Exhale Book Club Discussion Guide

November: Becoming by Michelle Obama

* Tere may be spoilers in this. You’ve been warned! *

Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, follows her life from childhood up to the “Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can present day — or at least close to the ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? present day. We learn about her family of origin, her upbringing, her time at As if growing up is fnite. As if at some point you become Princeton, and her frst impressions of a something and that’s the end.” - p. ix young Barack Obama (spoiler: achievement-oriented Michelle Robinson was not impressed). We get a sense in these pages of a woman who has adapted to what life has given her, from that little house on Euclid Avenue to the larger one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In the frst pages of her memoir, Michelle Obama describes living above where her Aunt Robbie taught piano lessons. Of the experience, Obama writes “Te sound people trying, however, became the soundtrack to our life.” - p. 3

Q1: What impact do you think hearing over and over again other people striving toward something but often getting it wrong had on Obama and her brother? On their parents?

Q2: Do you think the same is true for us when we create in true community, like in Exhale, where we share our frst and second drafts (and third and ffth and ninth!), our business-founders, our sketches of things yet to come — we are surrounded by imperfect-yet-pointful striving which encourages us in our own pursuits?

“My father, Fraser, taught me to work hard, laugh often, and keep my word. My mother, Marian, showed me how to think for myself and to use my voice. Together, in our cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago, they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country. Even

Becoming Reading Guide 1 of 19 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.” - p. X

Q3: Did you learn this in your own family of origin? Why or why not?

Q4: Is it something you are instilling in your own children today, actively or not?

One of the most powerful lines early in the book that sets the tone for the rest: “Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”

Q5: In a world where context feels hard to fnd and hold onto, this is a gift that Obama’s parents have given to their children. How do you invite context into your own consumption of media, your own reading of other people’s stories? How can we teach our children the same?

“I learned one song in the piano book and then another. I was probably no better than her other students, no less fumbling, but I was driven. To me, there was magic in the learning. I got a buzzy sort of satisfaction from it. For one thing, I’d picked up on the simple, encouraging correlation between how long I practiced and how much I achieved.” - p. 11

Obama’s story of learning piano with Aunt Robbie is hilarious. Of course she tried to challenge the carefully-crafted system, hopping ahead to more exciting things rather than plodding along at Robbie’s pace.

Q6: We all know that “practice makes perfect” — or at least practice makes progress. But it can be hard to keep plucking along at our creative pursuits when it feels like we’re not getting anywhere. What’s an area of practice that you would like to develop more in your own life? How do you think you could approach that successfully?

When Obama’s second-grade classroom turns out to be a chaotic learning environment where she and other kids are being held back by a teacher who didn’t know how to control her classroom or challenge her students, Obama’s mom quietly campaigns to get her — and a few other high-performing kids — called up a grade. Of the experience, Obama shares this:

Becoming Reading Guide 2 of 19 “I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach. Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Teir anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. Tey aren’t “bad kids.” Tey’re just trying to survive bad circumstances. At the time, though, I was just happy to have escaped. But I’d learn many years later that my mother, who is by nature wry and quiet but generally also the most forthright person in any room, made a point of seeking out the second-grade teacher and telling her, as kindly as possible, that she had no business teaching and should be working as a drugstore cashier instead.” - p. 21

Obama shares earlier that her mother and father usually kept out of the kids’s battles at school and outside, but here, Obama’s mom steps in to intervene on behalf of her child. Tis is possibly a pivotal moment in Obama’s life: from here, she advances into gifted programs and a high-performing high school, then onto Princeton and a law degree. But it could have gone much differently.

Q7: Is there a defning moment in your life that you know nudged you in one direction or another? What was it, and how do you think it affected the trajectory of your future?

When they are about ten years old, Michelle Obama’s cousin asks her why she talks “like a white girl” (page 39). Obama explains that speaking a certain way as a child could be perceived as denying her Black culture, of trying to sound “better” than what she was. She discusses this perception not only from her own cousins and other Black people, but also from the nation as a whole when later she and Barack would stand on stages as Ivy-educated Black people who spoke like they were raised in the Midwest — which is exactly what they were. She writes, “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?” (page 40).

