W

shadow—but the girls took to his corny jokes as quickly as they took to his
cooking. He showed them how to chop carrots and blanch greens, shifting our
family away from the fluorescent sameness of the grocery store and toward the
rhythm of the seasons. He could be reverent about the arrival of fresh peas in
springtime or the moment raspberries came ripe in June. He waited until peaches
were rich and plump before serving them to the girls, knowing that then they
might actually compete with candy. Sam also had an educated perspective on
food and health issues, namely how the food industry marketed processed foods
to families in the name of convenience and how that was having severe public
health consequences. I was intrigued, realizing that it tied in to some of what I’d
seen while working for the hospital system, and to the compromises I’d made
myself as a working mother trying to feed her family.

One evening Sam and I spent a couple of hours talking in my kitchen, the
two of us batting around ideas about how, if Barack ever managed to win the
presidency, I might use my role as First Lady to try to address some of these
issues. One idea bloomed into another. What if we grew vegetables at the White
House and helped advocate for fresh food? What if we then used that as a
cornerstone for something bigger, a whole children’s health initiative that might
help parents avoid some of the pitfalls I’d experienced?

We talked until it was late. I looked at Sam and let out a sigh. “The only
problem is our guy is down by thirty points in the polls,” I said as the two of us
began to crack up. “He’s never gonna win.”

It  was a   dream,  but I   liked   it.

hen it came to campaigning, each day was another race to be run. I was
still trying to cling to some form of normalcy and stability, not just for the girls,
but for me. I carried two BlackBerrys—one for work, the other for my personal
life and political obligations, which were now, for better or worse, deeply
entwined. My daily phone calls with Barack tended to be short and newsy—
Where are you? How’s it going? How are the kids?—both of us accustomed now to
not speaking of fatigue or our personal needs. There was no point, because we
couldn’t attend to them anyway. Life was all about the ticking clock.

At work, I was doing what I could to keep up, sometimes checking in with
my staff at the hospital from the cluttered backseat of a Toyota Corolla belonging