Becoming: Chapter 23–Epilogue

Meanwhile, the monthly jobs reports published by the Labor Department were showing consistent but sluggish growth, suggesting that when it came to recovering from the 2008 crisis, the nation still wasn’t where it needed to be.

At a soccer stadium in Cape Town, we met community organizers and health workers who were using youth sports programs to help educate children about HIV/AIDS, and were introduced to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the legendary theologian and activist who’d helped dismantle apartheid in South Africa.

At a soccer stadium in Cape Town, we met community organizers and health workers who were using youth sports programs to help educate children about HIV/AIDS, and were introduced to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the legendary theologian and activist who’d helped dismantle apartheid in South Africa.

Tutu was seventy-nine years old, a barrel-chested man with bright eyes and an irrepressible laugh.

Their own power came first. I found it demoralizing, infuriating, sometimes crushing. This was politics, yes, but in its most fractious and cynical form, seemingly disconnected from any larger sense of purpose.

They pledged to revamp their menus, cutting calories, reducing sodium, and offering healthier options for kids’ meals.

Though I’d moved through rarefied places like Princeton and Sidley & Austin, and though I now occasionally found myself wearing diamonds and a ball gown, I’d never stopped reading People magazine or let go of my love of a good sitcom.

This vote, for me, was more fraught than any other we’d gone through. It felt like a referendum not only on Barack’s political performance and the state of the country but also on his character, on our very presence in the White House.

Polls consistently showed him with only a tenuous lead over Mitt Romney.

During the final weeks, he began to look a little wan and even skinnier than usual, chewing his Nicorette with unusual vigor. I’d watched with wifely concern as he tried to do everything—soothe the worriers, finish out the campaign, and govern the nation all at once...

His shock and grief would never compare with that of the first responders who’d rushed in to secure the building and evacuate survivors from the carnage. It was nothing next to that of the parents who endured an interminable wait in the chilly air outside the building, praying that they’d see their child’s face again.

From a parent’s point of view, it wasn’t a bad way to raise teenagers—knowing that a set of watchful adults was trailing them at all times, tasked with extricating them from any sort of emergency.

Melissa and others on my team became my enforcers anytime an image of one of the girls surfaced on a gossip site, making haranguing phone calls to get it taken down.

Guarding the girls’ privacy meant finding other ways to satiate the public’s curiosity about our family.

It was beneficent, this attention—“Come to Columbia, Malia!” people were shouting—but it was not especially useful for a girl who was trying quietly to imagine her own future.

Our presence in the White House had been celebrated by millions of Americans, but it also contributed to a reactionary sense of fear and resentment among others.

This was the culmination of a legal battle that had been fought methodically over decades, state by state, court by court, and as with any civil rights struggle it had required the persistence and courage of many people.

She wasn’t used to my flouting the rules.

My intention was to give younger people a context for the hate surfacing in the news and in political discourse and to give them a reason to hope.

...it put media outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the established standards of decency.

And then again, there was something painfully familiar in the menace and male jocularity of that tape.

These things injure us. They sap our strength.

I implored my staff in the East Wing to finish strong, even as they needed to think about finding new jobs...

If something cataclysmic was going to happen, Simas would spot it early.

We added stone pathways and wooden benches, plus a welcoming arbor made of wood sourced from the estates of Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe and the childhood home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

And then, one fall afternoon, I set out across the South Lawn to officially dedicate the garden for posterity.

More than twenty-eight hundred Peace Corps volunteers were now trained to implement programs for girls internationally.

I loved my country for all the ways its story could be told. For almost a decade, I’d been privileged to move through it, experiencing its bracing contradictions and bitter conflicts, its pain and persistent idealism, and above all else its resilience.

For the first time in many years, I’m unhooked from any obligation as a political spouse, unencumbered by other people’s expectations.

The paintings are lovely, but what matters most is that they’re there for young people to see—that our faces help dismantle the perception that in order to be enshrined in history, you have to look a certain way.