After talking it through with both Barack and my friends, I decided to interview for the university hospital job, to at least see what it was about. My feeling was I’d be perfect for the job. I knew I had the right skills and plenty of passion. But if I were to take it, I’d also need to operate from a position of strength, on terms that worked for my family. I could nail it, I thought, if I wasn’t overburdened with superfluous meetings and could be given the leeway to manage my own time, working from home when I needed to, dashing out of the office for day-care pickup or a pediatrician’s visit when necessary.
Also, I didn’t want to work part-time anymore. I was done with that. I wanted a full-time job, with a competitive salary to match so that we could better afford child care and housekeeping help—so that I could lay off the Pine-Sol and spend my free time playing with the girls. In the meantime, I wasn’t going to try to hide the messiness of my existence, from the breast-feeding baby and the three-year-old in preschool to the fact that with my husband’s topsy-turvy political schedule I was in charge of more or less every aspect of life at home.
Somewhat brazenly, I suppose, I laid all this out in my interview with Michael Riordan, the hospital’s new president. I even brought three-month-old Sasha along with me, too. I can’t remember the circumstances exactly, whether I couldn’t find a babysitter that day or whether I’d even bothered to try. Sasha was little, though, and still needed a lot from me. She was a fact of my life—a cute, burbling, impossible-to-ignore fact—and something compelled me almost literally to put her on the table for this discussion. Here is me, I was saying, and here also is my baby.
It seemed a miracle that my would-be boss appeared to get it. If he had any reservations listening to me explain how flextime was a necessity while I bounced Sasha on my lap, hoping all the while that her diaper wouldn’t leak, he didn’t express them. I walked out of the interview feeling pleased and fairly certain I’d be offered the job. But no matter how it panned out, I knew I’d at least done something good for myself in speaking up about my needs. There was power, I felt, in just saying it out loud. With a clear mind and a baby who was starting to fuss, I rushed us both back home.
* * *
This was the new math in our family: We had two kids, three jobs, two cars, one condo, and what felt like no free time. I accepted the new position at the hospital; Barack continued teaching and legislating. We both served on the boards of several nonprofits, and as much as he’d been stung by his defeat in the congressional primary, Barack still had ideas about trying for a higher office. George W. Bush was now president. As a country, we’d endured the shock and tragedy of the terror attacks of 9/11. There was a war going on in Afghanistan, a new color-coded threat advisory system being used in the United States, and Osama bin Laden was apparently hiding somewhere in a cave. As always, Barack was absorbing every bit of news carefully, going about his regular business while quietly developing his own thoughts about it all.
I don’t recall exactly when it was that he first raised the possibility of running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The idea was still nascent and an actual decision many months away, but clearly it was taking hold in Barack’s mind. What I do remember is my response, which was just to look at him incredulously, as if to say, Don’t you think we’re busy enough?
My distaste for politics was only intensifying, less because of what went on in either Springfield or D.C. and more because five years into his tenure as state senator Barack’s overloaded schedule was starting to really grate on me. As Sasha and Malia grew, I found that the pace only quickened and the to-do lists only got longer, leaving me operating in what felt like a never-ending state of overdrive. Barack and I did all we could to keep the girls’ lives calm and manageable. We had a new babysitter helping out at home. Malia was happy at her University of Chicago Laboratory School, making friends and loading up her own little calendar with birthday parties and swim classes on weekends. Sasha was now about a year old, wobbling on two feet and beginning to say words and crack us up with her megawatt smiles. She was madly inquisitive and utterly bent on keeping up with Malia and her four-year-old buddies. My hospital job was going well, though the best way to stay on top of it, I was discovering, was to hoist myself from bed at 5:00 a.m. and put in a couple of hours on the computer before anyone else woke up.
This left me a little ragged in the evenings and sometimes put me in direct conflict with my night-owl husband, who turned up on Thursday nights from Springfield relatively chipper and wanting to dive headfirst into family life, making up for all the time he’d lost. But time was now officially an issue for us. If Barack’s disregard for punctuality had once been something I’d gently teased him about, it was now a straight-up aggravation. I knew that Thursdays made him happy. I’d hear his excitement when he called to report that he was done with work and finally headed home. I understood it was nothing but good intentions that would lead him to say “I’m on my way!” or “Almost home!” And for a while, I believed those words. I’d give the girls their nightly bath but delay bedtime so that they could wait up to give their dad a hug. Or I’d feed them dinner and put them to bed but hold off on eating myself, lighting a few candles and looking forward to sharing a meal with Barack.
And then I’d wait. I’d wait so long that Sasha’s and Malia’s eyelids would start to droop and I’d have to carry them to bed. Or I’d wait alone, hungry, and increasingly bitter as my own eyes got heavy and candle wax pooled on the table. On my way, I was learning, was the product of Barack’s eternal optimism, an indication of his eagerness to be home that did nothing to signify when he would actually arrive. Almost home was not a geo-locator but rather a state of mind. Sometimes he was on his way but needed to stop in to have one last forty-five-minute conversation with a colleague before he got into the car. Other times, he was almost home but forgot to mention that he was first going to fit in a quick workout at the gym.
In our life before children, such frustrations might have seemed petty, but as a working full-time mother with a half-time spouse and a predawn wake-up time, I felt my patience slipping away until finally, at some point, it just fell off a cliff. When Barack made it home, he’d either find me raging or unavailable, having flipped off every light in the house and gone sullenly to sleep.
* * *
We live by the paradigms we know. In Barack’s childhood, his father disappeared and his mother came and went. She was devoted to him but never tethered to him, and as far as he was concerned, there was nothing wrong in this approach. He’d had hills, beaches, and his own mind to keep him company. Independence mattered in Barack’s world. It always had and always would. I, meanwhile, had been raised inside the tight weave of my own family, in our boxed-in apartment, in our boxed-in South Side neighborhood, with my grandparents and aunts and uncles all around, everyone jammed at one table for our regular Sunday night meals. After thirteen years in love, we needed to think through what this meant.
When it came down to it, I felt vulnerable when he was away. Not because he wasn’t fully devoted to our marriage—this is and has always been a meaningful certainty in my life—but because having been brought up in a family where everyone always showed up, I could be extra let down when someone didn’t show. I was prone to loneliness and now also felt fierce about sticking up for the girls’ needs, too. We wanted him close. We missed him when he was gone. I worried that he didn’t understand what that felt like for us. I feared that the path he’d chosen for himself—and still seemed so clearly committed to pursuing—would end up steamrolling our every need. When he’d first approached me about running for state senate years earlier, there had been only two of us to think about. I had no conception of what saying yes to politics might mean for us later, once we’d added two children to the mix. But I now knew enough to understand that politics was never especially kind to families. I’d had a glimpse of it back in high school, through my friendship with Santita Jackson, and had seen it again when Barack’s political opponents had exploited his decision to stay with Malia in Hawaii when she was sick.