What her cousin seemed to be asking, and what we often ask each other, is “What group do you belong to and what can I know about you because of that?” As we read earlier in the book, this strips away all context from an individual story, something that Obama’s parents drilled into her from a young age.

Q8: In what ways do you group people who look or talk or act differently than you? In what ways is that harmful to seeing other people as individuals?

“Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. Tose “feelings of failure” he mentioned were everywhere already in my neighborhood, in the form of parents who couldn’t get ahead fnancially, of kids who were

Becoming Reading Guide 3 of 19 starting to suspect that their lives would be no different, of families who watched their better-off neighbors leave for the suburbs or transfer their children to Catholic schools.” - page 43

Obama’s principle at her grade school, Dr. Lavizzo, writes a letter containing the above sentiments to combat an editorial marking their school as now having a “ghetto mentality”. In turn, the school shifts some of it’s resources to create a multi-age classroom where students are grouped by ability, not grade level. Obama benefts from this for the last three years of her high school education, saying “Tere was a clear sense that the school had invested in us, which I think made us all try harder and feel better about ourselves. Te independent learning setup only served to fuel my competitive streak.” (page 44).

Q9: When someone invests in you, does it make you work harder? More diligently? If so, how can we create an environment in our own lives where we are investing in ourselves?

“I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.” - page 51

Q10: Obama’s mother confesses much later in her years that every Spring she entertained thoughts about leaving her husband. We can all go through versions of this: circumstances that make us want to pack up our family and move to a new place to start over; arguments that make us thing “I wonder what it would be like if…”; a string of events that make us want to burn it all to the ground and start fresh. How do we push through that in order to stay focused, both on our lives and in our creative work?

“At Whitney Young, it was safe to be smart. Te assumption was that everyone was working toward college, which meant that you never hid your intelligence for fear of someone saying you talked like a white girl.” - page 58

When Obama tests into Chicago’s frst magnet school, she fnds a place where it is okay to be herself: a high-achieving Black girl who knows she’s headed for college.

Q11: Is there a place in your life — past or present — that you feel perfectly at ease being yourself, not needing to hide any part of you?

When Obama’s high school guidance counselor tells her “I’m not sure you’re Princeton material,” Obama feels shattered (page 65). She writes, “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

Becoming Reading Guide 4 of 19 tried to succeed. She was telling me to lower my sights, which was the absolute reverse of every last thing my parents had ever told me” (page 66).

Q12: Has anyone ever done that to you? Told you to aim lower than you ought? How did you respond?

Obama, of course, doubles down with an “I’ll show her” attitude and of course gets accepted to Princeton. And when she does, she says this: “Te next day I knocked on Mr. Smith’s door to tell him about my acceptance, thanking him for his help. I never did stop in on the college counselor to tell her she’d been wrong—that I was Princeton material after all. It would have done nothing for either of us. And in the end, I hadn’t needed to show her anything. I was only showing myself ” (page 67).

She also writes that she’s now met men and women, both white and of color, who have accomplished big things despite the adversity they have faced. And she says: “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. Te noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have fgured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”

Q13: Most of us in Exhale aren’t fghting systemic racism in order to achieve our dreams, but we are all in some ways fghting sexism and misogyny and the idea that women can’t or shouldn’t have it all — unless they’ve already met all the needs of their family, frst (this is a generalization, of course). How have you encountered circumstances in your own life that have tried to keep you from reaching, and how have you responded?

Obama talks about leaving for Princeton and ultimately leaving her high school boyfriend, David, behind. “We’d been dating for over a year. We’d professed love, but it was love in the context of Euclid Avenue and Red Lobster and the basketball courts at Rosenblum Park. It was love in the context of the place I’d just left” (page 69).

Q14: I was so proud of young Michelle Obama from recognizing this context as important, of making the decision to see what her current context might lead to instead. Have you had a moment in your life like this, where you had the choice to say goodbye to a partner, a job, a friend because your context was changing? If so, what did you do? How do you feel about that decision now?

