was made up mostly of working-class African Americans.
The news landed like a rock through a stained-glass window. I’d worked so
hard to make sure my daughters were happy and whole. What had I done
wrong? What kind of mother was I if I hadn’t even noticed a change?
Talking further with the doctor, I began to see the pattern we were in. With
Barack gone all the time, convenience had become the single most important
factor in my choices at home. We’d been eating out more. With less time to
cook, I often picked up takeout on my way home from work. In the mornings, I
packed the girls’ lunch boxes with Lunchables and Capri Suns. Weekends usually
meant a trip to the McDonald’s drive-through window after ballet and before
soccer. None of this, our doctor said, was out of the ordinary, or even all that
terrible in isolation. Too much of it, though, was a real problem.
Clearly, something had to change, but I was at a loss about how to make
that happen. Every solution seemed to demand more time—time at the grocery
store, time in the kitchen, time spent chopping vegetables or slicing the skin off a
chicken breast—all this coming right when time felt as if it were already on the
verge of extinction in my world.
I then remembered a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with an old
friend I’d bumped into on a plane, who’d mentioned that she and her husband
had hired a young man named Sam Kass to cook regular healthy meals at her
house. By coincidence, it turned out Barack and I had met Sam years earlier
through a different set of friends.
I never expected to be the sort of person who hired someone to come into
my house and prepare meals for my family. It felt a little bougie, the kind of thing
that would elicit a skeptical side eye from my South Side relatives. Barack, he of
the Datsun with the hole in the floor, wasn’t hot on the idea, either; it didn’t fit
with his ingrained community-organizer frugality, nor the image he wanted to
promote as a presidential candidate. But to me, it felt like the only sane choice.
Something had to give. No one else could run my programs at the hospital. No
one else could campaign as Barack Obama’s wife. No one could fill in as Malia
and Sasha’s mother at bedtime. But maybe Sam Kass could cook some dinners for
us.
I hired Sam to come to our house a couple of times a week, making a meal
we could eat that night and another that I could pull from the refrigerator to heat
up the next evening. He was a bit of an outlier in the Obama household—a
white twenty-six-year-old with a shiny shaved head and a perpetual five o’clock