slip off an icy peak, I drove my ax into the ground. That isn’t to say that Barack
didn’t make his own adjustments—counseling helped him to see the gaps in how
we communicated, and he worked to be better at it—but I made mine, and they
helped me, which then helped us. For starters, I recommitted myself to being
healthy. Barack and I belonged to the same gym, run by a jovial and motivating
athletic trainer named Cornell McClellan. I’d worked out with Cornell for a
couple of years, but having children had changed my regular routine. My fix for
this came in the form of my ever-giving mother, who still worked full-time but
volunteered to start coming over to our house at 4:45 in the morning several days
a week so that I could run out to Cornell’s and join a girlfriend for a 5:00 a.m.
workout and then be home by 6:30 to get the girls up and ready for their days.
This new regimen changed everything: Calmness and strength, two things I
feared I was losing, were now back.
When it came to the home-for-dinner dilemma, I installed new boundaries,
ones that worked better for me and the girls. We made our schedule and stuck to
it. Dinner each night was at 6:30. Baths were at 7:00, followed by books,
cuddling, and lights-out at 8:00 sharp. The routine was ironclad, which put the
weight of responsibility on Barack to either make it on time or not. For me, this
made so much more sense than holding off dinner or having the girls wait up
sleepily for a hug. It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and
centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I
didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house
arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.