Becoming Reading Guide 5 of 19 “At Princeton, it seemed the only thing I needed to be vigilant about was my studies. Everything otherwise was designed to accommodate our well-being as students… We were protected, cocooned, catered to. A lot of kids, I was coming to realize, had never in their lifetimes known anything different… For a kid from the South Side, it could be a little dizzying. ‘You row crew?’ What does that even mean?” - page 72

As Obama enters the world of Princeton, she is confronted with two things: this is the frst predominantly white space she has ever been part of, and this is a very, very different environment from Euclid Avenue. Her advantage? Her older brother, who is also at Princeton. “I was still Craig Robinson’s little sister. Craig was now a junior and a top player on the varsity basketball team. He was, as he’d always been, a man with fans. Even the campus security guards greeted him by name. Craig had a life, and I managed at least partially to slip into it” (page 73).

Obama seems to fnd her footing among Craig’s friends, but also among the Tird World Center (TWC), a “poorly named but well-intentioned offshoot of the university with a mission to support students of color” (page 72). Tere she meets other Black students who share her same struggles, and this turns out to be essential. She writes, “But even today, with white students continuing to outnumber students of color on college campuses, the burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students. In my experience, it’s a lot to ask” (page 74).

She goes on to say: “Your world shifts, but you’re asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else. Tis is doable, of course—minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time—but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confdence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room. Which is why when my friends and I found one another at dinner each night, it was with some degree of relief. It’s why we stayed a long time and laughed as much as we could.”

Q15: Te passages above largely sum up her entry into the world that is Princeton, her frst time experience being Black as a minority in a community. How does experience this shape the rest of her life?

“I tried not to feel intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. Tey were simply emboldened, foating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.” - page 79

Q16: In what ways have you seen this play out in your own life?

Becoming Reading Guide 6 of 19 “Because while I was a social student who continued to lounge through communal mealtimes and had no problem trying to own the dance foor at Tird World Center parties, I was still privately and at all times focused on the agenda. Beneath my laid-back college-kid demeanor, I lived like a half-closeted CEO, quietly but unswervingly focused on achievement, bent on checking every box. My to-do list lived in my head and went with me everywhere. I assessed my goals, analyzed my outcomes, counted my wins. If there was a challenge to vault, I’d vault it. One proving ground only opened onto the next. Such is the life of a girl who can’t stop wondering, Am I good enough? and is still trying to show herself the answer.” - pages 88-89

Q17: Can you relate to this, this moving from one achievement to the next in order to prove yourself? Who are you proving yourself to?

“Tis may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly.” - page 91

Q18: Can you relate to this, too? Te desire to stay on a path — even when you know it’s no longer the right path — because it will cost too much to disappoint others? Or yourself?

“Barack Obama was late on day one.” - page 94

Michelle Obama’s account of getting to know Barack long before she date him is hilarious in hindsight. Perfection-oriented Michelle, who has taken every right step and would never be late to a mentorship appointment at a new law frm, gets to mentor what appears to be this super-star of an up-and-coming lawyer… but who is late to his frst appointment.

Q19: What does lateness signify to you? Do you judge other people for it? Are you the person who is late? (And honestly, once we have kids, aren’t we all late all the time?!? Sigh. It drives me bonkers to be so, but it is reality these days.)

“Barack was an ambler. He moved with a loose-jointed Hawaiian casualness, never given to hurry, even and especially when instructed to hurry. I, on the other hand, power walked even during my leisure hours and had a hard time decelerating. But I remember how that night I counseled myself to slow down, just a little—just enough so that I could hear what he was saying, because it was beginning to dawn on me that I cared about hearing everything he said.” - page 104

Becoming Reading Guide 7 of 19 Q20: We see Michelle start to fall for Barack here, despite their differences (and even despite his smoking). What are the ways in which the differences in your own relationships (partner, spouse, friend, parent) enhance your connection or detract from it?

