Becoming: Chapters 14–18

If we’d once spent the dinner hour parsing the intricacies of the juvenile justice system, comparing what I’d learned during my stint at Public Allies with some of the ideas he was trying to fit into a reform bill in the legislature, we now, with no less fervor, debated whether Malia was too dependent on her pacifier and compared our respective methods for getting her to sleep.

She'd ended the day as an exuberant surf kicker but was now, not even twelve hours later, a hot and listless heap of toddler-shaped misery, glassy-eyed and wailing in pain, but still too young to tell us anything specific about it.

His opponents in the congressional primary pounced on the opportunity to depict Barack as some kind of bon vivant lawmaker who’d been on vacation—in Hawaii, no less—and hadn’t deigned to come back to vote on something as significant as gun control.

Bobby Rush, the incumbent congressman, had tragically lost a family member to gun violence in Chicago only a few months earlier, which cast Barack in an even poorer light.

He’d led an overhaul of state campaign finance laws that ushered in stricter ethics rules for elected officials.

He’d earned the trust of legislators from all parts of the state, Republican and Democrat alike. But none of the real stuff seemed to matter now. The race had devolved into a series of low blows.

From the start of the campaign, Barack’s opponents and their supporters had been propagating unseemly ideas meant to gin up fear and mistrust among African American voters, suggesting that Barack was part of an agenda cooked up by the white residents of Hyde Park—read, white Jews—to foist their preferred candidate on the South Side.

I could nail it, I thought, if I wasn’t overburdened with superfluous meetings and could be given the leeway to manage my own time, working from home when I needed to, dashing out of the office for day-care pickup or a pediatrician’s visit when necessary.

I don’t recall exactly when it was that he first raised the possibility of running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The idea was still nascent and an actual decision many months away, but clearly it was taking hold in Barack’s mind.

We made our schedule and stuck to it. Dinner each night was at 6:30. Baths were at 7:00, followed by books, cuddling, and lights-out at 8:00 sharp. The routine was ironclad, which put the weight of responsibility on Barack to either make it on time or not.

What if we grew vegetables at the White House and helped advocate for fresh food? What if we then used that as a cornerstone for something bigger, a whole children’s health initiative that might help parents avoid some of the pitfalls I’d experienced?

For me, that fear was galvanizing. It got me out of bed in the morning.

The South Side had just over a million residents and a dearth of medical providers, not to mention a population that was disproportionately affected by the kinds of chronic conditions that tend to afflict the poor—asthma, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease.

I signed off on all of it, with one important caveat, repeated out loud so that everyone could hear it: If he lost, he’d move on from politics altogether and find a different sort of job.

Then, somewhat oddly, both the Democratic front-runner in the primary and the ensuing Republican nominee became embroiled in scandals involving their ex-wives.

As the network pundits would later acknowledge, choosing Barack Obama to speak to an audience of millions had been a mighty gamble.

Barack had a life in Washington now, operating with some of the gravitas that came with being a senator, but I was still me, living my same normal life.

I thought maybe we’d discuss how to navigate social situations with lobbyists or the legalities of raising money for a future campaign. What we got, however, was an elaborate disquisition on the history and architecture of the Capitol and a look at the official china patterns produced for the Senate, followed by a polite and chitchatty lunch.

If I was going to be a political spouse, I wanted to treat it seriously. I didn’t care about the politics per se, but I also didn’t want to screw anything up.

I was the wife of Barack Obama, the political rock star, the only black person in the Senate—the man who’d spoken of hope and tolerance so poignantly and forcefully that he now had a hornet buzz of expectation following him.

But there was one conversation he avoided having, and that was with me. He knew, of course, how I felt. We’d discussed it obliquely, around the edges of other topics.

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.”

We’d seen parents hoisting their babies above floodwaters and African American families trying to hold themselves together in the dehumanizing depravity that existed in the Superdome.

It was a disaster in the making, especially on the eve of the campaign launch and especially because Reverend Wright was scheduled to lead the invocation ahead of Barack's speech.

Members of both parties cast their votes at precinct-level meetings—caucuses—in the middle of winter, and the whole nation paid attention.

It always seemed to be accompanied by a sheepish half smile and the don’t-take-this-the-wrong-way inflection that people often use when approaching the subject of race.

Mainly I bristled because the question was so antithetical to what I was experiencing and what the people I was meeting seemed to be experiencing, too—the man with a seed-corn logo on his breast pocket, the college student in a black-and-gold pullover, the retiree who’d brought an ice cream bucket full of sugar cookies she’d frosted with our rising-sun campaign logo.

To me, the young people managing our field offices represented the promise of the coming generation of leaders. They weren’t jaded, and now they’d been galvanized and united.

Grinning, Joe Biden acknowledged the impressive and noisy turnout of Obama supporters with a sardonic “Hello, Chicago!”

Southside, who must have been over at our house that day, got his grandfatherly hackles up and insisted on going over with her as well.

I was not privy to it, but some sort of conversation between adults took place.

This was part of the process, we understood—a test to see who had the mettle to hold up as both a leader and a symbol for the country itself.

It was like having your soul X-rayed every day, scanned and rescanned for any sign of fallibility.

Days later, the interview aired in four parts on ABC and was met with an enthused fervor, covered by other news outlets with cloying taglines like “Curtain Rises on Obama’s Girls in TV Interview” and “The Obamas’ Two Little Girls Tell All.”

There was nothing salacious about the interview. There was no exploitative question asked, no especially revealing detail offered.

We’d taken two young girls who hadn’t chosen this life, and without thinking it through, we’d fed them into the maw.

Barack, of course, got the most of it—the public adulation as well as the scrutiny that rode inevitably on its back.

He’d studied political history and girded himself with the context it provided.

And yet a pernicious seed had been planted—a perception of me as disgruntled and vaguely hostile, lacking some expected level of grace.

Barack and I were now too well-known to be rendered invisible, but if people saw us as alien and trespassing, then maybe our potency could be drained.

As we carried on through primaries in Ohio and Texas, in Vermont and Mississippi, I had continued to speak about optimism and unity, feeling the positivity of people at campaign events coalescing around the idea of change.

Anytime my spirits started to dip, I’d punish myself further with a slew of disparaging thoughts: I hadn’t chosen this. I’d never liked politics.

All of it, of course, was shaded by the logistical and emotional burdens of having a loved one deployed for twelve months or more at a time to a place like Kabul or Mosul or on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.

There were a few gifts bought and wrapped on the fly by someone who was not me. The mood was not exactly desultory, but it wasn’t festive, either.

My husband's career had allowed me to witness the machinations of politics and power up close.