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

swishing, watery heartbeat picked up on ultrasound, emanating from the warm
cave of my body. We were pregnant. It was for real. Suddenly the responsibility
and relative sacrifice meant something completely different, like a landscape
taking on new colors, or all the furniture in a house being rearranged so that now
everything appeared perfectly in place. I walked around with a secret inside me.
This was my privilege, the gift of being female. I felt bright with the promise of
what I carried.

I would feel this way right through, even as first-trimester fatigue left me
drained, as my job stayed busy and Barack continued making his weekly treks to
the state capital. We had our outward lives, but now there was something inward
happening, a baby growing, a tiny girl. (Because Barack’s a fact guy and I’m a
planner, finding out her gender was obligatory.) We couldn’t see her, but she was
there, gaining in size and spirit as fall became winter and then became spring.
That thing I’d felt—my envy for Barack’s separateness from the process—had
now utterly reversed itself. He was on the outside, while I got to live the process.
I was the process, indivisible from this small, burgeoning life that was now
throwing elbows and poking my bladder with her heel. I was never alone, never
lonely. She was there, always, while I was driving to work, or chopping
vegetables for a salad, or lying in bed at night, poring over the pages of What to
Expect When You’re Expecting for the nine hundredth time.

Summers in Chicago are special to me. I love how the sky stays light right
into evening, how Lake Michigan gets busy with sailboats and the heat ratchets
up to the point that it’s almost impossible to recall the struggles of winter. I love
how in summer the business of politics slowly starts to go quiet and life tilts more
toward fun.

Though really we’d had no control over anything, somehow in the end it
felt as if we’d timed it all perfectly. Very early in the morning on July 4, 1998, I
felt the first twinges of labor. Barack and I checked into the University of
Chicago hospital, bringing both Maya—who’d flown in from Hawaii to be there
the week I was due—and my mom for support. It was still hours before the
barbecue coals would start to blaze across the city and people would spread their
blankets on the grass along the lakeshore, waving flags and waiting for the
spectacle of the city fireworks to bloom over the water. We’d miss all of it that
year anyway, lost in a whole new blaze and bloom. We were thinking not about
country but about family as Malia Ann Obama, one of the two most perfect