Becoming

About eight weeks later, I heard a sound that erased all traces of resentment: a swishing, watery heartbe ...

babies ever to be born to anyone, anywhere, dropped into our world. ...

M 14 otherhood became my motivator. It dictated my movements, my decisions, the rhythm of every day. It too ...

of Chicago. I negotiated to come back only half-time, figuring this would be a win-win sort of ar ...

A sure about my husband: You don’t dangle an opportunity in front of him, something that could ...

blessing, adopting a let’s-just-get-this-out-of-the-way attitude about the whole thing. I thought maybe h ...

T were only a matter of hours now from our flight home. I saw the worry deepening on Barack’ ...

the opportunity to depict Barack as some kind of bon vivant lawmaker who’d been on vacation—in Hawai ...

A to the same publication, Bobby Rush said, “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool. We’re no ...

fantastically simple pregnancy, and a straightforward delivery, while Malia, now almost three, waited at ...

preschool. But then came a call from Susan Sher, my former mentor and colleague at city hall who wa ...

Most of us lived in a state of constant calibration, tweaking one area of life in hopes of ...

T be offered the job. But no matter how it panned out, I knew I’d at least done somethin ...

W before anyone else woke up. This left me a little ragged in the evenings and sometimes put me in di ...

meanwhile, had been raised inside the tight weave of my own family, in our boxed-in apartment, ...

throwing his mind at complicated problems and reasoning them out on his own. Sitting down in front of a ...

slip off an icy peak, I drove my ax into the ground. That isn’t to say that Barack didn’t make his o ...

O 15 n Clybourn Avenue in Chicago, just north of downtown, there was a strange paradise, seemingly ...

turned out to be a good one, challenging and satisfying and in line with my beliefs. It ...

M began hiring and training patient advocates—friendly, helpful local people, generally—who could s ...