to ask too many follow-up questions or insist that he walk me through the
particulars. He and I were sounding boards for each other professionally and
always had been. But I also knew that he now spent his days surrounded by
expert advisers. He had access to all manner of top secret information, and as far
as I was concerned, most especially on matters of national security, he needed no
input from me. In general, I hoped that time with me and the girls would always
be a respite, even though work was forever close by. After all, we literally lived
above the shop.
Barack, who’s always been good at compartmentalizing, managed to be
admirably present and undistracted when he was with us. It was something we’d
learned together over time as our work lives had grown increasingly busy and
intense. Fences needed to go up; boundaries required protecting. Bin Laden was
not invited to dinner, nor was the humanitarian crisis in Libya, nor were the Tea
Party Republicans. We had kids, and kids need room to speak and grow. Our
family time was when big worries and urgent concerns got abruptly and
mercilessly shrunk to nothing so that the small could rightly take over. Barack
and I would sit at dinner, hearing tales from the Sidwell playground or listening
to the details of Malia’s research project on endangered animals, feeling as if these
were the most important things in the world. Because they were. They deserved
to be.
Still, even as we ate, the work piled up. I could see over Barack’s shoulder
to the hallway outside the dining room, where aides dropped off our nightly
briefing books on a small table, usually as we were in the middle of our meal.
This was part of the White House ritual: Two binders got delivered every
evening, one for me and a much thicker, leather-bound one for Barack. Each
contained papers from our respective offices, which we were meant to read
overnight.
After we tucked the kids into bed, Barack would normally disappear into the
Treaty Room with his binder, while I took mine to the sitting area in my
dressing room, where I’d spend an hour or two each night or early in the
morning going through what was inside—usually memos from staff, drafts of
upcoming speeches, and decisions to be made regarding my initiatives.
A year after launching Let’s Move!, we were seeing results. We’d aligned
ourselves with different foundations and food suppliers to install six thousand salad
bars in school cafeterias and were recruiting local chefs to help schools serve meals
that were not just healthy but tasty. Walmart, which was then the nation’s largest