Becoming

by Michelle Obama

  It took some time for me to be able to recognize the voices of the different White House phone operators who gave me wake-up calls in the morning or connected me with the East Wing offices downstairs, but soon they, too, became familiar and friendly. We’d chat about the weather, or I’d joke about how I often had to be roused hours earlier than Barack to have my hair done ahead of official events. These interactions were quick, but in some small way they made life feel a little more normal.

  One of the more experienced butlers, a white-haired African American man named James Ramsey, had served since the Carter administration. Every so often, he’d hand me the latest copy of Jet magazine, smiling proudly and saying, “I got you covered, Mrs. Obama.”

  Life was better, always, when we could measure the warmth.

  * * *

  I’d been walking around thinking that our new house was big and grand to the point of being over the top, but then in April I went to England and met Her Majesty the Queen.

  This was the first international trip Barack and I made together since the election, flying to London on Air Force One so that he could attend a meeting of the Group of 20, or G20, made up of leaders representing the world’s largest economies. It was a critical moment for such a gathering. The economic crisis in the United States had created devastating ripples across the globe, sending world financial markets into a tailspin. The G20 summit also marked Barack’s debut as president on the world stage. And as was often the case during those first months in office, his main job was to clean up a mess, in this case absorbing the frustration of other world leaders who felt the United States had missed important opportunities to regulate reckless bankers and prevent the disaster with which all of them were now dealing.

  Beginning to feel more confident that Sasha and Malia were comfortable in their routines at school, I’d left my mother in charge for the few days I’d be abroad, knowing that she’d immediately relax all my regular rules about getting to bed early and eating every vegetable served at dinner. My mom relished being a grandmother, most especially the part where she got to throw over all my rigidity in favor of her own looser and lighter style, which was markedly more lax than when Craig and I had been the kids under her care. The girls were always thrilled to have Grandma in charge.

  Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, was hosting the G20 summit, which included a full day of economic meetings at a conference center in the city, but as often happened when world leaders showed up in London for official events, the Queen would also have everyone over to Buckingham Palace for a ceremonial hello. Because of America and Great Britain’s close relationship and also, I suppose, because we were new on the scene, Barack and I were invited to arrive at the palace early for a private audience with the Queen ahead of the larger reception.

  Needless to say, I had no experience meeting royalty. I was given to understand that I could either curtsy or shake the Queen’s hand. I knew that we were to refer to her as “Your Majesty,” while her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, went by “Your Royal Highness.” Other than that, I wasn’t sure what to expect as our motorcade rolled through the tall iron gates at the entrance to the palace, past onlookers pressed at the fences, past a collection of guards and a royal horn player, through an interior arch and up to the courtyard, where the official master of the household waited outside to greet us.

  It turns out that Buckingham Palace is big—so big that it almost defies description. It has 775 rooms and is fifteen times the size of the White House. In the years to come, Barack and I would be lucky enough to return there a few times as invited guests. On our later trips, we’d sleep in a sumptuous bedroom suite on the ground floor of the palace, looked after by liveried footmen and ladies-in-waiting. We’d attend a formal banquet in the ballroom, eating with forks and knives coated in gold. At one point, as we were given a tour, we were told things like “This is our Blue Room,” our guide gesturing into a vast hall that was five times the size of our Blue Room back home. The Queen’s head usher one day would take me, my mother, and the girls through the palace Rose Garden, which contained thousands of flawlessly blooming flowers and occupied nearly an acre of land, making the few rosebushes we so proudly kept outside the Oval Office suddenly seem a tad less impressive. I found Buckingham Palace breathtaking and incomprehensible at the same time.

  On that first visit, we were escorted to the Queen’s private apartment and shown into a sitting room where she and Prince Philip stood waiting to receive us. Queen Elizabeth II was eighty-two years old then, diminutive and graceful with a delicate smile and her white hair curled regally away from her forehead. She wore a pale pink dress and a set of pearls and kept a black purse draped properly over one arm. We shook hands and posed for a photo. The Queen politely inquired about our jet lag and invited us to sit down. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about after that—a little bit about the economy and the state of affairs in England, the various meetings Barack had been having.

  There’s an awkwardness that comes with just about any formally arranged meeting, but in my experience it’s something you need to consciously work your way past. Sitting with the Queen, I had to will myself out of my own head—to stop processing the splendor of the setting and the paralysis I felt coming face-to-face with an honest-to-goodness icon. I’d seen Her Majesty’s face dozens of times before, in history books, on television, and on currency, but here she was in the flesh, looking at me intently and asking questions. She was warm and personable, and I tried to be the same. The Queen was a living symbol and well practiced at managing it, but she was as human as the rest of us. I liked her immediately.

