“Maybe,” Barack said, with a bemused shrug. “But maybe I can do some good. Who knows?”
“That’s right,” I said, shrugging back. It wasn’t my job to interfere with his optimism. “Who knows?”
* * *
This won’t be news to anyone, but my husband did become a politician. He was a good person who wanted to have an impact in the world, and despite my skepticism he decided this was the best way to go about it. Such is the nature of his faith.
Barack was elected to the Illinois senate in November 1996 and sworn in two months later, at the start of the following year. To my surprise, I’d enjoyed watching the campaign unfold. I’d helped collect signatures to put him on the ballot, knocking on doors in my old neighborhood on Saturdays, listening to what residents had to say about the state and its government, all the things they thought needed fixing. For me, it was reminiscent of the weekends I’d spent as a child trailing my dad as he climbed up all those porch steps, going about his duties as a precinct captain. Beyond this, I wasn’t much needed, and that suited me perfectly. I could treat campaigning like a hobby, picking it up when it was convenient, having some fun with it, and then getting back to my own work.
Barack’s mother had passed away in Honolulu shortly after he announced his candidacy. Her decline had been so swift that he hadn’t made it there to say good-bye. This crushed him. It was Ann Dunham who’d introduced him to the richness of literature and the power of a well-reasoned argument. Without her, he wouldn’t have felt the monsoon downpours in Jakarta or seen the water temples of Bali. He might never have learned to appreciate how easy and thrilling it was to jump from one continent to another, or how to embrace the unfamiliar. She was an explorer, an intrepid follower of her own heart. I saw her spirit in Barack in big and small ways. The pain of losing her sat lodged like a blade in both of us, right alongside the blade that had been embedded when we’d lost my dad.
Now that it was winter and the legislature was in session, we were separated for a good part of every week. Barack drove four hours to Springfield on Monday nights and checked into a cheap hotel where a lot of the other legislators stayed, usually returning late on Thursday. He had a small office in the statehouse and a part-time staffer in Chicago. He’d scaled back his work at the law firm but as a way of keeping pace with our debts, he’d added more courses to his teaching load at the law school, scheduling classes for days he wasn’t in Springfield and teaching more when the senate wasn’t in session. We spoke on the phone every night he was downstate, comparing notes and swapping tales about our respective days. On Fridays, back in Chicago, we had a standing date night, usually meeting downtown at a restaurant called Zinfandel after we’d both finished up work.
I remember these nights with a deep fondness now, for the low, warm lights of the restaurant and how it had become predictable that with my devotion to punctuality I’d always be the first to show up. I’d wait for Barack, and because it was the end of the workweek, and because I was accustomed to it at this point, it didn’t bother me that he was late. I knew he’d get there eventually and that my heart would leap as it always did, seeing him walk through the door and hand his winter coat off to the hostess before threading his way through the tables, grinning when his eyes finally landed on mine. He’d kiss me and then take off his suit jacket, draping it on the back of his chair before sitting down. My husband. The routine settled me. We ordered the same thing pretty much every Friday—pot roast, Brussels sprouts, and mashed potatoes—and when it came, we ate every bite.
This was a golden time for us, for the balance of our marriage, him with his purpose and me with mine. During a single, early week of senate business in Springfield, Barack had introduced seventeen new bills—possibly a record, and at the very least a measure of his eagerness to get something done. Some would ultimately pass, but most would get quickly picked off in the Republican-controlled chamber, downed by partisanship and a cynicism passed off as practicality among his new colleagues. I saw in those early months how, just as I’d predicted, politics would be a fight, and the fight would be wearying, involving standoffs and betrayals, dirty-deal makers and compromises that sometimes felt painful. But I saw, too, that Barack’s own forecast had been correct as well. He was strangely suited to the tussle of lawmaking, calm inside the maelstrom, accustomed to being an outsider, taking defeats in his easy Hawaiian stride. He stayed hopeful, insistently so, convinced that some part of his vision would someday, somehow, manage to prevail. He was getting battered already, but it wasn’t bothering him. It did seem he was built for this. He’d get dinged up and stay shiny, like an old copper pot.
I, too, was in the midst of a transition. I’d taken a new job, surprising myself somewhat by deciding to leave Public Allies, the organization I’d put together and grown with such care. For three years, I’d given myself to it with zeal, taking responsibility for the largest and the smallest of operational tasks, right down to restocking paper in the photocopier. With Public Allies thriving, and its longevity all but assured thanks to multiyear federal grants and foundation support, I felt that I could now step away in good faith. And it just so happened that in the fall of 1996 a new opportunity had cropped up almost out of nowhere. Art Sussman, the lawyer at the University of Chicago who’d met with me a few years earlier, called to let me know about a position that had just been created there.
The school was looking for an associate dean to focus on community relations, committing at long last to do a better job of integrating with the city, and most especially the South Side neighborhood that surrounded it, including through the creation of a community service program to connect students to volunteer opportunities in the neighborhood. Like the position at Public Allies, this new job spoke to a reality I’d lived personally. As I’d told Art years earlier, the University of Chicago had always felt less attainable and less interested in me than the fancy East Coast schools I’d ultimately attended, a place with its back turned to the neighborhood. The chance to try to lower those walls, to get more students involved with the city and more city residents with the university, was one I found inspiring.
All inspiration aside, there were underlying reasons for making the transition. The university offered the kind of institutional stability that a still-newish nonprofit could not. My pay was better, my hours would be more reasonable, and there were other people designated to keep paper in the copier and fix the laser printer when it broke. I was thirty-two years old now and starting to think more about what kind of load I wanted to carry. On our date nights at Zinfandel, Barack and I often continued a conversation we’d been having in one form or another for years—about impact, about how and where each one of us could make a difference, how best to apportion our time and energy.
For me, some of the old questions about who I was and what I wanted to be in life were starting to drift in again, fixing themselves at the forefront of my mind. I’d taken the new job in part to create a little more room in our life, and also because the health-care benefits were better than anything I’d ever had. And this would end up being important. As Barack and I sat holding hands across the table in the candle glow of another Friday night at Zinfandel, with the pot roast polished off and dessert on its way, there was one big wrinkle in our happiness. We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going well.