My team and I persuaded Darden Restaurants, the parent company behind chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, to make changes to the kinds of food it offered and how it was prepared. They pledged to revamp their menus, cutting calories, reducing sodium, and offering healthier options for kids’ meals.
Barack was a black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could win.
Ahora comprendo que incluso un matrimonio feliz puede ser agotador, que es un contrato que debe renovarse una y otra vez, discreta y calladamente, o incluso a solas.
Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.
Barack’s safety was something I didn’t want to think about, let alone discuss.
Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
You’ve leaped but you haven’t landed. You can’t know yet how the future’s going to feel. After months of everything going too fast, time slows to an agonizing crawl.
America would bring to Barack Obama the same questions my cousin was unconsciously putting to me that day on the stoop: Are you what you appear to be? Do I trust you or not?
I spent much of 2008 trying not to worry about the punches.
Grief and resilience live together. I learned this not just once as First Lady but many times over.
I considered all these people, current and former staff, to be family. And I was so proud of what we’d done.
Even when it’s not pretty or perfect, Even when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
It turns out that even two committed go-getters with a deep love and a robust work ethic can’t will themselves into being pregnant. Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and reward.
To me, there was magic in the learning.
I’d known just enough loss by then to know that there was more coming.
My mother was a force. She had little tolerance for fools, she kept her hair short and wore practical non-fussy clothes. Everything about her radiated confidence and calm.
I continue, too, to keep myself connected to a force that’s larger and more potent than any one election, or leader, or news story––and that’s OPTIMISM. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear.
Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.
I endured misery for the sake of appearances.
There are truths we face and truths we ignore.