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  She’d also told me privately ahead of time that she wasn’t convinced Barack should run for the Senate, so I’d walked into brunch that morning figuring I had the argument sewn up.

  But I’d been wrong.

  This Senate race presented a unique opportunity, Barack explained that day. He felt he had a real shot. The incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, was a conservative Republican in an increasingly Democratic state and was having trouble maintaining the support of his own party. It was likely that multiple candidates would run in the primary, which meant that Barack would only need to command a plurality of the vote to win the Democratic nomination. As for money, he assured me that he wouldn’t need to touch our personal finances. When I asked how we’d afford living expenses if we were going to have homes in both D.C. and Chicago, he’d said, “Well, I’ll write another book and it’ll be a big book, one that makes money.”

  This made me laugh. Barack was the only person I knew who had this kind of faith, thinking that a book could solve any problem. He was like the little boy from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” I teased, who trades his family’s livelihood for a handful of magic beans, believing with his whole heart that they will yield something, even if no one else does.

  On all other fronts, Barack’s logic was dismayingly solid. I watched Valerie’s face as he spoke, realizing that he was quickly racking up points with her, that he had an answer for every “but what about?” question we could throw his way. I knew he was making sense, even as I fought off the urge to tally up all the additional hours he’d spend away from us now, not to mention the specter of a move to D.C. Though we’d argued over the drain of his political career on our family for years now, I did love and trust Barack. He was already a man with two families, his attention divided between me and the girls and his 200,000 or so South Side constituents. Would sharing him with the state of Illinois really be all that different? I couldn’t know one way or another, but I also couldn’t bring myself to stand in the way of his aspiration, that thing always tugging at him to try for more.

  And so that day, we’d made a deal. Valerie agreed to be the finance chair for Barack’s Senate campaign. A number of our friends agreed to donate time and money to the effort. I signed off on all of it, with one important caveat, repeated out loud so that everyone could hear it: If he lost, he’d move on from politics altogether and find a different sort of job. If it didn’t work out on Election Day, this would be the end.

  Really and for real, this would be the end.

  What came next for Barack, though, was a series of lucky twists. First, Peter Fitzgerald decided not to run for reelection, clearing the field for challengers and relative newcomers like my husband. Then, somewhat oddly, both the Democratic front-runner in the primary and the ensuing Republican nominee became embroiled in scandals involving their ex-wives. With just a few months remaining before the election, Barack didn’t even have a Republican opponent.

  To be sure, he’d been running an excellent campaign, having learned plenty from his failed congressional run. He’d beaten out seven primary opponents and earned more than half the vote to win the nomination. Traveling the state and interacting with potential constituents, he was the same man I knew at home—funny and charming, smart and prepared. His overly verbose answers to questions at town-hall forums and campaign debates seemed only to drive home the point that he belonged on the Senate floor. But still, effort notwithstanding, Barack’s path to the Senate seemed paved in four-leaf clover.

  All this, too, was before John Kerry invited him to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention being held in Boston. Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts, was locked in a back-and-forth fight for the presidency with George W. Bush.

  My husband was, in all of this, a complete nobody—a humble state legislator who’d never stood before a crowd like the one of fifteen thousand or more that would be gathered in Boston. He’d never used a teleprompter, never been live on prime-time television. He was a newcomer, a black man in what was historically a white man’s business, surfacing from obscurity with a weird name and odd backstory, hoping to strike a chord with the common Democrat. As the network pundits would later acknowledge, choosing Barack Obama to speak to an audience of millions had been a mighty gamble.

  And yet, in his curious and roundabout way, he seemed destined for exactly this moment. I knew because I’d seen up close how his mind churned nonstop. Over years, I’d watched him inhale books, newspapers, and ideas, sparking to life anytime he spoke with someone who offered a shard of new experience or knowledge. He’d stowed every piece of it. What he was building, I see now, was a vision—and not a small one, either. It was the very thing I’d had to create room for in our shared life, to coexist with, even if reluctantly. It aggravated me sometimes no end, but it was also what I could never disavow in Barack. He’d been working at this thing, quietly and meticulously, as long as I’d known him. And now maybe the size of the audience would finally match the scope of what he believed to be possible. He’d been ready for that call. All he had to do was speak.

  * * *

  “Must’ve been a good speech” became my refrain afterward. It was a joke between me and Barack, one I repeated often and with irony following that night—July 27, 2004.

  I’d left the girls at home with my mother and flown to be with him in Boston for the speech, standing in the wings at the convention center as Barack stepped into the hot glare of the stage lights and into view of all those millions of people. He was a little nervous and so was I, though we were both determined not to show it. This was how Barack operated anyway. The more pressure he was under, the calmer he seemed to get. He’d written his remarks over the course of a couple of weeks, working on them in between Illinois senate votes. He memorized his words and rehearsed them carefully, to the point where he wouldn’t actually need the teleprompter unless his nerves got triggered and his mind went blank. But that wasn’t at all what happened. Barack looked out at the audience and into the TV cameras, and as if kick-starting some internal engine, he just smiled and began to roll.

