What bothered me most was that Barack exemplified everything parents on the South Side often said they wanted for their kids. He was everything people like Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson and so many black leaders had talked about for years: He’d gotten an education, and rather than abandoning the African American community, he was now trying to serve it. This was a heated election, sure, but Barack was being attacked for all the wrong things. I was astonished to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class.
It made me sick.
Barack, for his part, took it more in stride than I did, having already seen in Springfield how nasty politics could get and how the truth was so often distorted to serve people’s political aims. Bruised but unwilling to give up, he continued to campaign through the winter, making his weekly trips back and forth to Springfield while trying earnestly to beat back the storm, even as donations began to dwindle and more and more endorsements went to Bobby Rush. With the clock ticking down to the primary, Malia and I hardly saw him at all, though he called us every evening to say good night.
I was more grateful than ever for those few stolen days we’d had on the beach. I knew that in his heart Barack was, too. What never got lost inside all the noise, inside all those nights he spent away from us, was that he cared. He took none of it lightly. I caught a trace of agony in his voice nearly every time he hung up the phone. It was almost as if every day he were forced to cast another vote, between family and politics, politics and family.
In March, Barack lost the Democratic primary in what ended up being a resounding victory for Bobby Rush.
All the while, I just kept hugging our girl.
* * *
And then came our second girl. Natasha Marian Obama was born on June 10, 2001, at the University of Chicago Medical Center, after a single round of IVF, a fantastically simple pregnancy, and a straightforward delivery, while Malia, now almost three, waited at home with my mom. Our new baby was beautiful, a little lamb-child with a full head of dark hair and alert brown eyes—the fourth corner to our square. Barack and I were over the moon.
Sasha, we planned to call her. I’d chosen the name because I thought it had a sassy ring. A girl named Sasha would brook no fools. Like all parents, I found myself wanting so much for our children, praying that nothing would ever hurt them. My hope was that they’d grow up to be bright and energetic, optimistic like their father and hard-driving like their mom. More than anything, I wanted them to be strong, to have a certain steeliness, the kind that would keep them upright and forward moving, no matter what. I didn’t know a thing about what was coming our way, how our family’s life would unfold—whether everything would go well or everything would go poorly, or whether, like most people, we’d get a solid mix of both. My job was just to make sure they were ready for it.
My stint at the university had left me feeling worn out, putting me in a far-from-perfect juggle while also straining our finances with the expense of child care. After Sasha was born, I debated whether I even wanted to return to my job at all, thinking that maybe our family would be better served if I stayed home full-time. Glo, our beloved babysitter, had been offered a higher-paying nursing job and had reluctantly decided she needed to move on. I couldn’t blame her, of course, but losing Glo rearranged everything in my working mother’s heart. Her investment in my family had allowed me to maintain my investment in my job. She loved our kids as if they were her own. I’d wept and wept the night she gave her notice, knowing how hard it would be for us to balance without her. I knew how fortunate we were to have the resources to hire her in the first place. But now that she was gone, it felt like losing an arm.
I loved being with my little daughters. I recognized the value of every minute and hour put in at home, especially with Barack’s schedule being so irregular. I thought once again of my mother’s decision to stay home with me and Craig. Surely, I was guilty of romanticizing her life—imagining it had actually been fun for her to Pine-Sol the windowsills and make all our clothes—but compared with the way I’d been living, it seemed quaint and manageable, and possibly worth trying. I liked the idea of being in charge of one thing rather than two, of not having my brain scrambled by the competing narratives of home and work. And it did seem that we could swing it financially. Barack had moved from an adjunct position to a senior lecturer at the law school, which gave us a tuition break at the university’s Lab School, where Malia was soon to start preschool.
But then came a call from Susan Sher, my former mentor and colleague at city hall who was now general counsel and a vice president at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where we’d just had Sasha. The center had a brand-new president whom everyone was raving about, and one of his top priorities was improving community outreach. He was looking to hire an executive director for community affairs, a job that seemed almost custom-made for me. Was I interested in interviewing?
I debated whether to even send in my résumé. It sounded like a great opportunity, but I’d just basically talked myself into the idea that I was—that we all were—better off with my staying home. In any event, this was not a moment of high glamour for me, not a time I could really imagine blow-drying my hair and putting on a business suit. I was up several times a night to nurse Sasha, which put me behind on sleep and therefore sanity. Even as I was still rather fanatically devoted to neatness, I was losing the battle. Our condo was strewn with baby toys, toddler books, and packages of diaper wipes. Any trip outside the house involved a giant stroller and an unfashionable diaper bag full of the essentials: a Ziploc of Cheerios, a few everyday toys, and an extra change of clothes—for everyone.
But motherhood had also brought with it a set of wonderful friendships. I’d managed to connect with a group of professional women and form a kind of chatty, hands-on social cluster. Most of us were deep into our thirties and working in all sorts of careers, from banking and government to nonprofits. Many of us were having children at the same time. The more children we had, the tighter we grew. We saw one another nearly every weekend. We looked after each other’s babies, went on group outings to the zoo, and bought bulk tickets for Disney on Ice. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, we just set the whole pack of kids loose in somebody’s playroom and cracked open a bottle of wine.
Each one of these women was educated, ambitious, dedicated to her kids, and generally as bewildered as I was about how to put it all together. When it came to working and parenting, we were doing it every sort of way. Some of us worked full-time, some part-time, some stayed at home with their kids. Some allowed their toddlers to eat hot dogs and corn chips; others served whole-grain everything. A few had super-involved husbands; others had husbands like mine, who were oversubscribed and away a lot. Some of my friends were incredibly happy; others were trying to make changes, to attempt a different sort of balance. Most of us lived in a state of constant calibration, tweaking one area of life in hopes of bringing more steadiness to another.
Our afternoons together taught me that there was no formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. This was useful to see. Regardless of who was living which way and why, every small child in that playroom was cherished and growing just fine. I felt it every time we gathered, the collective force of all these women trying to do right by their kids: In the end, no matter what, I knew we’d help one another out and we’d all be okay.