Becoming Read online

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  Barack and I came back from our honeymoon in Northern California to both good and bad news. The good news came in the form of the November election, which brought what felt like a tide of encouraging change. Bill Clinton won overwhelmingly in Illinois and across the country, moving President Bush out of office after only one term. Carol Moseley Braun also won decisively, becoming the first African American woman ever to hold a Senate seat. What was even more exciting to Barack was that the Election Day turnout had been nothing short of epic: Project VOTE! had directly registered 110,000 new voters, and its broader get-out-the-vote campaign had likely boosted overall turnout as well.

  For the first time in a decade, over half a million black voters in Chicago went to the polls, proving that they had the collective power to shape political outcomes. This sent a clear message to lawmakers and future politicians and reestablished a feeling that seemed to have been lost when Harold Washington died: The African American vote mattered. It would be costly politically for anyone to ignore or discount black people’s needs and concerns. Inside of this, too, was a secondary message to the black community itself, a reminder that progress was possible, that our worth was measurable. All this was heartening for Barack. As tiring as it was, he’d loved his job for what it taught him about Chicago’s complex political system and for proving that his organizing instincts could work on a larger scale. He’d collaborated with grassroots leaders, everyday citizens, and elected officials, and almost miraculously it had yielded results. Several media outlets noted the impressive impact of Project VOTE! A writer for Chicago magazine described Barack as “a tall, affable workaholic,” suggesting that he should someday run for office, an idea that he simply shrugged off.

  And here was the bad news: That tall, affable workaholic I’d just married had also blown his book deadline, having been so caught up in registering voters that he’d managed to turn in only a partial manuscript. We got home from California to learn that the publisher had canceled his contract, sending word through his literary agent that Barack was now on the hook to pay back his $40,000 advance.

  If he panicked, he didn’t do it in front of me. I was busy enough shifting into my new role at city hall, which entailed going to more zoning board meetings and fewer senior citizen picnics than my previous job had. Though I was no longer working corporate-lawyer hours, the city’s everyday fracas left me spent in the evenings, less interested in processing any stresses at home and more ready to pour a glass of wine, switch my brain off, and watch TV on the couch. If I’d learned anything from Barack’s obsessive involvement with Project VOTE!, anyway, it was that it wasn’t helpful for me to worry about his worries—in part because I seemed to find them more overwhelming than he ever did. Chaos agitated me, but it seemed to invigorate Barack. He was like a circus performer who liked to set plates spinning: If things got too calm, he took it as a sign that there was more to do. He was a serial over-committer, I was coming to understand, taking on new projects without much regard for limits of time and energy. He’d said yes, for example, to serving on the boards of a couple of nonprofits while also saying yes to a part-time teaching job at the University of Chicago for the coming spring semester while also planning to work full-time at the law firm.

  And then there was the book. Barack’s agent felt sure she could resell the idea to a different publisher, though he’d have to get a draft finished soon. With his teaching gig yet to begin and having obtained the blessing of the law firm that had waited a year already for him to start full-time, he came up with a solution that seemed to suit him perfectly: He’d write the book in isolation, removing his everyday distractions by renting a little cabin somewhere and drilling down hard on the work. It was the equivalent of pulling a frantic all-nighter to get a paper done in college, only Barack was estimating it would take him roughly a couple of months to get the book finished. He relayed all of this to me one night at home about six weeks after our wedding, before delicately dropping a final bit of information: His mother had found him the perfect cabin. In fact, she’d already rented it for him. It was cheap, quiet, and on the beach. In Sanur. Which was on the Indonesian island of Bali, some nine thousand miles away from me.

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  It sounds a little like a bad joke, doesn’t it? What happens when a solitude-loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman who does not love solitude one bit?

  The answer, I’m guessing, is probably the best and most sustaining answer to nearly every question arising inside a marriage, no matter who you are or what the issue is: You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.

  Which is to say that at the start of 1993, Barack flew to Bali and spent about five weeks living alone with his thoughts while working on a draft of his book Dreams from My Father, filling yellow legal pads with his fastidious handwriting, distilling his ideas during languid daily walks amid the coconut palms and lapping tide. I, meanwhile, stayed home on Euclid Avenue, living upstairs from my mother as another leaden Chicago winter descended, shellacking the trees and sidewalks with ice. I kept myself busy, seeing friends and hitting workout classes in the evenings. In my regular interactions at work or around town, I’d find myself casually uttering this strange new term—“my husband.” My husband and I are hoping to buy a home. My husband is a writer finishing a book. It was foreign and delightful and conjured memories of a man who simply wasn’t there. I missed Barack terribly, but I rationalized our situation as I could, understanding that even if we were newlyweds, this interlude was probably for the best.

