Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.
My mother maintained the sort of parental mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate – kind of unflappable Zen neutrality... She wasn’t quick to judge and she wasn’t quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring... When we’d done something great, we received just enough praise to know she was happy with us, but never so much that it became the reason we did what we did.
Twenty minutes later, I caught sight of Barack across the room, in the grips of what looked to be an endless conversation with the woman, who was doing a large portion of the talking. He shot me a look, implying that he’d like to be rescued. But he was a grown man. I let him rescue himself.
That day, I stared for a few extra seconds at the little oblong bubble next to my husband’s name for president of the United States. After almost twenty-one months of campaigning, attacks, and exhaustion, this was it – the last thing I needed to do. Barack glanced my way and laughed. “You still trying to make up your mind?” he said. “Need a little more time?
I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television, but still want a framed keepsake for their mantel.
It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once – to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress.
But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting – a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed.
It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.
America is not a simple place. Its contradictions set me spinning. I’d found myself at Democratic fund-raisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping wine with wealthy women who would claim to be passionate about education and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially to tell me that their Wall Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about raising their taxes.
Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.
When rumors about the so-called whitey tape surfaced, a friend who knows me well called up, clearly worried that the lie was true. I had to spend a good thirty minutes convincing her that I hadn’t turned into a racist, and when the conversation ended, I hung up, thoroughly demoralized.
We live by the paradigms we know.
Whatever deficits I might have arrived with, coming from an inner-city high school, it seemed that I could make up for them by putting in extra time, asking for help when I needed it, and learning to pace myself and not procrastinate.
Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
What I’ve learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collections of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.
When voters got to see me as a person, they understood that the caricatures were untrue. I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.
It’s a curious thing to realize, the in-betweenness one feels being African American in Africa. It gave me a hard-to-explain feeling of sadness, a sense of being unrooted in both lands.
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.
I wanted Americans to understand that words matter – that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it.
They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.