Personally, as a kid, I preferred The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which I absorbed with fascination. Mary had a job, a snappy wardrobe, and really great hair. She was independent and funny, and unlike those of the other ladies on TV, her problems were interesting. She had conversations that weren’t about children or homemaking. She didn’t let Lou Grant boss her around, and she wasn’t fixated on finding a husband. She was youthful and at the same time grown-up. In the pre-pre-pre-internet landscape, when the world came packaged almost exclusively through three channels of network TV, this stuff mattered. If you were a girl with a brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into something more than a wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess.
And here I was now, twenty-nine years old, sitting in the very same apartment where I’d watched all that TV and consumed all those meals dished up by the patient and selfless Marian Robinson. I had so much—an education, a healthy sense of self, a deep arsenal of ambition—and I was wise enough to credit my mother, in particular, with instilling it in me. She’d taught me how to read before I started kindergarten, helping me sound out words as I sat curled like a kitten in her lap, studying a library copy of Dick and Jane. She’d cooked for us with care, putting broccoli and Brussels sprouts on our plates and requiring that we eat them. She’d hand sewn my prom dress, for God’s sake. The point was, she’d given diligently and she’d given everything. She’d let our family define her. I was old enough now to realize that all the hours she gave to me and Craig were hours she didn’t spend on herself.
My considerable blessings in life were now causing a kind of psychic whiplash. I’d been raised to be confident and see no limits, to believe I could go after and get absolutely anything I wanted. And I wanted everything. Because, as Suzanne would say, why not? I wanted to live with the hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward the stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother. I wanted to have a work life and a home life, but with some promise that one would never fully squelch the other. I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all. It was an odd and confounding thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have everything? I had no idea.
Barack, meanwhile, came home from Bali looking tanned and carrying a satchel stuffed with legal pads, having converted his isolation into a literary victory. The book was basically finished. Within a matter of months, his agent had resold it to a new publisher, paying off his debt and securing a plan for publication. More important to me was the fact that within a matter of hours we’d returned to the easy rhythm of our newlywed life. Barack was here, done with his solitude, landed back in my world. My husband. He was smiling at the jokes I made, wanting to hear about my day, kissing me to sleep at night.
As the months went by, we cooked, worked, laughed, and planned. Later that spring, we had our finances in order enough to buy a condo, moving out of 7436 South Euclid Avenue and into a pretty, railroad-style apartment in Hyde Park with hardwood floors and a tiled fireplace, a new launchpad for our life. With Barack’s encouragement, I took another risk and switched jobs again, this time saying good-bye to Valerie and Susan at city hall in order to finally explore the kind of nonprofit work that had always intrigued me, finding a leadership role that would give me a chance to grow. There was still plenty I hadn’t figured out about my life—the riddle of how to be both a Mary and a Marian remained unsolved—but for now all those deeper questions drifted out to the margins of my mind, where they’d sit dormant and unattended for the time being. Any worries could wait, I figured, because we were an us now, and we were happy. And happy seemed like a starting place for everything.
13
My new job made me nervous. I’d been hired to be the executive director for the brand-new Chicago chapter of an organization called Public Allies, which itself was basically brand-new. It was something like a start-up inside a start-up, and in a field in which I had no professional experience to speak of. Public Allies had been founded only a year earlier in Washington, D.C., and was the brainchild of Vanessa Kirsch and Katrina Browne, who were both just out of college and interested in helping more people find their way into careers in public service and nonprofit work. Barack had met the two of them at a conference and become a member of their board, eventually suggesting they get in touch with me regarding the job.
The model was similar to what was being used at Teach for America, which itself was relatively new at the time: Public Allies recruited talented young people, gave them intensive training and committed mentorship, and placed them in paid ten-month apprentice positions inside community organizations and public agencies, the hope being that they’d flourish and contribute in meaningful ways. The broader aim was that these opportunities would give the recruits—Allies, we called them—both the experience and the drive to continue working in the nonprofit or public sector for years to come, thereby helping to build a new generation of community leaders.
For me, the idea resonated in a big way. I still remembered how during my senior year at Princeton so many of us had marched into MCAT and LSAT exams or suited up to interview for corporate training programs without once （at least in my case） considering or maybe even realizing that a wealth of more civic-minded job options existed. Public Allies was meant as a corrective to this, a means of widening the horizon for young people thinking about careers. But what I especially liked was that its founders were focused less on parachuting Ivy Leaguers into urban communities and more on finding and cultivating talent that was already there. You didn’t need a college degree to become an Ally. You needed only a high school diploma or GED, to be older than seventeen and younger than thirty, and to have shown some leadership capability, even if thus far in life it had gone largely untapped.
Public Allies was all about promise—finding it, nurturing it, and putting it to use. It was a mandate to seek out young people whose best qualities might otherwise be overlooked and to give them a chance to do something meaningful. To me, the job felt almost like destiny. For every moment I’d spent looking wistfully at the South Side from my forty-seventh-floor window at Sidley, here was an invitation, finally, to use what I knew. I had a sense of how much latent promise sat undiscovered in neighborhoods like my own, and I was pretty sure I’d know how to find it.
As I contemplated the new job, my mind often traveled back to childhood, and in particular to the month or so I’d spent in the pencil-flying pandemonium of that second-grade class at Bryn Mawr Elementary, before my mother had the wherewithal to have me plucked out. In the moment, I’d felt nothing but relieved by my own good fortune. But as my luck in life seemed only to snowball from there, I thought more about the twenty or so kids who’d been marooned in that classroom, stuck with an uncaring and unmotivated teacher. I knew I was no smarter than any of them. I just had the advantage of an advocate. I thought about this more often now that I was an adult, especially when people applauded me for my achievements, as if there weren’t a strange and cruel randomness to it all. Through no fault of their own, those second graders had lost a year of learning. I’d seen enough at this point to understand how quickly even small deficits can snowball, too.