Becoming

by Michelle Obama

  Barack and I were committed to changing the perceptions about what made a young woman valuable to a society. He managed to leverage hundreds of millions of dollars in resources from across his administration, through USAID and the Peace Corps, and also through the Departments of State, Labor, and Agriculture. The two of us together lobbied other countries’ governments to help fund programming for girls’ education while encouraging private companies and think tanks to commit to the cause.

  At this point, too, I knew how to make a little noise for a cause. It was natural, I understood, for Americans to feel disconnected from the struggles of people in faraway countries, so I tried to bring it home, calling up celebrities like Stephen Colbert to lend their star power at events and on social media. I’d enlist the help of Janelle Monáe, Zendaya, Kelly Clarkson, and other talents to release a catchy pop song written by Diane Warren called “This Is for My Girls,” the proceeds of which would go toward funding girls’ education globally.

  And lastly, I’d do something that was a little terrifying for me, which was to sing, making an appearance on the late-night host James Corden’s hilarious “Carpool Karaoke” series, the two of us circling the South Lawn in a black SUV. We belted out “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” “Single Ladies,” and finally—the reason I’d signed on to do it in the first place—“This Is for My Girls,” with a guest appearance from Missy Elliott, who slipped into the backseat and rapped along with us. I’d practiced diligently for my karaoke session for weeks, memorizing every beat to every song. The goal was to have it look fun and light, but behind it, as always, was work and a larger purpose—to keep connecting people with the issue. My segment with James had forty-five million views on YouTube within the first three months, making every bit of the effort worth it.

  * * *

  Toward the end of 2015, Barack, the girls, and I flew to Hawaii to spend Christmas as we always did, renting a big house with wide windows that looked out on the beach, joined by our usual group of family friends. As we had for the last six years, we took time on Christmas Day to visit with service members and their families at a nearby Marine Corps base. And as it had been right through, for Barack the vacation was only a partial vacation—a just-barely vacation, really. He fielded phone calls, sat for daily briefings, and was consulting with a skeleton staff of advisers, aides, and speechwriters who were all staying at a hotel close by. It made me wonder whether he’d remember how to fully relax when the time actually came, whether either one of us would find a way to let down when this was all over. What would it feel like, I wondered, when we finally got to go somewhere without the guy carrying the nuclear football?

  Though I was allowing myself to dream a little, I still couldn’t picture how any of this would end.

  Returning to Washington to begin our final year in the White House, we knew the clock was ticking now in earnest. I began what would become a long series of “lasts.” There was the last Governors’ Ball, the last Easter Egg Roll, the last White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Barack and I also made a last state visit to the United Kingdom together, which included a quick trip to see our friend the Queen.

  Barack had always felt a special fondness for Queen Elizabeth, saying that she reminded him of his no-nonsense grandmother, Toot. I personally was awed by her efficiency, a skill clearly forged by necessity over a lifetime in the public eye. One day a few years earlier, Barack and I had stood, hosting a receiving line together with her and Prince Philip. I’d watched, bemused, as the Queen managed to whisk people speedily past with economic, friendly hellos that left no room for follow-up conversation, while Barack projected an amiable looseness, almost inviting chitchat and then ponderously answering people’s questions, thereby messing up the flow of the line. All these years after meeting the guy, I was still trying to get him to hurry up.

  One afternoon in April 2016, the two of us took a helicopter from the American ambassador’s residence in London to Windsor Castle in the countryside west of the city. Our advance team instructed us that the Queen and Prince Philip were planning to meet us when we landed and then personally drive us back to the castle for lunch. As was always the case, we were briefed on the protocol ahead of time: We’d greet the royals formally before getting into their vehicle to make the short drive. I’d sit in the front next to ninety-four-year-old Prince Philip, who would drive, and Barack would sit next to the Queen in the backseat.

  It would be the first time in more than eight years that the two of us had been driven by anyone other than a Secret Service agent, or ridden in a car together without agents. This seemed to matter to our security teams, the same way the protocol mattered to the advance teams, who fretted endlessly over our movements and interactions, making sure that every last little thing looked right and went smoothly.

  After we’d touched down in a field on the palace grounds and said our hellos, however, the Queen abruptly threw a wrench into everything by gesturing for me to join her in the backseat of the Range Rover. I froze, trying to remember if anyone had prepped me for this scenario, whether it was more polite to go along with it or to insist that Barack take his proper seat by her side.

  The Queen immediately picked up on my hesitation. And was having none of it.