“Was there a way to do this unseriously? How badly could it hurt my job? I had no clarity about anything —about what was proper, about who would fnd out and whether that mattered—but it hit me that I was done waiting for clarity… Tis is when I knew the game was on, one of the few times I decided to stop thinking and just live.” - page 105-106

Q21: Is there a time in your life that you’ve done this, stopped analyzing and just let it be? I’m not sure I can say yes on this one…

“He’d grown up with far less stability than I had, but he didn’t lament it. His story was his story.” - page 115

Q22: Are there parts of your own story that you get stuck on, consumed by? How do you get out of that cycle and move past it? Can you?

“We’d just spent the whole summer talking. I wasn’t going to relegate our love to the creeping pace of the postal service. Tis was another small difference between us: Barack could pour his heart out through a pen. He’d been raised on letters, sustenance arriving in the form of wispy airmail envelopes from his mom in Indonesia. I, meanwhile, was an in-your-face sort of person—brought up on Sunday dinners at Southside’s, where you sometimes had to shout to be heard.” - page 119

Q23: How do we bridge these communication gaps in our own relationships?

When Obama joins the recruitment team at her frm, she has an explicit goal of brining in recruits who are something other than white and male. She says “Te long-held practice was to engage students from a select group of law schools—Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, primarily—the places where most of the frm’s lawyers had earned their degrees. It was a circular process: one generation of lawyers hiring new lawyers whose life experience mirrored their own, leaving little room for diversity of any sort” (page 120). She advocates to visit historically Black colleges and not to reject students out-of-hand for Bs on their transcripts, but to look at the whole picture of a student and see what they’ve overcome to get where they are.

Becoming Reading Guide 8 of 19 Q24: Here, Obama is using her own position of power as a Black woman who has “made it” to advocate for others who might need a little more help to get to the top than the traditional white male applicants. What are some ways in your own life you can help advocate for others who might be a minority in your communities?

Obama kept a small journal in the years she was dating Barack and looking to possibly change careers. She reread some of her entries after leaving the White House and says this: “I read those lines today and see exactly what I was trying to tell myself—what a no-nonsense female mentor might have said to me directly. Really, it was simple: Te frst thing was that I hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was plenty good at it. Tis was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road… I wanted a life, basically. I wanted to feel whole.” - pages 132-134

Q25: If you keep a journal, do old entries help you see how far you’ve come? Maybe even see the trajectory of where you were going before you actually knew the answer in the moment? What’s the value, to you, of keeping a journal?

As Obama discusses with her mom her potential career change, her mom scoffs a bit. Obama refects on the moment, writing: “Fulfllment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit. I doubt that my parents, in their thirty years together, had even once discussed it.” - page 135

Finding “fulfllment” in life is very much a privilege, but I think it’s one that we should be striving to make more accessible to all people, everywhere, rather than continue to think of it as only for the wealthy.

Q26: How has your own life been fulflling or not? In what ways is it different from the generations that came before you — and maybe even the generations coming after you?

“We were having an absurd and inappropriate argument because in the wake of death every single thing on earth feels absurd and inappropriate.” - page 144

Q27: Can you recall a time when you fought with someone over something trivial because of the circumstances you were in?

Becoming Reading Guide 9 of 19 “I was realizing that the next phase of my journey would not simply unfold on its own, that my fancy academic degrees weren’t going to automatically lead me to fulflling work.” - page 146

I very much feel that this is a growing problem for a number of people in my generation, the Millennials, who were told “go to college, that’s how to get a good job”… only to go to college and have the economy erode out from under our feet while we were sitting in class. Our degrees may have eventually gotten us jobs, but what kind of jobs? Is the compensation enough to cover the cost of the education? Do those jobs inherently come with meaning, or do they leave time for us to fnd it outside of work? Tese are all big questions, and ones I don’t have the answers to, sadly.

Q28: What are some ways your own path led you to where you are now, and how was it …

“Having grown up black and on the South Side, I had little faith in politics. Politics had traditionally been used against black folks, as a means to keep us isolated and excluded, leaving us undereducated, unemployed, and underpaid. I had grandparents who’d lived through the horror of Jim Crow laws and the humiliation of housing discrimination and basically mistrusted authority of any sort… My father, who was a city employee most of his life, had essentially been conscripted into service as a Democratic precinct captain in order to even be considered for promotions at this job.” - page 150

Q29: What’s your own relationship to politics? How has it changed as you’ve gotten older?