  He spoke for seventeen minutes that night, explaining who he was and where he came from—his grandfather a GI who’d joined Patton’s Army, his grandmother who’d worked on an assembly line during the war, his father who’d grown up herding goats in Kenya, his parents’ improbable love, their faith in what a good education could do for a son who wasn’t born rich or well connected. Earnestly and expertly, he cast himself not as an outsider but rather as a literal embodiment of the American story. He reminded the audience that a country couldn’t be carved up simply into red and blue, that we were united by a common humanity, compelled to care for the whole of society. He called for hope over cynicism. He spoke with hope, projected hope, almost sang with it, really.

  It was seventeen minutes of Barack’s deft and easy way with words, seventeen minutes of his deep, dazzling optimism on display. By the time he finished, with a last plug for John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, the crowd was on its feet and roaring, the applause booming in the rafters. I walked out onto the stage, stepping into the blinding lights wearing high heels and a white suit, to give Barack a congratulatory hug before turning to wave with him at the whipped-up audience.

  The energy was electric, the sound absolutely deafening. That Barack was a good person with a big mind and serious faith in democracy was no longer any sort of secret. I was proud of what he’d done, though it didn’t surprise me. This was the guy I’d married. I’d known his capabilities all along. Looking back, I think it was then that I quietly began to let go of the idea that there was any reversing his course, that he’d ever belong solely to me and the girls. I could hear it almost in the pulse of the applause. More of this, more of this, more of this.

  The media response to Barack’s speech was hyperbolic. “I’ve just seen the first black president,” Chris Matthews declared to his fellow commentators
on NBC. A front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read simply, “The Phenom.” Barack’s cell phone began to ring nonstop. Cable pundits were dubbing him a “rock star” and an “overnight success,” as if he hadn’t spent years working up to that moment onstage, as if the speech had created him instead of the other way around. Still, the speech was the beginning of something new, not just for him, but for us, our whole family. We were swept into another level of exposure and into the swift current of other people’s expectations.

  It was surreal, the whole thing. All I could do, really, was joke about it.

  “Must’ve been a good speech,” I’d say with a shrug as people began stopping Barack on the street to ask for his autograph or to tell him they’d loved what he’d said. “Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when we walked out of a restaurant in Chicago to find that a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk to wait for him. I said the same thing when journalists started asking for Barack’s thoughts on important national issues, when big-time political strategists started to hover around him, and when nine years after publication the formerly obscure Dreams from My Father got a paperback reissue and landed on the New York Times bestseller list.

  “Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when a beaming, bustling Oprah Winfrey showed up at our house to spend a day interviewing us for her magazine.

  What was happening to us? I almost couldn’t track it. In November, Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate, winning 70 percent of the vote statewide, the largest margin in Illinois history and the biggest landslide of any Senate race in the country that year. He’d won significant majorities among blacks, whites, and Latinos; men and women; rich and poor; urban, suburban, and rural. At one point, we went to Arizona for a quick getaway, and he was mobbed by well-wishers there. This for me felt like a true and odd measure of his fame: Even white people were recognizing him now.

  * * *

  I took what was left of my normalcy and wrapped myself in it. When we were at home, everything was the same. When we were with our friends and family, everything was the same. With our kids, it was always the same. But outside, things were different. Barack was flying back and forth to D.C. all the time now. He had a Senate office and an apartment in a shabby building on Capitol Hill, a little one-bedroom that was already cluttered with books and papers, his Hole away from home. Anytime the girls and I came to visit, we didn’t even pretend to want to stay there, booking a hotel room for the four of us instead.

  I stuck to my routine in Chicago. Gym, work, home, repeat. Dishes in the dishwasher. Swim lessons, soccer, ballet. I kept pace as I always had. Barack had a life in Washington now, operating with some of the gravitas that came with being a senator, but I was still me, living my same normal life. I was sitting one day in my parked car at the shopping plaza on Clybourn Avenue, having some Chipotle and a little me-time after a dash through BabyGap, when my secretary at work called on my cell phone to ask if she could patch through a call. It was from a woman in D.C.—someone I’d never met, the wife of a fellow senator—who’d tried a few times already to reach me.

  “Sure, put her through,” I said.

  And on came the voice of this senator’s wife, pleasant and warm. “Well, hello!” she said. “I’m so glad to finally talk to you!”

  I told her that I was excited to talk to her, too.

  “I’m just calling to welcome you,” she said, “and to let you know that we’d like to invite you to join something very special.”

  She’d called to ask me to be in some sort of private organization, a club that, from what I gathered, was made up primarily of the wives of important people in Washington. They got together regularly for luncheons and to discuss issues of the day. “It’s a nice way to meet people, and I know that’s not always easy when you’re new to town,” she said.