  “Did they give you some rule about this?” she said, dismissing all the fuss with a wave of her hand. “That’s rubbish. Sit wherever you want.”

  * * *

  For me, giving commencement speeches was an important, almost sacred springtime ritual. Each year I delivered several of them, choosing a mix of high school and college ceremonies, focusing on the sorts of schools that normally didn’t land high-profile speakers. (Princeton and Harvard, I’m sorry, but you’re fine without me.) In 2015, I’d gone back to the South Side of Chicago to speak at the graduation at King College Prep, the high school from which Hadiya Pendleton would have graduated had she lived long enough. Her spirit was commemorated at the ceremony by an empty chair, which her classmates had decorated with sunflowers and purple fabric.

  For my final round of commencements as First Lady, I spoke at Jackson State University in Mississippi, another historically black school, using the opportunity to talk about striving for excellence. I spoke at the City College of New York, emphasizing the value of diversity and immigration. And on May 26, which happened to be the day Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination for president, I was in New Mexico, speaking to a class of Native American students who were graduating from a small residential high school, nearly all of them headed next to college. The deeper I got into the experience of being First Lady, the more emboldened I felt to speak honestly and directly about what it meant to be marginalized by race and gender. My intention was to give younger people a context for the hate surfacing in the news and in political discourse and to give them a reason to hope.

  I tried to communicate the one message about myself and my station in the world that I felt might really mean something. Which was that I knew invisibility. I’d lived invisibility. I came from a history of invisibility. I liked to mention that I was the great-great-granddaughter of a slave named Jim Robinson, who was probably buried in an unmarked grave somewhere on a South Carolina plantation. And in standing at a lectern in front of students who were thinking about the future, I offered testament to the idea that it was possible, at least in some ways, to overcome invisibility.

  The last commencement I attended that spring was personal—Malia’s graduation from Sidwell Friends, held on a warm day in June. Our close friend Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who’d written a poem for Barack’s first inauguration, spoke to the class, which meant that Barack and I got to sit back and just feel. I was proud of Malia, who was soon to head off to Europe to travel for a few weeks with friends. After taking a gap year, she’d enroll at Harvard. I was proud of Sasha, who turned fifteen that same day and was counting down the hours to the Beyoncé concert she was going to in lieu of a birthday party.
She would go on to spend much of the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, living with family friends until Barack and I arrived for vacation. She’d make new friends and land her first job, working at a snack bar. I was proud, too, of my mother, who sat nearby in the sunshine, wearing a black dress and heels, having managed to live in the White House and travel the world with us while staying utterly and completely herself.

  I was proud of all of us, for almost being done.

  Barack sat next to me in a folding chair. I could see the tears brimming behind his sunglasses as he watched Malia cross the stage to pick up her diploma. He was tired, I knew. Three days earlier, he’d given a eulogy for a friend from law school who’d worked for him in the White House. Two days later, an extremist would open fire inside a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing forty-nine people and wounding fifty-three more. The gravity of his job never let up.

  He was a good father, dialed in and consistent in ways his own father had never been, but there were also things he’d sacrificed along the way. He’d entered into parenthood as a politician. His constituents and their needs had been with us all along.

  It had to hurt a little bit, realizing he was so close to having more freedom and more time, just as our daughters were beginning to step away.

  But we had to let them go. The future was theirs, just as it should be.

  * * *

  In late July, I flew through a violent thunderstorm, the plane dipping and diving on its approach to Philadelphia, where I was going to speak for the last time at a Democratic convention. It was perhaps the worst turbulence I’d ever experienced, and while Caroline Adler Morales, my very pregnant communications director, worried that the stress of it would put her into labor and Melissa—a skittish flier under normal circumstances—sat shrieking in her seat, all I could think was Just get me down in time to practice my speech. Though I’d long grown comfortable on the biggest stages, I still found huge comfort in preparation.

  Back in 2008, during Barack’s first run for president, I’d rehearsed and re-rehearsed my convention speech until I could place the commas in my sleep, in part because I’d never given a speech on live television like that, and also because the personal stakes felt so high. I was stepping onto the stage after having been demonized as an angry black woman who didn’t love her country. My speech that night gave me a chance to humanize myself, explaining who I was in my own voice, slaying the caricatures and stereotypes with my own words. Four years later, at the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, I’d spoken earnestly about what I’d seen in Barack during his first term—how he was still the same principled man I’d married, how I’d realized that “being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.”

