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patients struggling to pay health-care premiums and from people who’d lost their
homes to foreclosure. From gay people who hoped to be able to legally marry
and from Republicans who felt he was ruining the country. From moms,
grandfathers, and young children. He read letters from people who appreciated
what he did and from others who wanted to let him know he was an idiot.

He read all of it, seeing it as part of the responsibility that came with the
oath. He had a hard and lonely job—the hardest and loneliest in the world, it
often seemed to me—but he knew that he had an obligation to stay open, to shut
nothing out. While the rest of us slept, he took down the fences and let
everything inside.

n Monday and Wednesday evenings, Sasha, who was now ten, had swim-
team practice at the American University fitness center, a few miles from the
White House. I went sometimes to watch her do her workouts, trying to slip
unnoticed into the small room next to the pool where parents could sit and
observe practice through a window.

Navigating a busy athletic facility during peak workout hours posed a
challenge for the agents on my security detail, but they managed it well. For my
part, I’d become an expert at walking quickly and lowering my gaze when
passing through public spaces, which helped keep things efficient. I zipped past
university students busy with their weight workouts and Zumba classes in full
swing. Sometimes nobody seemed to notice. Other times, I’d feel the disturbance
without even needing to look up, aware of the ripple I caused as people
murmured or occasionally just shouted, “Hey, that’s Michelle Obama!” But it
was never more than a ripple and it happened quickly. I was like an apparition,
there and gone before the sight had really registered.

On practice nights, the seats by the pool were generally empty, aside from a
handful of other parents idly chatting or scrolling through their iPhones as they
waited for their kids to be done. I’d find a quiet spot, sit down, and focus on the
swimming.

I loved any time I could glimpse my daughters in the context of their own
worlds—free from the White House, free from their parents, in the spaces and
relationships they’d forged for themselves. Sasha was a strong swimmer,
enthusiastic about breaststroke and intent on mastering the butterfly. She wore a