It was another small push out into the world. I’m sure that in her heart my mother knew already that he’d make the right choice. Every move she made, I realize now, was buttressed by the quiet confidence that she’d raised us to be adults. Our decisions were on us. It was our life, not hers, and always would be.
She climbed out of the car, giving me no choice but to drive. Get over it and just live a little was her message.
I offered testament to the idea that it was possible, at least in some ways, to overcome invisibility.
You don’t have to like your teacher,” she told me one day after I came home spewing complaints. “But that woman’s got the kind of math in her head that you need in yours. Focus on that and ignore the rest.
Barack, I’ve come to understand, is the sort of person who needs a hole, a closed-off little warren where he can read and write undisturbed. It’s like a hatch that opens directly onto the spacious skies of his brain. Time spent there seems to fuel him.
In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of those two things together had left me spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I couldn’t continue to live with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed Barack for the confusion. “If there were not a man in my life constantly questioning me about what drives me and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal, “would I be doing it on my own?
This is what a control freak learns inside the compressed otherworld of college, maybe above all else: There are simply other ways of being.
Because what was a basketball game if not a showcase of boys?
Even standing on the far edge of the vortex, you still felt its spin.
American citizens are for the most part far less cynical than their elected leaders.
If anyone in our family wanted to step outside onto the Truman Balcony – the lovely arcing terrace that overlooked the South Lawn, and the only semiprivate outdoor space we had at the White House – we needed to first alert the Secret Service so that they could shut down the section of E Street that was in view of the balcony, clearing out the flocks of tourists who gathered outside the gates there at all hours of the day and night.
He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good.
Two months later, just weeks before the election, a tape would surface of Donald Trump in an ungaurded moment, bragging to a TV host in 2005 about sexually assaulting women, using language so lewd and vulgar that it put media outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the established stamdards of decency. In the end, the standards of decency were simply lowered in order to make room for the candidate’s voice.
Ghetto” signaled that a place was both black and hopeless. It was a label that foretold failure and then hastened its arrival.
I’d said it casually, but the phrase caught hold and was amplified across the press. Some Americans seemed to embrace it, understanding all too well the amount of organization and drive it takes to raise children. Others, meanwhile, seemed vaguely appalled, presuming it to mean that as First Lady I’d do nothing but pipe-cleaner craft projects with my kids.
I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of streetlights outside. He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his father? “Hey, what’re you thinking about over there?” I whispered. He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking about income inequality.
It was possible... to live on two planes at once – to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind... You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
I wasn’t particularly imaginative in how I thought about the future, which is another way of saying I was already thinking about law school.
You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip.
I let his voice be my comfort. It bore no trace of pain or self-pity, carrying only good humor and softness and just the tiniest hint of jazz. I lived on it as if it were oxygen. It was sustaining, and it was always enough.