  This time, I was stumping for Hillary Clinton, Barack’s opponent in the brutal 2008 primary who’d gone on to become his loyal and effective secretary of state. I’d never feel as passionately about another candidate as I did about my own husband, which made campaigning for others sometimes difficult for me. I maintained a code for myself, though, when it came to speaking publicly about anything or anyone in the political sphere: I said only what I absolutely believed and what I absolutely felt.

  We landed in Philadelphia and I rushed to the convention center, finding just enough time to change clothes and run through my speech twice. Then I stepped out and spoke my truth. I talked about the fears I’d had early on about raising our daughters in the White House and how proud I was of the intelligent young women they’d become. I said that I trusted Hillary because she understood the demands of the presidency and had the temperament to lead, because she was as qualified as any nominee in history. And I acknowledged the stark choice now being put before the country.

  Since childhood, I’d believed it was important to speak out against bullies while also not stooping to their level. And to be clear, we were now up against a bully, a man who among other things demeaned minorities and expressed contempt for prisoners of war, challenging the dignity of our country with practically his every utterance. I wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it. It was dignity I wanted to make an appeal for—the idea that as a nation we might hold on to the core thing that had sustained my family, going back generations. Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.

  Two months later, just weeks before the election, a tape would surface of Donald Trump in an unguarded moment, bragging to a TV host in 2005 about sexually assaulting women, using language so lewd and vulgar that it put media outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the established standards of decency. In the end, the standards of decency were simply lowered in order to make room for the candidate’s voice.

  When I heard it, I could hardly believe it. And then again, there was something painfully familiar in the menace and male jocularity of that tape. I can hurt you and get away with it. It was an expression of hatred that had generally been kept out of polite company, but still lived in the marrow of our supposedly enlightened society—alive and accepted enough that someone like Donald Trump could afford to be cavalier about it. Every woman I know recognized it. Every person who’s ever been made to feel “other” recognized it. It was precisely what so many of us hoped our own children would never need to experience, and yet probably would. Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.

  My body buzzed with fury after hearing that tape. I was scheduled to speak at a campaign rally for Hillary the following week, and rather than delivering a straightforward endorsement of her capabilities, I felt compelled to try to address Trump’s words directly—to counter his voice with my own.

  I worked on my remarks while sitting in a hospital room at Walter Reed, where my mother was having back surgery, my thoughts flowing fast. I’d been mocked and threatened many times now, cut down for being black, female, and vocal. I’d felt the derision directed at my body, the literal space I occupied in the world. I’d watched Donald Trump stalk Hillary Clinton during a debate, following her around as she spoke, standing too close, trying to diminish her presence with his. I can hurt you and get away with it. Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities—in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try to advance.

  For me, Trump’s comments were another blow. I couldn’t let his message stand. Working with Sarah Hurwitz, the deft speechwriter who’d been with me since 2008, I channeled my fury into words, and then—after my mother had recovered from surgery—I delivered them one October day in Manchester, New Hampshire. Speaking to a high-energy crowd, I made my feelings clear. “This is not normal,” I said. “This is not politics as usual. This is disgraceful. It is intolerable.” I articulated my rage and my fear, along with my faith that with this election Americans understood the true nature of what they were choosing between. I put my whole heart into giving that speech.

  I then flew back to Washington, praying I’d been heard.

  * * *

  As fall continued, Barack and I began making plans for our move to a new house in January, having decided to stay in Washington so that Sasha could finish high school at Sidwell. Malia, meanwhile, was in South America on a gap-year adventure, feeling the freedom of being as far away from the political intensity as she could. I implored my staff in the East Wing to finish strong, even as they n
eeded to think about finding new jobs, even as the battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump grew more intense and distracting by the day.

  On November 7, 2016, the evening before the election, Barack and I made a quick trip to Philadelphia to join Hillary and her family at a final rally before an enormous crowd on Independence Mall. The mood was positive, expectant. I took heart in the optimism Hillary projected that night, and in the many polls that showed her with a comfortable lead. I took heart in what I thought I understood about the qualities Americans would and wouldn’t tolerate in a leader. I presumed nothing, but I felt good about the odds.

  For the first time in many years, Barack and I had no role to play on election night. There was no hotel suite reserved for the wait; there were no trays of canapés laid out, no television blaring from any corner. There was no hair, makeup, or wardrobe to be tended to, no marshaling of our children, no late-night speech being prepped for delivery. We had nothing to do, and it thrilled us. This was the beginning of our stepping back, a first taste of what the future might be like. We were invested, of course, but the moment ahead wasn’t ours. It was merely ours to witness. Knowing it would be a while before results came in, we invited Valerie over to watch a movie in the White House theater.