  In my whole life, I’d never been asked to join a club. I’d watched friends in high school go off on ski trips with their Jack and Jill groups. At Princeton, I’d waited up sometimes for Suzanne to come home, buzzed and tittering, from her eating-club parties. Half the lawyers at Sidley, it seemed, belonged to country clubs. I’d visited plenty of those clubs over time, raising money for Public Allies, raising money for Barack’s campaigns. You learned early on that clubs, in general, were saturated with money. Belonging signified more than just belonging.

  It was a kind offer she was making, coming from a genuine place, and yet I was all too happy to turn it down.

  “Thank you,” I said. “It’s so nice of you to think of me. But actually, we’ve made the decision I won’t be moving to Washington.” I let her know that we had two little girls in school in Chicago and that I was pretty attached to my job. I explained that Barack was settling into life in D.C., commuting home when he could. I didn’t mention that we were so committed to Chicago that we were looking to buy a new house, thanks to the royalty money that was starting to come in from the renewed sales of his book and the fact that he now had a generous offer on a second book—the surprise harvest of Barack’s magic beans.

  The senator’s wife paused, letting a delicate beat pass. When she spoke again, her voice was gentle. “That can be very hard on a marriage, you know,” she said. “Families fall apart.”

  I felt her judgment then. She herself had been in Washington for many years. The implication was she’d seen things go poorly when a spouse stayed back. The implication was that I was making a dangerous choice, that there was only one correct way to be a senator’s wife and I was choosing wrong.

  I thanked her again, hung up, and sighed. None of this had been my choice in the first place. None of this was my choice at all. I was now, like her, the wife of a U.S. senator—Mrs. Obama, she’d called me throughout the conversation—but that didn’t mean I had to drop everything to support him. Truly, I didn’t want to drop a thing.

  I knew there were other senators with spouses who chose to live in their hometowns rather than in D.C. I knew that the Senate, with fourteen of its one hundred members being female, was not quite as antiquated as it had once been. But still, I found it presumptuous that another woman would tell me I was wrong to want to keep my kids in school and remain in my job. A few weeks after the election, I’d gone with Barack to Washington for a daylong orientation offered to newly elected senators and their spouses. There’d been only a few of us attending that year, and after a quick introduction the politicians went one way, while spouses were ushered into another room. I’d come with questions, knowing that politicians and their families were expected to adhere to strict federal ethics policies dictating everything from whom they could receive gifts from to how they paid for travel to and from Washington. I thought maybe we’d discuss how to navigate social situations with lobbyists or the legalities of raising money for a future campaign.

  What we got, however, was an elaborate disquisition on the history and architecture of the Capitol and a look at the official china patterns produced for the Senate, followed by a polite and chitchatty lunch. The whole thing had gone on for hours. It would have been funny, maybe, if I hadn’t taken a day off from work and left our kids with my mother in order to be there. If I was going to be a political spouse, I wanted to treat it seriously. I didn’t care about the politics per se, but I also didn’t want to screw anything up.

  The truth was that Washington confused me, with its decorous traditions and sober self-regard, its whiteness and maleness, its ladies having lunch off to one side. At the heart of my confusion was a kind of fear, because as much as I hadn’t chosen to be involved, I was getting sucked in. I’d been Mrs. Obama for the last twelve years, but it was starting to mean something different. At least in some spheres, I was now Mrs. Obama in a way that could feel diminishing, a missus defined by her mister. I was the wife of Barack Obama, the political rock star, the only black person in the Senate—the man who’d spoken of hope and tolerance so poignantly and forcefully that he now had a hornet buzz of expe
ctation following him.

  My husband was a senator, but somehow people seemed to want to vault right over that. Instead, everyone was keen to know whether he would make a run for president in 2008. There was no shaking the question. Every reporter asked it. Nearly every person who approached him on the street asked it. My colleagues at the hospital would stand in my doorway and casually drop the question, probing for some bit of early news. Even Malia, who was six and a half on the day she put on a pink velvet dress and stood next to Barack as he was sworn in to the Senate by Dick Cheney, wanted to know. Unlike many of the others, though, our first grader was wise enough to sense how premature it all seemed.

  “Daddy, are you gonna try to be president?” she’d asked. “Don’t you think maybe you should be vice president or something first?”

  I was with Malia on this matter. As a lifelong pragmatist, I would always counsel a slow approach, the methodical checking of boxes. I was a natural-born fan of the long and judicious wait. In this regard, I felt better anytime I heard Barack pushing back at his inquisitors with an aw-shucks kind of modesty, batting away questions about the presidency, saying that the only thing he was planning was to put his head down and work hard in the Senate. He often reminded people that he was just a low-ranking member of the minority party, a backbench player if there ever was one. And, he would sometimes add, he had two kids he needed to raise.