M

14

otherhood became my motivator. It dictated my movements, my
decisions, the rhythm of every day. It took no time, no thought at all, for me to
be fully consumed by my new role as a mother. I’m a detail-oriented person, and
a baby is nothing if not a reservoir of details. Barack and I studied little Malia,
taking in the mystery of her rosebud lips, her dark fuzzy head and unfocused
gaze, the herky-jerky way she moved her tiny limbs. We bathed and swaddled
her and kept her pressed to our chests. We tracked her eating, her hours of sleep,
her every gurgle. We analyzed the contents of each soiled diaper as if it might tell
us all her secrets.

She was a tiny person, a person entrusted to us. I was heady with the
responsibility of it, fully in her thrall. I could lose an hour just watching her
breathe. When there’s a baby in the house, time stretches and contracts, abiding
by none of the regular rules. A single day can feel endless, and then suddenly six
months have blown right past. Barack and I laughed about what parenthood had
done to us. If we’d once spent the dinner hour parsing the intricacies of the
juvenile justice system, comparing what I’d learned during my stint at Public
Allies with some of the ideas he was trying to fit into a reform bill in the
legislature, we now, with no less fervor, debated whether Malia was too
dependent on her pacifier and compared our respective methods for getting her
to sleep. We were, as most new parents are, obsessive and a little boring, and
nothing made us happier. We hauled little Malia in her baby carrier with us to
Zinfandel for our Friday night dates, figuring out how to streamline our order so
we could be in and out quickly, before she got too restless.

Several months  after   Malia   was born,   I’d returned    to  work    at  the University