The news landed like a rock through a stained-glass window. I’d worked so hard to make sure my daughters were happy and whole. What had I done wrong? What kind of mother was I if I hadn’t even noticed a change?
Talking further with the doctor, I began to see the pattern we were in. With Barack gone all the time, convenience had become the single most important factor in my choices at home. We’d been eating out more. With less time to cook, I often picked up takeout on my way home from work. In the mornings, I packed the girls’ lunch boxes with Lunchables and Capri Suns. Weekends usually meant a trip to the McDonald’s drive-through window after ballet and before soccer. None of this, our doctor said, was out of the ordinary, or even all that terrible in isolation. Too much of it, though, was a real problem.
Clearly, something had to change, but I was at a loss about how to make that happen. Every solution seemed to demand more time—time at the grocery store, time in the kitchen, time spent chopping vegetables or slicing the skin off a chicken breast—all this coming right when time felt as if it were already on the verge of extinction in my world.
I then remembered a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with an old friend I’d bumped into on a plane, who’d mentioned that she and her husband had hired a young man named Sam Kass to cook regular healthy meals at her house. By coincidence, it turned out Barack and I had met Sam years earlier through a different set of friends.
I never expected to be the sort of person who hired someone to come into my house and prepare meals for my family. It felt a little bougie, the kind of thing that would elicit a skeptical side eye from my South Side relatives. Barack, he of the Datsun with the hole in the floor, wasn’t hot on the idea, either; it didn’t fit with his ingrained community-organizer frugality, nor the image he wanted to promote as a presidential candidate. But to me, it felt like the only sane choice. Something had to give. No one else could run my programs at the hospital. No one else could campaign as Barack Obama’s wife. No one could fill in as Malia and Sasha’s mother at bedtime. But maybe Sam Kass could cook some dinners for us.
I hired Sam to come to our house a couple of times a week, making a meal we could eat that night and another that I could pull from the refrigerator to heat up the next evening. He was a bit of an outlier in the Obama household—a white twenty-six-year-old with a shiny shaved head and a perpetual five o’clock shadow—but the girls took to his corny jokes as quickly as they took to his cooking. He showed them how to chop carrots and blanch greens, shifting our family away from the fluorescent sameness of the grocery store and toward the rhythm of the seasons. He could be reverent about the arrival of fresh peas in springtime or the moment raspberries came ripe in June. He waited until peaches were rich and plump before serving them to the girls, knowing that then they might actually compete with candy. Sam also had an educated perspective on food and health issues, namely how the food industry marketed processed foods to families in the name of convenience and how that was having severe public health consequences. I was intrigued, realizing that it tied in to some of what I’d seen while working for the hospital system, and to the compromises I’d made myself as a working mother trying to feed her family.
One evening Sam and I spent a couple of hours talking in my kitchen, the two of us batting around ideas about how, if Barack ever managed to win the presidency, I might use my role as First Lady to try to address some of these issues. One idea bloomed into another. What if we grew vegetables at the White House and helped advocate for fresh food? What if we then used that as a cornerstone for something bigger, a whole children’s health initiative that might help parents avoid some of the pitfalls I’d experienced?
We talked until it was late. I looked at Sam and let out a sigh. “The only problem is our guy is down by thirty points in the polls,” I said as the two of us began to crack up. “He’s never gonna win.”
It was a dream, but I liked it.
* * *
When it came to campaigning, each day was another race to be run. I was still trying to cling to some form of normalcy and stability, not just for the girls, but for me. I carried two BlackBerrys—one for work, the other for my personal life and political obligations, which were now, for better or worse, deeply entwined. My daily phone calls with Barack tended to be short and newsy—Where are you? How’s it going? How are the kids?—both of us accustomed now to not speaking of fatigue or our personal needs. There was no point, because we couldn’t attend to them anyway. Life was all about the ticking clock.
At work, I was doing what I could to keep up, sometimes checking in with my staff at the hospital from the cluttered backseat of a Toyota Corolla belonging to an anthropology student volunteering for the campaign in Iowa or from the quiet corner of a Burger King in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Several months after Barack’s announcement in Springfield and with the support of my colleagues, I’d decided to scale back to part-time hours, knowing it was the only sustainable way to keep going. On the road two or three days a week together, Melissa, Katie, and I had become an efficient family, meeting up at the airport in the mornings and hustling through security, where the guards all knew my name. I was recognized more often now, mostly by African American women who’d call out “Michelle! Michelle!” as I walked past them to the gate.
Something was changing, so gradually that at first it was hard to register. I sometimes felt as if I were floating through a strange universe, waving at strangers who acted as if they knew me, boarding planes that lifted me out of my normal world. I was becoming known. And I was becoming known for being someone’s wife and as someone involved with politics, which made it doubly and triply weird.
Working a rope line during campaign events had become like trying to stay upright inside a hurricane, I’d found, with well-meaning, deeply enthusiastic strangers reaching for my hands and touching my hair, people trying to thrust pens, cameras, and babies at me without warning. I’d smile, shake hands, and hear stories, all the while trying to move forward down the line. Ultimately, I’d emerge, with other people’s lipstick on my cheeks and handprints on my blouse, looking as if I’d just stepped out of a wind tunnel.
I had little time to think much about it, but quietly I worried that as my visibility as Barack Obama’s wife rose, the other parts of me were dissolving from view. When I spoke to reporters, they rarely asked about my work. They inserted “Harvard-educated” in their description of me, but generally left it at that. A couple of news outlets had published stories speculating that I’d been promoted at the hospital not due to my own hard work and merit but because of my husband’s growing political stature, which was painful to read. In April, Melissa called me one day at home to let me know about a snarky column written by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. In it, she referred to me as a “princess of South Chicago,” suggesting that I was emasculating Barack when I spoke publicly about how he didn’t pick up his socks or put the butter back in the fridge. For me, it had always been important that people see Barack as human and not as some otherworldly savior. Maureen Dowd would have preferred, apparently, that I adopt the painted-on smile and the adoring gaze. I found it odd and sad that such a harsh critique would come from another professional woman, someone who had not bothered to get to know me but was now trying to shape my story in a cynical way.