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and most especially the South Side neighborhood that surrounded it, including
through the creation of a community service program to connect students to
volunteer opportunities in the neighborhood. Like the position at Public Allies,
this new job spoke to a reality I’d lived personally. As I’d told Art years earlier,
the University of Chicago had always felt less attainable and less interested in me
than the fancy East Coast schools I’d ultimately attended, a place with its back
turned to the neighborhood. The chance to try to lower those walls, to get more
students involved with the city and more city residents with the university, was
one I found inspiring.

All inspiration aside, there were underlying reasons for making the
transition. The university offered the kind of institutional stability that a still-
newish nonprofit could not. My pay was better, my hours would be more
reasonable, and there were other people designated to keep paper in the copier
and fix the laser printer when it broke. I was thirty-two years old now and
starting to think more about what kind of load I wanted to carry. On our date
nights at Zinfandel, Barack and I often continued a conversation we’d been
having in one form or another for years—about impact, about how and where
each one of us could make a difference, how best to apportion our time and
energy.

For me, some of the old questions about who I was and what I wanted to be
in life were starting to drift in again, fixing themselves at the forefront of my
mind. I’d taken the new job in part to create a little more room in our life, and
also because the health-care benefits were better than anything I’d ever had. And
this would end up being important. As Barack and I sat holding hands across the
table in the candle glow of another Friday night at Zinfandel, with the pot roast
polished off and dessert on its way, there was one big wrinkle in our happiness.
We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going well.

t turns out that even two committed go-getters with a deep love and a robust
work ethic can’t will themselves into being pregnant. Fertility is not something
you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and
reward. For me and Barack, this was as surprising as it was disappointing. No
matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t seem to come up with a pregnancy. For a
while, I told myself it was simply an issue of access, the result of Barack’s comings
and goings from Springfield. Our attempts at procreation took place not in