had two little girls in school in Chicago and that I was pretty attached to my job.
I explained that Barack was settling into life in D.C., commuting home when he
could. I didn’t mention that we were so committed to Chicago that we were
looking to buy a new house, thanks to the royalty money that was starting to
come in from the renewed sales of his book and the fact that he now had a
generous offer on a second book—the surprise harvest of Barack’s magic beans.
The senator’s wife paused, letting a delicate beat pass. When she spoke
again, her voice was gentle. “That can be very hard on a marriage, you know,”
she said. “Families fall apart.”
I felt her judgment then. She herself had been in Washington for many
years. The implication was she’d seen things go poorly when a spouse stayed
back. The implication was that I was making a dangerous choice, that there was
only one correct way to be a senator’s wife and I was choosing wrong.
I thanked her again, hung up, and sighed. None of this had been my choice
in the first place. None of this was my choice at all. I was now, like her, the wife
of a U.S. senator—Mrs. Obama, she’d called me throughout the conversation—
but that didn’t mean I had to drop everything to support him. Truly, I didn’t
want to drop a thing.
I knew there were other senators with spouses who chose to live in their
hometowns rather than in D.C. I knew that the Senate, with fourteen of its one
hundred members being female, was not quite as antiquated as it had once been.
But still, I found it presumptuous that another woman would tell me I was wrong
to want to keep my kids in school and remain in my job. A few weeks after the
election, I’d gone with Barack to Washington for a daylong orientation offered to
newly elected senators and their spouses. There’d been only a few of us attending
that year, and after a quick introduction the politicians went one way, while
spouses were ushered into another room. I’d come with questions, knowing that
politicians and their families were expected to adhere to strict federal ethics
policies dictating everything from whom they could receive gifts from to how
they paid for travel to and from Washington. I thought maybe we’d discuss how
to navigate social situations with lobbyists or the legalities of raising money for a
future campaign.
What we got, however, was an elaborate disquisition on the history and
architecture of the Capitol and a look at the official china patterns produced for
the Senate, followed by a polite and chitchatty lunch. The whole thing had gone
on for hours. It would have been funny, maybe, if I hadn’t taken a day off from