got dryer sheets and laundry detergent for Kristin, and I found a couple of games
for Sasha and Malia. And for the first time in several years, I was able to pick out
a card to give to Barack on our anniversary.
I went home elated. Sometimes, the smallest things felt huge.
As time went by, I added new adventures to my routine. I started to meet
friends occasionally out for dinner in restaurants or at their homes. Sometimes I’d
go to a park and take long walks along the Potomac River. I’d have agents
walking ahead of and behind me on these excursions, but inconspicuously and at
a distance. In later years, I’d begin leaving the White House to hit workout
classes, dropping in on SoulCycle and Solidcore studios around the city, slipping
into the room at the last minute and leaving as soon as class was done to avoid
causing a disturbance. The most liberating activity of all turned out to be
downhill skiing, a sport with which I had little experience but that quickly
became a passion. Capitalizing on the unusually heavy winters we’d had during
our first two years in Washington, I made a few day trips with the girls and some
friends to a tiny, aptly named ski area called Liberty Mountain, near Gettysburg,
where we found we could don helmets, scarves, and goggles and blend into any
crowd. Gliding down a ski slope, I was outdoors, in motion, and unrecognized—
all at once. For me, it was like flying.
The blending mattered. The blending, in fact, was everything—a way to feel
like myself, to remain Michelle Robinson from the South Side inside this larger
sweep of history. I knit my old life into my new one, my private concerns into
my public work. In D.C., I’d made a handful of new friends—a couple of the
mothers of Sasha’s and Malia’s classmates and a few people I’d met in the course
of White House duties. These were women who cared less about my last name
or home address and more about who I was as a person. It’s funny how quickly
you can tell who’s there for you and who’s just trying to plant some sort of flag.
Barack and I sometimes talked about it with Sasha and Malia over dinner, the fact
that there were people, children and adults, who hovered at the edges of our
friend groups seeming a little too eager—“thirsty,” as we called it.
I’d learned many years earlier to hold my true friends close. I was still deeply
connected to the group of women who had started gathering for Saturday
playdates years earlier, back in our diaper-bag days in Chicago, when our children
blithely pitched food from their high chairs and all of us were so tired we wanted
to weep. These were the friends who’d held me together, dropping off groceries
when I was too busy to shop, picking up the girls for ballet when I was behind