Top Quotes: “Becoming” — Michelle Obama
Background: Obama writes about her childhood, early years of her corporate law career before she “swerved” into public service, her relationship with Barack, her kids, and her mother, and a bit about her time in the White House. It’s a very pleasant read — nothing too shocking or exhilarating but it was great to get to know so much more of her story and her passions.
“Our neigborhood was middle-class and racially mixed. Kids found one another based not on the color of their skin but on who was outside and ready to play. We were a motley mix of last names — Kansopant, Abuasef, Yacker, Robinson — and were too young to register that things around us were changing fast. In 1950, 15 years before my parents moved to South Shore, the neighborhood had been 96% white. By the time I’d leave for college in 1981, it would be about 96% black.”
“House fires were a regular occurrence in Chicago, in part due to slumlords who let their buildings slide into disrepair and were all too happy to reap the insurance benefits when a fire tore through, and in part because home smoke detectors were a relatively new development and still expensive for working-class people to afford. Inside our tight city grid, fire was almost a way of life, a random but persistent snatcher of homes and lives.
“My mother maintained the sort of parental mindset that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate — a kind of unflappable Zen neutrality. I had friends whose mothers rode their highs and lows as if they were their own, and I knew plenty of other kids whose parents were too overwhelmed by their own challenges to be much of a presence at all. My mom was simply even-keeled. She wasn’t quick to judge and she wasn’t quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring. When things were bad, she gave us only a small amount of pity. When we’d done something great, we received just enough praise to know she was happy with us, but never so much that it became the reason we did what we did. She loved us consistently, [my brother] Craig and me, but we were not overmanaged. Her goal was to push us out into the world. ‘I’m not raising babies,’ she told us, ‘I’m raising adults.’ She and my dad offered guidance rather than rules. It meant that as teenagers we’d never have a curfew. Instead, they’d ask, ‘What’s a reasonable time for you to come home?’ and then trust us to stick to our word.”
“So many of my friends judged potential mates from the outside in, focusing first on their looks and financial prospects. If it turned out the person they’d chosen wasn’t a good communicator or was uncomfortable with being vulnerable, they seemed to think time or marriage vows would fix the problem. But Barack had arrived in my life a wholly formed person. From our very first conversation, he’d shown me that he wasn’t self-conscious about expressing fear or weakness and that he valued being truthful.”
“I felt Nairobi’s foreignness — or really, my own foreignness in relation to it — immediately, even in the first strains of morning. It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as I’ve traveled more, the way a new place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight from what you’re used to; it carries smells you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.”
“I watched Valerie and Sudan closely since they were working moms and I knew that someday I wanted 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. They were unapologetic about prioritizing the needs of their children, even if it meant occasionally disrupting the flow at work, and didn’t try to compartmentalize work and home the way I’d noticed male partners at [the law firm I worked at] do. They weren’t striving for perfect, but managed somehow to be always excellent, the two of them bound in a deep and mutually helpful friendship.”
“My mom declined Secret Service protection and avoided the media in order to keep her profile low and her footprint light. She’d charm the White House housekeeping staff by insisting on doing her own laundry, and for years to come, she’d slip in and out of the residence as she pleased, walking out the gates and over to the nearest CVS when she needed something, making new friends and meeting them out regularly for lunch. Anytime a stranger commented that she looked exactly like Michelle Obama’s mother, she’d just give a polite shrug and say, ‘Yeah, I get that a lot,’ before carrying on with her business. As she always had, my mother did things her own way.”
“[At a school in the South Side of Chicago], a social worker asked the students, ‘Tell Mrs. Obama. What goes through your mind when you wake up in the morning and hear the weather forecast is eighty and sunny?’ A day like that, the students agreed, was no good. When the weather was nice, the gangs got more active and the shooting got worse. These kids had adapted to the upside-down logic dictated by their environment, staying indoors when the weather was good, varying the routes they took to and from school each day based on shifting gang territories and alliances. Sometimes, they told me, taking the safest path home meant walking right down the middle of the street as cars sped past them on both sides. Doing so gave them a better view of any escalating fights or possible shooters. And it gave them more time to run.”
“I’d found myself at Democratic fundraisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping wine with wealthy women who would claim to be passionate about education and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially to tell me that their Wall Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about raising their taxes.”
“For me, optimism is a form of faith, an antidote to fear. Optimism reigned in my family’s little apartment on Euclid Avenue. I saw it in my father, in the way he moved around as if nothing was wrong with his body, as if the disease that would someday take his life just didn’t exist. I saw it in my mother’s stubborn belief in our neighborhood, her decision to stay rooted even as fear led many of her neighbors to pack up and move. It’s the thing that drew me to Barack when he turned up in my office at [the law firm in which I worked], wearing a hopeful grin. Later, it helped me to overcome my doubts and vulnerabilities enough to trust that if I allowed my family to live an extremely public life, we’d manage to stay safe and also happy.”
