Though really we’d had no control over anything, somehow in the end it felt as if we’d timed it all perfectly. Very early in the morning on July 4, 1998, I felt the first twinges of labor. Barack and I checked into the University of Chicago hospital, bringing both Maya—who’d flown in from Hawaii to be there the week I was due—and my mom for support. It was still hours before the barbecue coals would start to blaze across the city and people would spread their blankets on the grass along the lakeshore, waving flags and waiting for the spectacle of the city fireworks to bloom over the water. We’d miss all of it that year anyway, lost in a whole new blaze and bloom. We were thinking not about country but about family as Malia Ann Obama, one of the two most perfect babies ever to be born to anyone, anywhere, dropped into our world.
14
Motherhood became my motivator. It dictated my movements, my decisions, the rhythm of every day. It took no time, no thought at all, for me to be fully consumed by my new role as a mother. I’m a detail-oriented person, and a baby is nothing if not a reservoir of details. Barack and I studied little Malia, taking in the mystery of her rosebud lips, her dark fuzzy head and unfocused gaze, the herky-jerky way she moved her tiny limbs. We bathed and swaddled her and kept her pressed to our chests. We tracked her eating, her hours of sleep, her every gurgle. We analyzed the contents of each soiled diaper as if it might tell us all her secrets.
She was a tiny person, a person entrusted to us. I was heady with the responsibility of it, fully in her thrall. I could lose an hour just watching her breathe. When there’s a baby in the house, time stretches and contracts, abiding by none of the regular rules. A single day can feel endless, and then suddenly six months have blown right past. Barack and I laughed about what parenthood had done to us. 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. We were, as most new parents are, obsessive and a little boring, and nothing made us happier. We hauled little Malia in her baby carrier with us to Zinfandel for our Friday night dates, figuring out how to streamline our order so we could be in and out quickly, before she got too restless.
Several months after Malia was born, I’d returned to work at the University of Chicago. I negotiated to come back only half-time, figuring this would be a win-win sort of arrangement—that I could now be both career woman and perfect mother, striking the Mary Tyler Moore/ Marian Robinson balance I’d always hoped for. We’d found a babysitter, Glorina Casabal, a doting, expert caregiver about ten years older than I was. Born in the Philippines, she was trained as a nurse and had raised two kids of her own. Glorina—“Glo”—was a short, bustling woman with a short, practical haircut and gold wire-rimmed glasses who could change a diaper in twelve seconds flat. She had a nurse’s hyper-competent, do-anything energy and would become a vital and cherished member of our family for the next few years. Her most important quality was that she loved my baby passionately.
What I didn’t realize—and this would also go into my file of things many of us learn too late—is that a part-time job, especially when it’s meant to be a scaled-down version of your previously full-time job, can be something of a trap. Or at least that’s how it played out for me. At work, I was still attending all the meetings I always had while also grappling with most of the same responsibilities. The only real difference was that I now made half my original salary and was trying to cram everything into a twenty-hour week. If a meeting ran late, I’d end up tearing home at breakneck speed to fetch Malia so that we could arrive on time （Malia eager and happy, me sweaty and hyperventilating） to the afternoon Wiggleworms class at a music studio on the North Side. To me, it felt like a sanity-warping double bind. I battled guilt when I had to take work calls at home. I battled a different sort of guilt when I sat at my office distracted by the idea that Malia might be allergic to peanuts. Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.
Meanwhile, it seemed that Barack had hardly missed a stride. A few months after Malia’s birth, he’d been reelected to a four-year term in the state senate, winning with 89 percent of the vote. He was popular and successful, and plate spinner that he was, he was also starting to think about bigger things—namely, running for the U.S. Congress, hoping to unseat a four-term Democrat named Bobby Rush. Did I think it was a good idea for him to run for Congress? No, I did not. It struck me as unlikely that he’d win, given that Rush was well-known and Barack was still a virtual nobody. But he was a politician now and had traction inside the state Democratic Party. He had advisers and supporters, some of whom were urging him to give it a shot. Somebody had conducted a preliminary poll that seemed to suggest maybe he could win. And this I know for sure about my husband: You don’t dangle an opportunity in front of him, something that could give him a wider field of impact, and expect him just to walk away. Because he doesn’t. He won’t.
* * *
At the end of 1999, when Malia was almost eighteen months old, we took her to Hawaii at Christmastime to visit her great-grandmother Toot, who was now seventy-seven years old and living in the same small high-rise apartment she’d been in for decades. It was meant to be a family visit—the one time each year Toot could see her grandson and great-granddaughter. Winter had once again clapped itself over Chicago, siphoning the warmth from the air and the blue from the sky. Feeling antsy both at home and at work, we’d booked a modest hotel room near Waikiki Beach and started counting down the days. Barack’s teaching duties at the law school had wrapped up for the semester, and I’d put in for time off at my job. But then politics got in the way.
The Illinois senate was hung up in a marathon debate, trying to settle on the provisions of a major crime bill. Instead of breaking for the holidays, it went into a special session with the aim of pushing through to a vote before Christmas. Barack called me from Springfield, saying we’d need to delay our trip by a few days. This wasn’t great news, but I understood it was out of his hands. All I cared was that we eventually got there. I didn’t want Toot spending Christmas alone, and beyond that Barack and I needed the downtime. The trip to Hawaii, I was figuring, would separate both of us from our work and give us a chance to simply breathe.
He was now officially running for Congress, which meant that he rarely switched off. He would later give an interview to a local paper, estimating that during the six or so months he campaigned for Congress, he spent less than four full days at home with me and Malia. This was the painful reality of campaigning. On top of his other responsibilities, Barack lived with a ticking clock, one that incessantly reminded him of the minutes and hours remaining before the March primary. How he spent each of those minutes and hours could, at least in theory, affect the eventual outcome. What I was learning, too, was that in the eyes of a campaign operation, any minutes or hours a candidate spends privately with family are viewed basically as a waste of that valuable time.