W

While Malia toured Columbia that afternoon, I was put into a secure
holding area designated by the Secret Service—what turned out to be the
basement of an academic building on campus—where I sat alone and unnoticed
until it was time to leave, wishing I’d at least brought a book to read. It hurt a
little to be down there, I’ll admit. I felt a kind of loneliness that probably had less
to do with the fact that I was by myself killing time in a windowless room and
more to do with the idea that, like it or not, the future was coming, that our first
baby was going to grow up and leave.

e weren’t at the end yet, but already I was beginning to take stock. I
found myself tallying the gains and losses, what had been sacrificed and what we
could count as progress—in our country, in our family. Had we done all we
could? Were we going to come out of this intact?

I tried to think back and remember how it was that my life had forked away
from the predictable, control-freak fantasy existence I’d envisioned for myself—
the one with the steady salary, a house to live in forever, a routine to my days. At
what point had I chosen away from that? When had I allowed the chaos inside?
Had it been on the summer night when I lowered my ice cream cone and leaned
in to kiss Barack for the first time? Was it the day I’d finally walked away from
my orderly piles of documents and my partner-track career in law, convinced I’d
find something more fulfilling?

My mind sometimes landed back in the church basement in Roseland, on
the Far South Side of Chicago, where I’d gone twenty-five years earlier to be
with Barack as he spoke to a neighborhood group that was struggling to push
back against hopelessness and indifference. Listening to the conversation that
evening, I’d heard something familiar articulated in a new way. It was possible, I
knew, to live on two planes at once—to have one’s feet planted in reality but
pointed in the direction of progress. It was what I’d done as a kid on Euclid
Avenue, what my family—and marginalized people more generally—had always
done. You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your
own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is,
but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

I’d known the guy for only a couple of months then, but in retrospect I see
now that this was my swerve. In that moment, without saying a word, I’d signed
on for a lifetime of us, and a lifetime of this.