A

In a nutshell, Barack believed and trusted when others did not. He had a
simple, buoying faith that if you stuck to your principles, things would work out.
I’d had so many careful, sensible conversations at this point, with so many people,
about how to extract myself from a career in which, by all outward measures, I
was flourishing. Again and again, I’d read the caution and concern on so many
faces when I spoke of having loans to pay off, of not yet having managed to buy a
house. I couldn’t help but think about how my father had kept his aims
deliberately modest, avoiding every risk in order to give us constancy at home. I
still walked around with my mother’s advice ringing in my ear: Make the money
first and worry about your happiness later. Compounding my anxiety was the one
deep longing that far outmatched any material wish: I knew I wanted to have
children, sooner rather than later. And how would that work if I abruptly started
over in a brand-new field?

Barack, when he showed up back in Chicago, became a kind of soothing
antidote. He absorbed my worries, listened as I ticked off every financial
obligation I had, and affirmed that he, too, was excited to have children. He
acknowledged that there was no way we could predict how exactly we’d manage
things, given that neither of us wanted to be locked into the comfortable
predictability of a lawyer’s life. But the bottom line was that we were far from
poor and our future was promising, maybe even more promising for the fact that
it couldn’t easily be planned.

His was the lone voice telling me to just go for it, to erase the worries and
go toward whatever I thought would make me happy. It was okay to make my
leap into the unknown, because—and this would count as startling news to most
every member of the Shields/Robinson family, going back all the way to Dandy
and Southside—the unknown wasn’t going to kill me.

Don’t   worry,  Barack  was saying. You can do  this.   We’ll   figure  it  out.

word now about the bar exam: It’s a necessary chore, a rite of passage for
any just-hatched lawyer wishing to practice, and though the content and structure
of the test itself vary somewhat from state to state, the experience of taking it—a
two-day, twelve-hour exam meant to prove your knowledge of everything from
contract law to arcane rules about secured transactions—is pretty much
universally recognized as hellish. Just as Barack was intending to, I had sat for the