be a genus of white women who lived inside television sitcoms—cheery, coiffed,
corseted. They stayed at home, fussed over the children, and had dinner ready on
the stove. They sometimes got into the sherry or flirted with the vacuum-cleaner
salesman, but the excitement seemed to end there. The irony, of course, was that
I used to watch those shows in our living room on Euclid Avenue while my own
stay-at-home mom fixed dinner without complaint and my own clean-cut dad
recovered from a day at work. My parents’ arrangement was as traditional as
anything we saw on TV. Barack sometimes jokes, in fact, that my upbringing was
like a black version of Leave It to Beaver, with the South Shore Robinsons as
steady and fresh-faced as the Cleaver family of Mayfield, U.S.A., though of
course we were a poorer version of the Cleavers, with my dad’s blue city
worker’s uniform subbing for Mr. Cleaver’s suit. Barack makes this comparison
with a touch of envy, because his own childhood was so different, but also as a
way to push back on the entrenched stereotype that African Americans primarily
live in broken homes, that our families are somehow incapable of living out the
same stable, middle-class dream as our white neighbors.
Personally, as a kid, I preferred The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which I
absorbed with fascination. Mary had a job, a snappy wardrobe, and really great
hair. She was independent and funny, and unlike those of the other ladies on TV,
her problems were interesting. She had conversations that weren’t about children
or homemaking. She didn’t let Lou Grant boss her around, and she wasn’t fixated
on finding a husband. She was youthful and at the same time grown-up. In the
pre-pre-pre-internet landscape, when the world came packaged almost
exclusively through three channels of network TV, this stuff mattered. If you
were a girl with a brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into
something more than a wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess.
And here I was now, twenty-nine years old, sitting in the very same
apartment where I’d watched all that TV and consumed all those meals dished up
by the patient and selfless Marian Robinson. I had so much—an education, a
healthy sense of self, a deep arsenal of ambition—and I was wise enough to credit
my mother, in particular, with instilling it in me. She’d taught me how to read
before I started kindergarten, helping me sound out words as I sat curled like a
kitten in her lap, studying a library copy of Dick and Jane. She’d cooked for us
with care, putting broccoli and Brussels sprouts on our plates and requiring that
we eat them. She’d hand sewn my prom dress, for God’s sake. The point was,
she’d given diligently and she’d given everything. She’d let our family define her.
I was old enough now to realize that all the hours she gave to me and Craig were