take when they saw them, but everyone was nice. Each day afterward, the
motorcade ride to Sidwell Friends felt a little more routine. After about a week,
the girls felt comfortable enough to start traveling to school without me,
swapping my mother in as their regular escort, which automatically made drop-
offs and pickups a bit less of a production, involving fewer agents, vehicles, and
guns.
My mother hadn’t wanted to come with us to Washington, but I’d forced
the issue. The girls needed her. I needed her. I liked to believe that she needed
us, too. For the last few years, she’d been a nearly every-day presence in our lives,
her practicality a salve to everyone’s worries. At seventy-one, though, she’d never
lived anywhere but Chicago. She was reluctant to leave the South Side and her
home on Euclid Avenue. (“I love those people, but I love my own house,” she
told a reporter after the election, not mincing any words. “The White House
reminds me of a museum and it’s like, how do you sleep in a museum?”)
I tried to explain that if she moved to Washington, she’d meet all sorts of
interesting people, wouldn’t have to cook or clean for herself anymore, and
would have more room on the top floor of the White House than she’d ever had
at home. None of this was meaningful to her. My mother was impervious to all
manner of glamour and hype.
I’d finally called Craig. “You’ve got to talk to Mom for me,” I said. “Please
get her on board with this.”
Somehow that worked. Craig was good at strong-arming when he needed
to be.
My mother would end up staying with us in Washington for the next eight
years, but at the time she claimed the move was temporary, that she’d stay only
until the girls got settled. She also refused to get put into any bubble. She
declined Secret Service protection and avoided the media in order to keep her
profile low and her footprint light. She’d charm the White House housekeeping
staff by insisting on doing her own laundry, and for years to come, she’d slip in
and out of the residence as she pleased, walking out the gates and over to the
nearest CVS or Filene’s Basement when she needed something, making new
friends and meeting them out regularly for lunch. Anytime a stranger commented
that she looked exactly like Michelle Obama’s mother, she’d just give a polite
shrug and say, “Yeah, I get that a lot,” before carrying on with her business. As
she always had, my mother did things her own way.