  Later that afternoon, Barack and I floated around at the palace reception, eating canapés with the other G20 leaders and their spouses. I chatted with Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy of France. I met the king of Saudi Arabia, the president of Argentina, the prime ministers of Japan and Ethiopia. I did my best to remember who came from which nation and which spouse went with whom, careful not to say too much for fear of getting anything wrong. Overall, it was a dignified, friendly affair and a reminder that even heads of state are capable of talking about their children and joking about the British weather.

  At some point toward the end of the party, I turned my head to find that Queen Elizabeth had surfaced at my elbow, the two of us suddenly alone together in the otherwise crowded room. She was wearing a pair of pristine white gloves and appeared just as fresh as she’d been hours earlier when we first met. She smiled up at me.

  “You’re so tall,” she remarked, cocking her head.

  “Well,” I said, chuckling, “the shoes give me a couple of inches. But yes, I’m tall.”

  The Queen then glanced down at the pair of black Jimmy Choos I was wearing. She shook her head.

  “These shoes are unpleasant, are they not?” she said. She gestured with some frustration at her own black pumps.

  I confessed then to the Queen that my feet were hurting. She confessed that hers hurt, too. We looked at each other then with identical expressions, like, When is all this standing around with world leaders going to finally wrap up? And with this, she busted out with a fully charming laugh.

  Forget that she sometimes wore a diamond crown and that I’d flown to London on the presidential jet; we were just two tired ladies oppressed by our shoes. I then did what’s instinctive to me anytime I feel connected to a new person, which is to express my feelings outwardly. I laid a hand affectionately across her shoulder.

  I couldn’t have known it in the moment, but I was committing what would be deemed an epic faux pas. I’d touched the Queen of England, which I’d soon learn was apparently not done. Our interaction at the reception was caught on camera, and in the coming days it would be reproduced in media reports all over the world: “A Breach in Protocol!” “Michelle Obama Dares to Hug the Queen!” It revived some of the campaign-era speculation that I was generally
uncouth and lacking the standard elegance of a First Lady, and worried me somewhat, too, thinking I’d possibly distracted from Barack’s efforts abroad. But I tried not to let the criticism rattle me. If I hadn’t done the proper thing at Buckingham Palace, I had at least done the human thing. I daresay that the Queen was okay with it, too, because when I touched her, she only pulled closer, resting a gloved hand lightly on the small of my back.

  The following day, while Barack went off for a marathon session of meetings on the economy, I went to visit a school for girls. It was a government-funded, inner-city secondary school in the Islington neighborhood, not far from a set of council estates, which is what public-housing projects are called in England. More than 90 percent of the school’s nine hundred students were black or from an ethnic minority; a fifth of them were the children of immigrants or asylum seekers. I was drawn to it because it was a diverse school with limited financial resources and yet had been deemed academically outstanding. I also wanted to make sure that when I visited a new place as First Lady, I really visited it—meaning that I’d have a chance to meet the people who actually lived there, not just those who governed them. Traveling abroad, I had opportunities that Barack didn’t. I could escape the stage-managed multilateral meetings and sit-downs with leaders and find new ways to bring a little extra warmth to those otherwise staid visits. I aimed to do it with every foreign trip, beginning in England.

  I wasn’t fully prepared, though, to feel what I did when I set foot inside the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School and was ushered to an auditorium where about two hundred students had gathered to watch some of their peers perform and then hear me speak. The school was named after a pioneering doctor who also became the first female mayor elected in England. The building itself was nothing special—a boxy brick building on a nondescript street. But as I settled into a folding chair onstage and started watching the performance—which included a Shakespeare scene, a modern dance, and a chorus singing a beautiful rendition of a Whitney Houston song—something inside me began to quake. I almost felt myself falling backward into my own past.

  You had only to look around at the faces in the room to know that despite their strengths these girls would need to work hard to be seen. There were girls in hijab, girls for whom English was a second language, girls whose skin made up every shade of brown. I knew they’d have to push back against the stereotypes that would get put on them, all the ways they’d be defined before they’d had a chance to define themselves. They’d need to fight the invisibility that comes with being poor, female, and of color. They’d have to work to find their voices and not be diminished, to keep themselves from getting beaten down. They would have to work just to learn.

  But their faces were hopeful, and now so was I. For me it was a strange, quiet revelation: They were me, as I’d once been. And I was them, as they could be. The energy I felt thrumming in that school had nothing to do with obstacles. It was the power of nine hundred girls striving.

  When the performance was done and I went to the lectern to speak, I could barely contain my emotion. I glanced down at my prepared notes but suddenly had little interest in them. Looking up at the girls, I just began to talk, explaining that though I had come from far away, carrying this strange title of First Lady of the United States, I was more like them than they knew. That I, too, was from a working-class neighborhood, raised by a family of modest means and loving spirit, that I’d realized early on that school was where I could start defining myself—that an education was a thing worth working for, that it would help spring them forward in the world.

