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were only a matter of hours now from our flight home. I saw the worry
deepening on Barack’s face, caught as he was in the crosscurrents of his opposing
obligations. What we were about to decide went far beyond the moment at hand.

“She can’t fly,” I said, “obviously.”
“I know.”
“We have to switch the flights again.”
“I know.”
Unspoken was the fact that he could just go. He could walk out the door
and catch a cab to the airport and still make it to Springfield in time to vote. He
could leave his sick daughter and fretting wife halfway across the Pacific and go
join his colleagues. It was an option. But I wasn’t going to martyr myself by
suggesting it. I was vulnerable, I’ll admit, swimming in the uncertainty of what
was going on with Malia. What if the fever got worse? What if she needed a
hospital? Meanwhile, around the world, there were more paranoid people than us
readying fallout shelters, hoarding cash and jugs of water just in case the worst of
the Y2K predictions came true and the power and communication grids went on
the fritz due to buggy computer networks unable to register the new millennium.
It wasn’t going to happen, but still. Was he really thinking about leaving?

It turns out he wasn’t. He didn’t. He would never.
I didn’t listen to the call he made to his legislative aide that day, explaining
that he’d miss the crime-bill vote. I didn’t care. I was just focused on our girl.
And as soon as Barack got off that call, he was, too. She was our little human. We
owed everything to her first.

In the end, the year 2000 arrived without incident. After a couple of days of
rest and some antibiotics, what indeed had turned out to be a nasty ear infection
for Malia cleared up, returning our toddler to her normal bouncy state. Life
would go on. It always did. On another perfect blue-sky day in Honolulu, we
boarded a plane and flew home to Chicago, back into the chill of winter and into
what for Barack was shaping up to be a political disaster.

he crime bill had failed to pass the state legislature, losing by five votes. For
me, there was no math to do: Even if Barack had made it back from Hawaii in
time, his vote almost certainly wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Still, he took
a beating for his absence. His opponents in the congressional primary pounced on