Obama writes of the mentors she fnds in her life, of Valerie Jarrett and Susan Sher, who seemed to be able to manage careers and families and retain confdent and humanity while doing so: “Tese were women who knew their own voices and were unafraid to use them. Tey could be humorous and humble when the moment called for it, but they were unfazed by blowhards and didn’t second-guess the power in their own points of view. Also, importantly, they were working moms… I watched them closely in this regard as well, knowing that I wanted someday to be one myself. Valerie never hesitated to step out of a big meeting when a call came in from her daughter’s school. Susan, likewise, dashed out in the middle of the day if one of her sons spiked a fever or was performing in a preschool music show. Tey were unapologetic about prioritizing the needs of their children, even if it meant occasionally disrupting the fow at work, and didn’t try to compartmentalize work and home the way I’d noticed male partners at Sidley seemed to do” (pages 167-168).

Q30: Have you had mentors in the past who you have actively watched and tried to emulate? What drew you to them? What did you learn from them?

Becoming Reading Guide 10 of 19 “Chaos agitated me, but it seemed to invigorate Barack.” - page 169

Q31: What’s your own relationship to chaos? To overcommitting?

“For many women, including myself, “wife” can feel like a loaded word.” - page 171

Q32: What does the title “wife” mean to you? How has that been shaped by your upbringing?

Of her own mom, Obama realizes in her later 20s: “Te point was, she’d given diligently and she’d given everything. She’d let our family defne 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.” - pages 172-173

Q33: What do you recognize of your own parents and grandparents now that you are yourself grown and parenting yourself?

Of wanting to take a lesser-paying job but not being able to, Obama writes: “I literally couldn’t afford to say yes. Which led to a second revelation about certain nonprofts, 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” (page 177).

Q34: In what ways has your own childhood’s fnancial situation — and how that carried into your adult life — allowed you to say yes or no to different opportunities?

As Barack begins his own political career, he and Michelle are also trying to start a family and having a less-than-easy go of it:

“If I were to start a fle on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it.

Becoming Reading Guide 11 of 19 I learned this only after I mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories.

It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.” - pages 187-188

Q35: Tis is one more example of how humans are meant to live in community, to support each other through their trials and griefs and joys, too. In what ways has a community held space like this for you, to help you in your work or your mothering?

Obama also shares how uniquely female of a problem infertility can be, where all the burden lays on the woman to eat right, take the right drugs at the right times, and do it all while also — usually — staying pretty quiet about it:

“It was maybe then that I felt a frst ficker of resentment involving politics and Barack’s unshakable commitment to the work. Or maybe I was just feeling the acute burden of being female. Either way, he was gone and I was here, carrying the responsibility… In the weeks to come, he’d go about his regular business while I went in for daily ultrasounds to monitor my eggs. He wouldn’t have his blood drawn. He wouldn’t have to cancel any meetings to have a cervix inspection. He was doting and invested, my husband, doing what he could do. He read all the IVF literature and would talk to me all night about it, but his only actual duty was to show up at the doctor’s office and provide some sperm. And then, if he chose, he could go have a martini afterward. None of this was his fault, but it wasn’t equal, either, and for any woman who lives by the mantra that equality is important, this can be a little confusing. It was me who’d alter everything, putting my passions and career dreams on hold, to fulfll this piece of our dream.” - pages 188-189

I can often get stuck in the cycle of ruminating on how children have changed my life from the cellular level on up, but that my husband’s life largely looks the same: he goes to the same job at the same time and if he needs to make an appointment, he can check the calendar and make it, no need to arrange childcare frst because he’s got me to cover it automatically. In many ways, this has been our choice, but it’s also been the best of the options available, too. I know many families are less advantaged than us, have even less choice. And yet, it still doesn’t seem quite fair.

