Becoming: Chapters 19–22

I recalled that Rosalynn Carter had sat in on cabinet meetings, Nancy Reagan had gotten into some trouble accepting free designer dresses, and Hillary Clinton had been derided for taking on a policy role in her husband’s administration.

First Ladies showed up in the news, having tea with the spouses of foreign dignitaries; they sent out official greetings on holidays and wore pretty gowns to state dinners.

If I’d learned anything from the ugliness of the campaign, from the myriad ways people had sought to write me off as angry or unbecoming, it was that public judgment sweeps in to fill any void.

Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts.

Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts.

Her husband was just as welcoming, possessing a magnanimous Texas spirit that seemed to override any political hard feelings.

Barack couldn’t help but to offer bits of advice about surviving a first day at a new school (keep smiling, be kind, listen to your teachers), adding finally, as the two girls donned their purple backpacks, “And definitely don’t pick your noses!”

We arrived first at the upper school campus, where Malia and I hustled past a gauntlet of news cameras and into the building, the two of us flanked by Secret Service agents.

I returned to the motorcade and rode back to the Hay-Adams, ensconced in my bubble.

She had her round little face pressed up against the window of the SUV and was staring outward, wide-eyed and pensive, taking in the sight of photographers and onlookers, her thoughts unreadable but her expression sober.

There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.

For the last few years, she’d been a nearly every-day presence in our lives, her practicality a salve to everyone’s worries.

“I love those people, but I love my own house,” she told a reporter after the election, not mincing any words. “The White House reminds me of a museum and it’s like, how do you sleep in a museum?”

My mother was impervious to all manner of glamour and hype.

I liked Jill, Joe’s wife, right away, admiring her gentle fortitude and her work ethic.

Barack and I, along with the indefatigable Joe Biden, spent the next two hours in an outdoor reviewing stand in front of the White House, watching bands and floats from all fifty states pass by us on Pennsylvania Avenue.

I had not just a closet but a spacious dressing room adjoining it—the same room from which Laura Bush had shown me the Rose Garden view. Over time, this became my de facto private office, the place where I could sit quietly and read, work, or watch TV, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, blessedly out of sight of everyone.

For him, the removal of all obligations and worries concerning the home made him nothing but happy, if only because it freed his brain, allowing it to roam unfettered over larger concerns, of which there were many.

As the girls began making social plans outside school, my personal assistant (or “body person,” as it’s called in political parlance) became the point of contact, collecting the phone numbers of other parents, orchestrating pickups and drop-offs for playdates.

And in speaking on these topics from the White House, I’d be offering an implicit challenge to the behemoth corporations in the food and beverage industry and the way they’d been doing business for decades.

Sasha and Malia came to love the convivial spirit of the kitchen, slipping in to make smoothies or pop popcorn after school.

It revived some of the campaign-era speculation that I was generally uncouth and lacking the standard elegance of a First Lady, and worried me somewhat, too, thinking I’d possibly distracted from Barack’s efforts abroad.

I could escape the stage-managed multilateral meetings and sit-downs with leaders and find new ways to bring a little extra warmth to those otherwise staid visits.

So much of his job was just plain grueling, the challenges huge and often seemingly intractable.

I was either hard-driving and angry or, with my garden and messages about healthy eating, I was a disappointment to feminists, lacking a certain stridency.

Barack and I had by now let go of the idea that we could be spontaneous. We’d surrendered to the idea that there was no longer room for impulsiveness and whimsy in our own lives.

Late in the summer of 2009, we went on a family trip in the Grand Canyon, and I was lambasted for an apparent lack of dignity when I was photographed getting off Air Force One (in 106-degree heat, I might add) dressed in a pair of shorts.

I never expected to be someone who hired others to maintain my image, and at first the idea was discomfiting.

Arriving in Washington with the same sort of desire and energy to contribute, though, she’d been roundly spurned, pilloried for taking on a policy role in the White House’s work on health-care reform.

I stood in front of the White House, dressed as a leopard—in black pants, a spotted top, and a pair of cat ears on a headband—as Barack, who was never much of a costume guy even before optics mattered, stood next to me in a humdrum sweater.

That night, we handed out bags of cookies, dried fruits, and M&M’s in a box emblazoned with the presidential seal as more than two thousand little princesses, grim reapers, pirates, superheroes, ghosts, and football players traipsed up the lawn to meet us.

All the while, the West Wing was apparently fretting about my plans, worried I’d come off as a finger-wagging embodiment of the nanny state at a time when controversial bank and car-company bailouts had left Americans extra leery of anything that looked like government intervention.

On a cold Tuesday afternoon and with D.C. still digging out from a historic blizzard, I stood at a lectern in the State Dining Room at the White House, surrounded by kids and cabinet secretaries, sports figures and mayors, along with leaders in medicine, education, and food production, plus a bevy of media, to proudly announce our new initiative, which we’d decided to name Let’s Move!

“We’ve got a contingency plan for exactly this scenario!”

How Barack and I comported ourselves in the face of instability mattered. We understood that we represented the nation and were obligated to step forward and be present when there was tragedy, or hardship, or confusion.

We also wanted to fight the stigma surrounding the mental health issues that followed some of our troops home, and planned to lobby writers and producers in Hollywood to include military stories in their movies and TV shows.

As much as we tried to create a buffer between them and the more fraught aspects of Barack’s job, I knew that Sasha and Malia still had a lot to take in.

They coexisted with world events in a way that few children did, living with the fact that news occasionally unfolded right under our roof, that their father got called away sometimes for national emergencies, and that always and no matter what there’d be some part of the population that openly reviled him.

The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed.

There was my mom, my staunchest support, whose vigilance had saved me from languishing in a dreary second-grade classroom.