Barack and I developed a special fondness for Queen Elizabeth, who reminded Barack of his no-nonsense grandmother. Over the course of many visits she showed me that humanity is more important than protocol or formality.
Meeting Nelson Mandela gave me the perspective I needed a couple of years into our White House journey—that real change happens slowly, not just over months and years but over decades and lifetimes.
A hug, for me, is a way to melt away pretenses and simply connect. Here I’m at Oxford University with the girls from London’s Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School.
I’ll never forget the spirit of optimism and resilience that lived in the service members and military families I met during visits to Walter Reed Medical Center.
Hadiya Pendleton’s mother, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, did everything right but still couldn’t protect her child from the awful randomness of gun violence. Meeting her before Hadiya’s funeral in Chicago, I was overwhelmed by how unfair it was.
I tried as often as possible to be home to greet the girls when they came back from school. It was one benefit of living above the office.
Barack always maintained a healthy separation between work and family time, making it upstairs for dinner nearly every night and managing to be fully present with us at home. In 2009, the girls and I broke down the barrier and surprised him in the Oval Office on his birthday.
We made good on our promise to Malia and Sasha that if Barack became president, we’d get a dog. In fact, we eventually got two. Bo （pictured here） and Sunny brought a sense of lightness to everything.
Each spring I hoped to use my commencement speeches to inspire graduates and help
them see the power of their own stories. Here I am preparing to speak at Virginia
Tech in 2012. In the background, Tina Tchen, my tireless chief of staff for five years,
can be seen as she often was: multitasking on her phone.
The dogs were free to roam throughout much of the White House. They especially loved hanging out in the garden and also in the kitchen. Here they are in the pantry with butler Jorge Davila, probably hoping to get slipped some food.
We’re deeply grateful to all of the staff who kept our lives running smoothly for eight years. We came to know about their kids and grandkids and also celebrated milestones with them, as we did here with assistant usher Reggie Dixon on his birthday in 2012.
Being the First Family came with unusual privileges and some unusual challenges. Barack
and I sought to maintain a sense of normalcy for our girls. ABOVE LEFT: Malia, Barack, and I cheer on Sasha’s basketball team, the Vipers. ABOVE RIGHT: The girls relax on Bright Star, the call sign for the First Lady’s plane.
We made sure our girls had the opportunity to do standard teenage things, like learning to drive a car, even if it meant having driving lessons with the Secret Service.
The Fourth of July always gives us a lot to celebrate, since it’s also Malia’s birthday.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s the power of using your voice. I tried my best to speak the truth and shed light on the stories of people whoare often brushed aside.
In 2015, my family joined Congressman John Lewis and other icons of the civil rights movement in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. I was reminded that day of how far our country has come—and how far we still have to go.
17
When I was in first grade, a boy in my class punched me in the face one day, his fist coming like a comet, full force and out of nowhere. We’d been lining up to go to lunch, all of us discussing whatever felt urgent just then to six-and seven-year-olds—who was the fastest runner or why crayon colors had such weird names—when blam, I got whacked. I don’t know why. I’ve forgotten the boy’s name, but I remember staring at him dumbfounded and in pain, my lower lip already swelling, my eyes hot with tears. Too shocked to be angry, I ran home to my mom.
The boy got a talking-to from our teacher. My mother went over to school to personally lay eyes on the kid, wanting to assess what kind of threat he posed. Southside, who must have been over at our house that day, got his grandfatherly hackles up and insisted on going over with her as well. I was not privy to it, but some sort of conversation between adults took place. Some type of punishment was meted out. I received a shamefaced apology from the boy and was instructed not to worry about him further.
“That boy was just scared and angry about things that had nothing to do with you,” my mother told me later in our kitchen as she stirred dinner on the stove. She shook her head as if to suggest she knew more than she was willing to share. “He’s dealing with a whole lot of problems of his own.”
This was how we talked about bullies. When I was a kid, it was easy to grasp: Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people. I’d see it in DeeDee, the tough girl on my neighborhood block, and even in Dandy, my own grandfather, who could be rude and pushy even with his own wife. They lashed out because they felt overwhelmed. You avoided them if you could and stood up to them if you had to. According to my mother, who would probably want some sort of live-and-let-live slogan carved on her headstone, the key was never to let a bully’s insults or aggression get to you personally.
If you did—well, then, you could really get hurt.
Only later in life would this become a real challenge for me. Only when I was in my early forties and trying to help get my husband elected president would I think back to that day in the lunch line in first grade, remembering how confusing it was to be ambushed, how much it hurt to get socked in the face with no warning at all.
I spent much of 2008 trying not to worry about the punches.
* * *
I’ll begin by jumping ahead to a happy memory from that year, because I do have many of them. We visited Butte, Montana, on the Fourth of July, which happened to be Malia’s tenth birthday and about four months ahead of the general election. Butte is a hardy, historic copper-mining town set down in the brushy southwestern corner of Montana, with the dark ridgeline of the Rocky Mountains visible in the distance. Butte was a toss-up town in what our campaign hoped could be a toss-up state. Montana had gone for George W. Bush in the last election but had also elected a Democratic governor. It seemed like a good place for Barack to visit.
More than ever, there were calculations involved in how Barack spent every minute of every day. He was being watched, measured, evaluated. People took note of which states he visited, which diner he showed up at for breakfast, what kind of meat he ordered to go with his eggs. About twenty-five members of the press traveled with him continuously now, filling the back of the campaign plane, filling the corridors and breakfast rooms of small-town hotels, trailing him from stop to stop, their pens immortalizing everything. If a presidential candidate caught a cold, it got reported. If someone got an expensive haircut or asked for Dijon mustard at a TGI Fridays （as Barack had naively done years earlier, meriting an eventual headline in the New York Times）， it would get reported and then parsed a hundred ways on the internet. Was the candidate weak? Was he a snob? A phony? A true American?
This was part of the process, we understood—a test to see who had the mettle to hold up as both a leader and a symbol for the country itself. It was like having your soul X-rayed every day, scanned and rescanned for any sign of fallibility. You didn’t get elected if you didn’t first submit to the full-bore scrutiny of the American gaze, which ran itself over your entire history, including your social associations, professional choices, and tax returns. And that gaze was arguably more intense and open to manipulation than ever. We were just coming into an age where clicks were being measured and monetized. Facebook had only recently gone mainstream. Twitter was relatively new. Most American adults owned a cell phone, and most cell phones had a camera. We were standing at the edge of something I’m not sure any of us yet fully understood.