of Chicago. I negotiated to come back only half-time, figuring this would be a
win-win sort of arrangement—that I could now be both career woman and
perfect mother, striking the Mary Tyler Moore/ Marian Robinson balance I’d
always hoped for. We’d found a babysitter, Glorina Casabal, a doting, expert
caregiver about ten years older than I was. Born in the Philippines, she was
trained as a nurse and had raised two kids of her own. Glorina—“Glo”—was a
short, bustling woman with a short, practical haircut and gold wire-rimmed
glasses who could change a diaper in twelve seconds flat. She had a nurse’s hyper-
competent, do-anything energy and would become a vital and cherished member
of our family for the next few years. Her most important quality was that she
loved my baby passionately.
What I didn’t realize—and this would also go into my file of things many of
us learn too late—is that a part-time job, especially when it’s meant to be a
scaled-down version of your previously full-time job, can be something of a trap.
Or at least that’s how it played out for me. At work, I was still attending all the
meetings I always had while also grappling with most of the same responsibilities.
The only real difference was that I now made half my original salary and was
trying to cram everything into a twenty-hour week. If a meeting ran late, I’d end
up tearing home at breakneck speed to fetch Malia so that we could arrive on
time (Malia eager and happy, me sweaty and hyperventilating) to the afternoon
Wiggleworms class at a music studio on the North Side. To me, it felt like a
sanity-warping double bind. I battled guilt when I had to take work calls at
home. I battled a different sort of guilt when I sat at my office distracted by the
idea that Malia might be allergic to peanuts. Part-time work was meant to give
me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing
everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.
Meanwhile, it seemed that Barack had hardly missed a stride. A few months
after Malia’s birth, he’d been reelected to a four-year term in the state senate,
winning with 89 percent of the vote. He was popular and successful, and plate
spinner that he was, he was also starting to think about bigger things—namely,
running for the U.S. Congress, hoping to unseat a four-term Democrat named
Bobby Rush. Did I think it was a good idea for him to run for Congress? No, I
did not. It struck me as unlikely that he’d win, given that Rush was well-known
and Barack was still a virtual nobody. But he was a politician now and had
traction inside the state Democratic Party. He had advisers and supporters, some
of whom were urging him to give it a shot. Somebody had conducted a
preliminary poll that seemed to suggest maybe he could win. And this I know for