Most of us lived in a state of constant calibration, tweaking one area of life in
hopes of bringing more steadiness to another.
Our afternoons together taught me that there was no formula for
motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. This was
useful to see. Regardless of who was living which way and why, every small child
in that playroom was cherished and growing just fine. I felt it every time we
gathered, the collective force of all these women trying to do right by their kids:
In the end, no matter what, I knew we’d help one another out and we’d all be
okay.
After talking it through with both Barack and my friends, I decided to
interview for the university hospital job, to at least see what it was about. My
feeling was I’d be perfect for the job. I knew I had the right skills and plenty of
passion. But if I were to take it, I’d also need to operate from a position of
strength, on terms that worked for my family. I could nail it, I thought, if I
wasn’t overburdened with superfluous meetings and could be given the leeway to
manage my own time, working from home when I needed to, dashing out of the
office for day-care pickup or a pediatrician’s visit when necessary.
Also, I didn’t want to work part-time anymore. I was done with that. I
wanted a full-time job, with a competitive salary to match so that we could better
afford child care and housekeeping help—so that I could lay off the Pine-Sol and
spend my free time playing with the girls. In the meantime, I wasn’t going to try
to hide the messiness of my existence, from the breast-feeding baby and the
three-year-old in preschool to the fact that with my husband’s topsy-turvy
political schedule I was in charge of more or less every aspect of life at home.
Somewhat brazenly, I suppose, I laid all this out in my interview with
Michael Riordan, the hospital’s new president. I even brought three-month-old
Sasha along with me, too. I can’t remember the circumstances exactly, whether I
couldn’t find a babysitter that day or whether I’d even bothered to try. Sasha was
little, though, and still needed a lot from me. She was a fact of my life—a cute,
burbling, impossible-to-ignore fact—and something compelled me almost literally
to put her on the table for this discussion. Here is me, I was saying, and here also is
my baby.
It seemed a miracle that my would-be boss appeared to get it. If he had any
reservations listening to me explain how flextime was a necessity while I bounced
Sasha on my lap, hoping all the while that her diaper wouldn’t leak, he didn’t
express them. I walked out of the interview feeling pleased and fairly certain I’d