It was surreal, the whole thing. All I could do, really, was joke about it.
“Must’ve been a good speech,” I’d say with a shrug as people began stopping Barack on the street to ask for his autograph or to tell him they’d loved what he’d said. “Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when we walked out of a restaurant in Chicago to find that a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk to wait for him. I said the same thing when journalists started asking for Barack’s thoughts on important national issues, when big-time political strategists started to hover around him, and when nine years after publication the formerly obscure Dreams from My Father got a paperback reissue and landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
“Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when a beaming, bustling Oprah Winfrey showed up at our house to spend a day interviewing us for her magazine.
What was happening to us? I almost couldn’t track it. In November, Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate, winning 70 percent of the vote statewide, the largest margin in Illinois history and the biggest landslide of any Senate race in the country that year. He’d won significant majorities among blacks, whites, and Latinos; men and women; rich and poor; urban, suburban, and rural. At one point, we went to Arizona for a quick getaway, and he was mobbed by well-wishers there. This for me felt like a true and odd measure of his fame: Even white people were recognizing him now.
* * *
I took what was left of my normalcy and wrapped myself in it. When we were at home, everything was the same. When we were with our friends and family, everything was the same. With our kids, it was always the same. But outside, things were different. Barack was flying back and forth to D.C. all the time now. He had a Senate office and an apartment in a shabby building on Capitol Hill, a little one-bedroom that was already cluttered with books and papers, his Hole away from home. Anytime the girls and I came to visit, we didn’t even pretend to want to stay there, booking a hotel room for the four of us instead.
I stuck to my routine in Chicago. Gym, work, home, repeat. Dishes in the dishwasher. Swim lessons, soccer, ballet. I kept pace as I always had. Barack had a life in Washington now, operating with some of the gravitas that came with being a senator, but I was still me, living my same normal life. I was sitting one day in my parked car at the shopping plaza on Clybourn Avenue, having some Chipotle and a little me-time after a dash through BabyGap, when my secretary at work called on my cell phone to ask if she could patch through a call. It was from a woman in D.C.—someone I’d never met, the wife of a fellow senator—who’d tried a few times already to reach me.
“Sure, put her through,” I said.
And on came the voice of this senator’s wife, pleasant and warm. “Well, hello!” she said. “I’m so glad to finally talk to you!”
I told her that I was excited to talk to her, too.
“I’m just calling to welcome you,” she said, “and to let you know that we’d like to invite you to join something very special.”
She’d called to ask me to be in some sort of private organization, a club that, from what I gathered, was made up primarily of the wives of important people in Washington. They got together regularly for luncheons and to discuss issues of the day. “It’s a nice way to meet people, and I know that’s not always easy when you’re new to town,” she said.
In my whole life, I’d never been asked to join a club. I’d watched friends in high school go off on ski trips with their Jack and Jill groups. At Princeton, I’d waited up sometimes for Suzanne to come home, buzzed and tittering, from her eating-club parties. Half the lawyers at Sidley, it seemed, belonged to country clubs. I’d visited plenty of those clubs over time, raising money for Public Allies, raising money for Barack’s campaigns. You learned early on that clubs, in general, were saturated with money. Belonging signified more than just belonging.
It was a kind offer she was making, coming from a genuine place, and yet I was all too happy to turn it down.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s so nice of you to think of me. But actually, we’ve made the decision I won’t be moving to Washington.” I let her know that we had two little girls in school in Chicago and that I was pretty attached to my job. I explained that Barack was settling into life in D.C., commuting home when he could. I didn’t mention that we were so committed to Chicago that we were looking to buy a new house, thanks to the royalty money that was starting to come in from the renewed sales of his book and the fact that he now had a generous offer on a second book—the surprise harvest of Barack’s magic beans.
The senator’s wife paused, letting a delicate beat pass. When she spoke again, her voice was gentle. “That can be very hard on a marriage, you know,” she said. “Families fall apart.”
I felt her judgment then. She herself had been in Washington for many years. The implication was she’d seen things go poorly when a spouse stayed back. The implication was that I was making a dangerous choice, that there was only one correct way to be a senator’s wife and I was choosing wrong.
I thanked her again, hung up, and sighed. None of this had been my choice in the first place. None of this was my choice at all. I was now, like her, the wife of a U.S. senator—Mrs. Obama, she’d called me throughout the conversation—but that didn’t mean I had to drop everything to support him. Truly, I didn’t want to drop a thing.
I knew there were other senators with spouses who chose to live in their hometowns rather than in D.C. I knew that the Senate, with fourteen of its one hundred members being female, was not quite as antiquated as it had once been. But still, I found it presumptuous that another woman would tell me I was wrong to want to keep my kids in school and remain in my job. A few weeks after the election, I’d gone with Barack to Washington for a daylong orientation offered to newly elected senators and their spouses. There’d been only a few of us attending that year, and after a quick introduction the politicians went one way, while spouses were ushered into another room. I’d come with questions, knowing that politicians and their families were expected to adhere to strict federal ethics policies dictating everything from whom they could receive gifts from to how they paid for travel to and from Washington. I thought maybe we’d discuss how to navigate social situations with lobbyists or the legalities of raising money for a future campaign.
What we got, however, was an elaborate disquisition on the history and architecture of the Capitol and a look at the official china patterns produced for the Senate, followed by a polite and chitchatty lunch. The whole thing had gone on for hours. It would have been funny, maybe, if I hadn’t taken a day off from work and left our kids with my mother in order to be there. If I was going to be a political spouse, I wanted to treat it seriously. I didn’t care about the politics per se, but I also didn’t want to screw anything up.
The truth was that Washington confused me, with its decorous traditions and sober self-regard, its whiteness and maleness, its ladies having lunch off to one side. At the heart of my confusion was a kind of fear, because as much as I hadn’t chosen to be involved, I was getting sucked in. I’d been Mrs. Obama for the last twelve years, but it was starting to mean something different. At least in some spheres, I was now Mrs. Obama in a way that could feel diminishing, a missus defined by her mister. I was the wife of Barack Obama, the political rock star, the only black person in the Senate—the man who’d spoken of hope and tolerance so poignantly and forcefully that he now had a hornet buzz of expectation following him.