Q36: In what ways does this inequality feel hindering to you? Affect your daily life and your creative life?

Becoming Reading Guide 12 of 19 “Motherhood became my motivator. It dictated my movements, my decisions, the rhythm of every day. It took no time, no thought at all, for me to be fully consumed by my new role as a mother. I’m a detail- oriented person, and a baby is nothing if not a reservoir of details.”

Q37: I can identify with this, wholeheartedly. You?

“Several months after Malia was born, I’d returned to work at the University of Chicago. I negotiated to come back only half-time, fguring this would be a win-win sort of arrangement—that I could now be both career woman and perfect mother, striking the Mary Tyler Moore/ Marian Robinson balance I’d always hoped for… To me, it felt like a sanity-warping double bind. I battled guilt when I had to take work calls at home. I battled a different sort of guilt when I sat at my office distracted by the idea that Malia might be allergic to peanuts. Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.” - page 191-192

Q38: I can also completely identify with this, this feeling of needing to do it all but only having the time to do it all half-well and never feeling like I was at rest in any moment of any day. How has your work or decision to not work affected your motherhood journey? How does it compare to that of your own mom or grandmother or friends?

Obama fnds a community of other working moms to grow together with. Of the experience she says: “Our afternoons together taught me that there was no formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. Tis was useful to see. Regardless of who was living which way and why, every small child in that playroom was cherished and growing just fne. I felt it every time we gathered, the collective force of all these women trying to do right by their kids: In the end, no matter what, I knew we’d help one another out and we’d all be okay” (pages 199-201).

Q39: Who is your mom community? How have they helped you through these mothering years?

In interviewing for a new full-time position, Obama lays out her cards on the table: literally, she takes three-month old Sasha to the interview with her. Of the experience she says, “I walked out of the interview feeling pleased and fairly certain I’d be offered the job. But no matter how it panned out, I knew I’d at least done something good for myself in speaking up about my needs. Tere was power, I felt, in just saying it out loud” (page 202).

Becoming Reading Guide 13 of 19 Q40: Do you have a hard time expressing your own needs? If so, has there ever been a time when you were able to, and how did that feel?

Obama fnds herself irritated at Barack over the long hours he is gone, and extra disappointed when he doesn’t show up when he says he will. After some counseling she decides she is going to start taking her happiness more in her own control, creating a routine for herself and the girls and putting the onus on Barack to ft into their lives when he comes home. She says: “For me, this made so much more sense than holding off dinner or having the girls wait up sleepily for a hug. It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us” (page 206).

Q41: I love this turning point, where she makes the active decision to do what works for her and her family, and he can make it work on his end, too. Do you have any routines like this that keep your days a little less angsty? Is there a way to instill them (or more of them!) if not?

“Sasha and Malia were three and six years old now, feisty, smart, and growing fast. Teir energy left me breathless… Which only added to the occasional allure of the shopping plaza. Tere were times when I’d sit in the parked car and eat my fast food alone with the car radio playing, overcome with relief, impressed with my efficiency. Tis was life with little kids. Tis was what sometimes passed for achievement. I had the applesauce. I was eating a meal. Everyone was still alive.” - page 208

Q42: Isn’t it reassuring that Michelle Obama’s successes in motherhood often look like our own?

“Our decision to let Barack’s career proceed as it had—to give him the freedom to shape and pursue his dreams—led me to tamp down my own efforts at work… Almost deliberately, I’d numbed myself somewhat to my ambition, stepping back in moments when I’d normally step forward. I’m not sure anyone around me would have said I wasn’t… You hear all the time about the trade-offs of being a working mother. Tese were mine. If I’d once been someone who threw herself completely into every task, I was now more cautious, protective of my time, knowing I had to maintain enough energy for life at home.” - page 209-210

Q43: How do you decide what to say yes and no to in order to keep your family life running as smoothly as possible? What about that of a partner?