  He had taken the chaos of his unfinished book and shipped himself out to do battle with it. Possibly this was out of kindness to me, a bid to keep the chaos out of my view. I’d married an outside-the-box thinker, I had to remind myself. He was handling his business in what struck him as the most sensible and efficient manner, even if outwardly it appeared to be a beach vacation—a honeymoon with himself (I couldn’t help but think in my lonelier moments) to follow his honeymoon with me.

  You and I, you and I, you and I. We were learning to adapt, to knit ourselves into a solid and forever form of us. Even if we were the same two people we’d always been, the same couple we’d been for years, we now had new labels, a second set of identities to wrangle. He was my husband. I was his wife. We’d stood up at church and said it out loud, to each other and to the world. It did feel as if we owed each other new things.

  For many women, including myself, “wife” can feel like a loaded word. It carries a history. If you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, wives seemed to be a genus of white women who lived inside television sitcoms—cheery, coiffed, corseted. They stayed at home, fussed over the children, and had dinner ready on the stove. They sometimes got into the sherry or flirted with the vacuum-cleaner salesman, but the excitement seemed to end there. The irony, of course, was that I used to watch those shows in our living room on Euclid Avenue while my own stay-at-home mom fixed dinner without complaint and my own clean-cut dad recovered from a day at work. My parents’ arrangement was as traditional as anything we saw on TV. Barack sometimes jokes, in fact, that my upbringing was like a black version of Leave It to Beaver, with the South Shore Robinsons as steady and fresh-faced as the Cleaver family of Mayfield, U.S.A., though of course we were a poorer version of the Cleavers, with my dad’s blue city worker’s uniform subbing for Mr. Cleaver’s suit. Barack makes this comparison with a touch of envy, because his own childhood was so different, but also as a way to push back on the entrenched stereotype that African Americans primarily live in broken homes, that our families are somehow incapable of living out the same stable, middle-class dream as our white neighbors.

  Personally, as a kid, I preferred The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which I absorbed with fascination. Mary had a job, a snappy wardrobe, and really great hair. She was independent and funny, and unlike those of the other ladies on TV, her problems were interesting. She had conver
sations that weren’t about children or homemaking. She didn’t let Lou Grant boss her around, and she wasn’t fixated on finding a husband. She was youthful and at the same time grown-up. In the pre-pre-pre-internet landscape, when the world came packaged almost exclusively through three channels of network TV, this stuff mattered. If you were a girl with a brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into something more than a wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess.

  And here I was now, twenty-nine years old, sitting in the very same apartment where I’d watched all that TV and consumed all those meals dished up by the patient and selfless Marian Robinson. I had so much—an education, a healthy sense of self, a deep arsenal of ambition—and I was wise enough to credit my mother, in particular, with instilling it in me. She’d taught me how to read before I started kindergarten, helping me sound out words as I sat curled like a kitten in her lap, studying a library copy of Dick and Jane. She’d cooked for us with care, putting broccoli and Brussels sprouts on our plates and requiring that we eat them. She’d hand sewn my prom dress, for God’s sake. The point was, she’d given diligently and she’d given everything. She’d let our family define her. I was old enough now to realize that all the hours she gave to me and Craig were hours she didn’t spend on herself.

  My considerable blessings in life were now causing a kind of psychic whiplash. I’d been raised to be confident and see no limits, to believe I could go after and get absolutely anything I wanted. And I wanted everything. Because, as Suzanne would say, why not? I wanted to live with the hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward the stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother. I wanted to have a work life and a home life, but with some promise that one would never fully squelch the other. I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all. It was an odd and confounding thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have everything? I had no idea.

  Barack, meanwhile, came home from Bali looking tanned and carrying a satchel stuffed with legal pads, having converted his isolation into a literary victory. The book was basically finished. Within a matter of months, his agent had resold it to a new publisher, paying off his debt and securing a plan for publication. More important to me was the fact that within a matter of hours we’d returned to the easy rhythm of our newlywed life. Barack was here, done with his solitude, landed back in my world. My husband. He was smiling at the jokes I made, wanting to hear about my day, kissing me to sleep at night.

  As the months went by, we cooked, worked, laughed, and planned. Later that spring, we had our finances in order enough to buy a condo, moving out of 7436 South Euclid Avenue and into a pretty, railroad-style apartment in Hyde Park with hardwood floors and a tiled fireplace, a new launchpad for our life. With Barack’s encouragement, I took another risk and switched jobs again, this time saying good-bye to Valerie and Susan at city hall in order to finally explore the kind of nonprofit work that had always intrigued me, finding a leadership role that would give me a chance to grow. There was still plenty I hadn’t figured out about my life—the riddle of how to be both a Mary and a Marian remained unsolved—but for now all those deeper questions drifted out to the margins of my mind, where they’d sit dormant and unattended for the time being. Any worries could wait, I figured, because we were an us now, and we were happy. And happy seemed like a starting place for everything.

