hours she didn’t spend on herself.
My considerable blessings in life were now causing a kind of psychic
whiplash. I’d been raised to be confident and see no limits, to believe I could go
after and get absolutely anything I wanted. And I wanted everything. Because, as
Suzanne would say, why not? I wanted to live with the hat-tossing, independent-
career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated
toward the stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife
and mother. I wanted to have a work life and a home life, but with some promise
that one would never fully squelch the other. I hoped to be exactly like my own
mother and at the same time nothing like her at all. It was an odd and
confounding thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have
everything? I had no idea.
Barack, meanwhile, came home from Bali looking tanned and carrying a
satchel stuffed with legal pads, having converted his isolation into a literary
victory. The book was basically finished. Within a matter of months, his agent
had resold it to a new publisher, paying off his debt and securing a plan for
publication. More important to me was the fact that within a matter of hours
we’d returned to the easy rhythm of our newlywed life. Barack was here, done
with his solitude, landed back in my world. My husband. He was smiling at the
jokes I made, wanting to hear about my day, kissing me to sleep at night.
As the months went by, we cooked, worked, laughed, and planned. Later
that spring, we had our finances in order enough to buy a condo, moving out of
7436 South Euclid Avenue and into a pretty, railroad-style apartment in Hyde
Park with hardwood floors and a tiled fireplace, a new launchpad for our life.
With Barack’s encouragement, I took another risk and switched jobs again, this
time saying good-bye to Valerie and Susan at city hall in order to finally explore
the kind of nonprofit work that had always intrigued me, finding a leadership role
that would give me a chance to grow. There was still plenty I hadn’t figured out
about my life—the riddle of how to be both a Mary and a Marian remained
unsolved—but for now all those deeper questions drifted out to the margins of
my mind, where they’d sit dormant and unattended for the time being. Any
worries could wait, I figured, because we were an us now, and we were happy.
And happy seemed like a starting place for everything.