Becoming Reading Guide 14 of 19 “I liked my job, and while it wasn’t perfect, I also liked my life. With Sasha about to move into elementary school, I felt as though I was at the start of a new phase, on the brink of being able to fre up my ambition again and consider a new set of goals. What would a presidential campaign do? It would hijack all that. I knew enough to understand this ahead of time. Barack and I had been through fve campaigns in eleven years already, and each one had forced me to fght a bit harder to hang on to my own priorities.” - pages 222-223

Q44: In what ways have you looked ahead to a new season and either celebrated what it would mean for your own creative work, or mourned what it might mean, too? (P.S. We’ve got a podcast about that! Click here to listen.)

As the Obamas decide whether or not Barack should run for president, they recognize not only the pressure and stress they will put on their own lives, but also the privilege they have that allows them to make this decision at all: “We understood, in other words, how ridiculously fortunate we were, and we both felt an obligation not to be complacent” (page 225).

Q45: Have you ever had to charge forward into something that you knew would cost you but would be worth it for other people in the end?

“Te scrutiny of Barack would be extra intense, the lens always magnifed. We knew that as a black candidate he couldn’t afford any sort of stumble. He’d have to do everything twice as well.” - page 233

Q46: Most of us in this group don’t have this same struggle because of our skin color, but all of us do walk through the world as women, another group that often has to work twice as hard for less money and less recognition. How does that affect the way you move through life? How hard you try?

“Something had to give. No one else could run my programs at the hospital. No one else could campaign as Barack Obama’s wife. No one could fll in as Malia and Sasha’s mother at bedtime. But maybe Sam Kass could cook some dinners for us.” - page 238

Q47: Outsourcing! Yes! What do you outsource in your life in order to focus on the essential? (P.S. Need some help with that? Our April 2019 book club pick is a great place to start!)

Becoming Reading Guide 15 of 19 “I, on the other hand, was still learning about public life… In general, I felt as if I couldn’t win, that no amount of faith or hard work would push me past my detractors and their attempts to invalidate me. I was female, black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mind-set, translated only to ‘angry.’ It was another damaging cliché, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious signal not to listen to what we’ve got to say.” - pages 258-264

Q48: In what ways do people push you and your voice to the perimeter? In what ways can you be better about refusing to this to others?

“For me, this was a turnaround point. Te campaign apparatus existed exclusively to serve the candidate, not the spouse or the family. And as much as Barack’s staffers respected me and valued my contribution, they’d never given me much in the way of guidance. Until that point, no one from the campaign had bothered to travel with me or show up for my events. I’d never received media training or speech prep. No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.” - page 268

Tis still foors me, that Michelle Obama was left to coach herself while her husband was running for office.

Q49: In what ways have you had to learn to advocate for yourself, both in life and in your creative work?

“I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.” - page 270

Q50: Is this something you’ve learned in your own life? How can we put this into practice?

For Malia’s birthday — the 4th of July — Michelle and Barack feel like they have failed her by not having a big celebration. Tey learned, however, that kids don’t always feel the same as us: “Ultimately, though, like so many things, it was a matter of perception—how we decided to look at what was in front of us. Barack and I were focused on only our faults and insufficiencies… But Malia was looking for something different. And she saw it. She saw kind faces, people who loved her, a thickly frosted cake, a little sister and cousin by her side, a new year ahead. She’d spent the day outdoors. She’d seen a parade. Tomorrow there would be an airplane ride. She marched over to where Barack sat and threw herself into his lap. ‘Tis,’ she declared, ‘is the best birthday ever!’ She didn’t notice that both her mom and her dad got teary or that half the people in the room were now choked up as well. Because she was right. And suddenly we all saw it. She was ten years old that day, and everything was the best” (page 271).

Q51: When have you thought you failed as a parent, but truly didn’t in the eyes of your kid?

Becoming Reading Guide 16 of 19 “My husband’s career had allowed me to witness the machinations of politics and power up close. I’d seen how just a handful of votes in every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both simple and incredibly effective.” - page 273

Q52: What’s your relationship or history to voting? How has it changed as you’ve grown older?