  At this point, I’d been First Lady for just over two months. In different moments, I’d felt overwhelmed by the pace, unworthy of the glamour, anxious about our children, and uncertain of my purpose. There are pieces of public life, of giving up one’s privacy to become a walking, talking symbol of a nation, that can seem specifically designed to strip away part of your identity. But here, finally, speaking to those girls, I felt something completely different and pure—an alignment of my old self with this new role. Are you good enough? Yes, you are, all of you. I told the students of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson that they’d touched my heart. I told them that they were precious, because they truly were. And when my talk was over, I did what was instinctive. I hugged absolutely every single girl I could reach.

  * * *

  Back home in Washington, spring had arrived. The sun came up earlier and stayed out a little longer each day. I watched as the slope of the South Lawn gradually turned a lush and vibrant green. From the windows of the residence, I could see the red tulips and lavender grape hyacinth that surrounded the fountain at the base of the hill. My staff and I had spent the past two months working to turn my idea for a garden into reality, which hadn’t been easy. For one thing, we’d had to persuade the National Park Service and the White House grounds team to tear up a patch of one of the most iconic lawns in the world. The very suggestion had been met with resistance, initially. It had been decades since a White House Victory Garden had been planted, on Eleanor Roosevelt’s watch, and no one seemed much interested in a reprise. “They think we’re insane,” Sam Kass told me at one point.

  Eventually, though, we got our way. We were at first allotted a tiny plot of land tucked away behind the tennis courts, next to a toolshed. To his credit, Sam fought for better real estate, finally securing an L-shaped eleven-hundred-square-foot plot in a sun-splashed part of the South Lawn, not far from the Oval Office and the swing set we’d recently installed for the girls. We coordinated with the Secret Service to make sure our tilling wouldn’t disrupt any of the sensors or sight lines they needed to protect the grounds. We ran tests to determine whether the soil had enough nutrients and didn’t contain any toxic elements like lead or mercury.

  And then we were good to go.

  Several days after I returned from Europe, I hosted a group of students from Bancroft Elementary School, a bilingual school in the northwestern part of the city. Weeks earlier, we’d used shovels and hoes to prepare the soil. Now the same kids were back to help me do the planting. Our patch of dirt sat not far from the southern fence along E Street, where tourists often congregated to gaze up at the White House. I was glad that this would now be a part of their view.

  Or at least I hoped to be glad at some point. Because with a garden you never know for sure what will or won’t happen—whether anything, in fact, will grow. We’d invited the media to cover the planting. We’d invited all the White House chefs to help us, along with Tom Vilsack, Barack’s secretary of agriculture. We’d asked everyone to watch what we were doing. Now we had to wait for the results. “Honestly,” I’d said to Sam before anyone arrived that morning, “this better work.”

  That day, I knelt with a bunch of fifth graders as we carefully put seedlings into the ground, patting the dirt into place around the fragile stalks. After being in Europe and having my every outfit dissected in the press (I’d worn a cardigan sweater to meet the Queen, which was almost as scandalous as touching her had been), I was relieved to be kneeling in the dirt in a light jacket and a pair of casual pants. The kids asked me questions, some about vegetables and the tasks at hand, but also things like “Where’s the president?” and “How come he’s not helping?” It took only a little while, though, before most of them seemed to lose track of me, their focus centered instead on the fit of their garden gloves and the worms in the soil. I loved being with children. It was, and would be throughout the entirety of my time in the White House, a balm for my spirit, a way to momentarily escape my First Lady worries, my self-consciousness about constantly being judged. Kids made me feel like myself again. To them, I wasn’t a spectacle. I was just a nice, kinda-tall lady.

  As the morning went on, we planted lettuce and spinach, fennel and broccoli. We put in carrots and collard greens and onions and shell peas. We planted berry bushes and a lot of herbs. What would come from it? I didn’t know, the same way I didn’t
know what lay ahead for us in the White House, nor what lay ahead for the country or for any of these sweet children surrounding me. All we could do then was put our faith into the effort, trusting that with sun and rain and time, something half-decent would push up through the dirt.

  21

  One Saturday evening at the end of May, Barack took me out on a date. In the four months since becoming president, he’d been spending his days working on ways to fulfill the various promises made to voters during the campaign; now he was making good on a promise to me. We were going to New York, to have dinner and see a show.

  For years in Chicago, our date nights had been a sacred part of every week, an indulgence we built into our lives and protected no matter what. I love talking to my husband across a small table in a low-lit room. I always have, and I expect I always will. Barack is a good listener, patient and thoughtful. I love how he tips his head back when he laughs. I love the lightness in his eyes, the kindness at his core. Having a drink and an unrushed meal together has always been our pathway back to the start, to that first hot summer when everything between us carried an electric charge.