  13

  My new job made me nervous. I’d been hired to be the executive director for the brand-new Chicago chapter of an organization called Public Allies, which itself was basically brand-new. It was something like a start-up inside a start-up, and in a field in which I had no professional experience to speak of. Public Allies had been founded only a year earlier in Washington, D.C., and was the brainchild of Vanessa Kirsch and Katrina Browne, who were both just out of college and interested in helping more people find their way into careers in public service and nonprofit work. Barack had met the two of them at a conference and become a member of their board, eventually suggesting they get in touch with me regarding the job.

  The model was similar to what was being used at Teach for America, which itself was relatively new at the time: Public Allies recruited talented young people, gave them intensive training and committed mentorship, and placed them in paid ten-month apprentice positions inside community organizations and public agencies, the hope being that they’d flourish and contribute in meaningful ways. The broader aim was that these opportunities would give the recruits—Allies, we called them—both the experience and the drive to continue working in the nonprofit or public sector for years to come, thereby helping to build a new generation of community leaders.

  For me, the idea resonated in a big way. I still remembered how during my senior year at Princeton so many of us had marched into MCAT and LSAT exams or suited up to interview for corporate training programs without once (at least in my case) considering or maybe even realizing that a wealth of more civic-minded job options existed. Public Allies was meant as a corrective to this, a means of widening the horizon for young people thinking about careers. But what I especially liked was that its founders were focused less on parachuting Ivy Leaguers into urban communities and more on finding and cultivating talent that was already there. You didn’t need a college degree to become an Ally. You needed only a high school diploma or GED, to be older than seventeen and younger than thirty, and to have shown some leadership capability, even if thus far in life it had gone largely untapped.

  Public Allies was all about promise—finding it, nurturing it, and putting it to use. It was a mandate to seek out young people whose best qualities might otherwise be overlooked and to give them a chance to do something meaningful. To me, the job felt almost like destiny. For every moment I’d spent looking wistfully at the South Side from my forty-seventh-floor window at Sidley, here was an invitation, finally, to use what I knew. I had a sense of how much latent promise sat undiscovered in neighborhoods like my own, and I was pretty sure I’d know how to find it.

  As I contemplated the new job, my mind often traveled back to childhood, and in particular to the month or so I’d spent in the pencil-flying pandemonium of that second-grade class at Bryn Mawr Elementary, before my mother had the wherewithal to have me plucked out. In the moment, I’d felt nothing but relieved by my own good fortune. But as my luck in life seemed only to snowball from there, I thought more about the twenty or so kids who’d been marooned in that classroom, stuck with an uncaring and unmotivated teacher. I knew I was no smarter than any of them. I just had the advantage of an advocate. I thought about this more often now that I was an adult, especially when people applauded me for my achievements, as if there weren’t a strange and cruel randomness to it all. Through no fault of their own, those second graders had lost a year of learning. I’d seen enough at this point to understand how quickly even small deficits can snowball, too.

  Back in Washington, D.C., the Public Allies founders had mustered a fledgling class of fifteen Allies who were working in various organizations around the city. They’d also raised enough money to launch a new chapter in Chicago, becoming one of the first organizations to receive federal funding through the AmeriCorps service program created under President Clinton. Which is where I came into the picture, thrilled and anxious in equal parts. Negotiating the terms of the job, though, I’d had what maybe should have been an obvious revelation about nonprofit work: It doesn’t pay. I was initially offered a salary so small, so far below what I was making working for the city of Chicago, which was already half of what I’d been earning as a lawyer, that I literally couldn’t afford to say yes. Which led to a second revelation about certain nonprofits, especially young-person-driven start-ups like Public Allies, and many of the bighearted, tirelessly passionate people who work in them: Unlike me, it seemed they could actually afford to be there, their virtue discreetly underwritten
by privilege, whether it was that they didn’t have student loans to pay off or perhaps had an inheritance to someday look forward to and thus weren’t worried about saving for the future.

  It became clear that if I wanted to join the tribe, I’d have to negotiate my way in, asking for exactly what I needed in terms of salary, which was significantly more than Public Allies had expected to pay. This was simply my reality. I couldn’t be shy or embarrassed about my needs. I still had roughly $600 of student debt to pay off each month on top of my regular expenses, and I was married to a man with his own load of law school loans to cover. The organization’s leaders were almost disbelieving when I informed them how much I’d borrowed in order to get through school and what that translated to in terms of monthly debt, but they gamely went out and secured new funding that enabled me to come on board.

  And with that, I was off and running, eager to make good on the opportunity I’d been handed. This was my first chance ever, really, to build something basically from the ground up: Success or failure would depend almost entirely on my efforts, not those of my boss or anyone else. I spent the spring of 1993 working furiously to set up an office and hire a small staff so that we could have a class of Allies in place by the fall. We’d found cheap office space in a building on Michigan Avenue and managed to get a load of donated secondhand chairs and tables from a corporate consulting firm that was redecorating its offices.