“I was humbled and excited to be First Lady, but not for one second did I think I’d be sliding into some glamorous, easy role. Nobody who has the words ‘frst’ and ‘black’ attached to them ever would. I stood at the foot of the mountain, knowing I’d need to climb my way into favor.” - page 283

Q53: People of Color and minorities have to work extra hard to be afforded the same opportunities, and are often held to higher standards even when they do than their white counterparts. How do we change that, starting at the local level in our own communities?

“If you don’t get out there and defne yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defned by others. I wasn’t interested in slotting myself into a passive role, waiting for Barack’s team to give me direction. After coming through the crucible of the last year, I knew that I would never allow myself to get that banged up again.” - page 284-285

Q54: Obama learns fast — no one can say anything differently. Have you ever had to proactively defne a role for yourself in order to not be slated into one by others? How did that transpire?

On going on a date night, Obama refects how wonderful it was to get away for a few hours and just be husband a wife, but “Te harder part was seeing the selfshness inherent in making that choice, knowing that it had required hours of advance meetings between security teams and local police. It had involved extra work for our staffers, for the theater, for the waiters at the restaurant, for the people whose cars had been diverted off Sixth Avenue, for the police on the street. It was part of the new heaviness we lived with. Tere were just too many people involved, too many affected, for anything to feel light” (page 327-328).

Q55: Tere’s always a trade-off for carving out time for yourself, whether it’s money for a babysitter or a host of other things that don’t get done while you’re gone. What have you decided is worth it, and what isn’t?

Becoming Reading Guide 17 of 19 “Barack and I had by now let go of the idea that we could be spontaneous. We’d surrendered to the idea that there was no longer room for impulsiveness and whimsy in our own lives. But for our girls, we’d fght to keep that possibility alive.” - page 331

Q56: I love being reminded that Michelle and Barack are parents, too — and maybe even frst. Tey’re fght for normalcy for their girls is admirable. What do you fght for for your kids that you don’t in the same way for yourself?

“When Vogue proposed putting me on the cover of the magazine shortly after Barack was elected, my team had debated whether it would make me seem frivolous or elitist during a time of economic worry, but in the end we’d decided to go ahead with it. It mattered every time a woman of color showed up on the cover of a magazine.” - page 332

Q57: In what ways has seeing someone who looks like you — your skin color, hair color, body type, learning style, etc. — helped to spur you on toward bigger goals, or at least let you realize what was possible?

“As my mother, the plainspoken enemy of all hyperbole, still says anytime someone starts gushing about me and Craig and our various accomplishments, ‘Tey’re not special at all. Te South Side is flled with kids like that.’ We just needed to help get them into those rooms.” - page 354

Q58: In what ways has someone helped you into a room you might have had a harder time accessing alone? Have you ever done the same for someone else?

During her time in the White House, Obama started organizing weekends away for her and her friends where they could tune out the distractions of their busy lives and tune into each other. She called them “Boot Camp” — partly because she used them as a way to exercise, but also “more importantly because I like the idea of being rigorous about friendship,” she writes (page 361). She continues:

“We were all so used to sacrifcing for our kids, our spouses, and our work. I had learned through my years of trying to fnd balance in my life that it was okay to fip those priorities and care only for ourselves once in a while… Boot Camp weekends became a way for us to take shelter, connect, and recharge… We got a lot of exercise and talked and talked and talked. We pooled our thoughts and experiences, offering advice or funny stories or sometimes just the assurance that whoever was spilling her guts in a given

Becoming Reading Guide 18 of 19 moment wasn’t the only one ever to have a teenager who was acting out or a boss she couldn’t stand… Often, we steadied one another just by listening. And saying good-bye at the end of each weekend, we vowed we’d do it all again soon.”

Q59: Have you ever had an experience like this, where you’ve gotten together with a group of friends to just be together and care for yourselves frst? How can you make this a reality in your own life — for even just a couple of hours?

“Tere’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. Tis, for me, is how we become.” - pages 420-421

Te last line in Michelle Obama’s memoir is beautiful. And I think we can all take it into our own walks with us, into our daily lives and our creative lives.

Q60: How will you allow yourself to be known today? And how will you hear someone else?

Becoming Reading Guide 19 of 19