad kids,” though we had no guidance and no structure and had been sentenced to a grim, underlit room in the basement of the school. Every hour there felt hellish and long. I sat miserably at my desk, in my puke-green chair—puke green being the official color of the 1970s—learning

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.

my mother, who is by nature wry and quiet but generally also the most forthright person in any room,

cross an invisible line, disappearing through a veil of trees to the far side of the park,

It 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.

she’d make quiet, cutting remarks, as if just by showing up I’d managed to ruin everyone’s day.

cruising for no reason but the fact that we could.

My parents talked to us like we were adults. They didn’t lecture, but rather indulged every question we asked, no matter how juvenile. They never hurried a discussion for the sake of convenience. Our talks could go on for hours, often because Craig and I took every opportunity to grill my parents about things we didn’t understand.

Park Forest, it turns out, was one of America’s first fully planned communities—not just a housing subdivision, but a full village designed for about thirty thousand people, with shopping malls, churches, schools, and parks.

Something about the place had put me on edge. I wasn’t a fan of the suburbs, though I couldn’t articulate exactly why.

I’ve said before that my father was a withstander, a man who never complained about small things or big, who cheerily ate liver when it was served to him, who had a doctor give him what amounted to a death sentence and then just carried on. This thing with the car was no different.

immersing himself in hypotheticals the rest of us found bizarre. Worried he’d lose his sight, he took to wearing a blindfold around the house, learning to navigate our living room and kitchen by feel. Worried he might go deaf, he began teaching himself sign language. There was also apparently the threat of amputation, prompting Craig to fumble his way through various meals and homework sessions with his right arm tied behind his back. Because you never did know.

random but persistent snatcher of homes and hearts.

The lesson being that in life you control what you can.

Should things get scary, we realized, our rescue wouldn’t unfold the way rescues did in the tidy after-school movies we watched on TV.

my father loved to be the rock for others. What he couldn’t do physically, he substituted with emotional and intellectual guidance and support,

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

he had little interest in being a passive prop, even in a pretend crisis. He had no intention, under any circumstance, of being a liability—of

managed to drag 170 or so pounds of paternal deadweight backward through the imaginary inferno that raged in his preadolescent mind,

He was forever mistrustful of the world beyond his own yard—worried primarily about everyone’s safety and well-being—and as a result poured his energy into creating an environment where we were always well fed and entertained, likely with the hope we’d never want to move away from it.