I

Barack sat next to me in a folding chair. I could see the tears brimming
behind his sunglasses as he watched Malia cross the stage to pick up her diploma.
He was tired, I knew. Three days earlier, he’d given a eulogy for a friend from
law school who’d worked for him in the White House. Two days later, an
extremist would open fire inside a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing
forty-nine people and wounding fifty-three more. The gravity of his job never let
up.

He was a good father, dialed in and consistent in ways his own father had
never been, but there were also things he’d sacrificed along the way. He’d
entered into parenthood as a politician. His constituents and their needs had been
with us all along.

It had to hurt a little bit, realizing he was so close to having more freedom
and more time, just as our daughters were beginning to step away.

But we  had to  let them    go. The future  was theirs, just    as  it  should  be.

n late July, I flew through a violent thunderstorm, the plane dipping and
diving on its approach to Philadelphia, where I was going to speak for the last
time at a Democratic convention. It was perhaps the worst turbulence I’d ever
experienced, and while Caroline Adler Morales, my very pregnant
communications director, worried that the stress of it would put her into labor
and Melissa—a skittish flier under normal circumstances—sat shrieking in her
seat, all I could think was Just get me down in time to practice my speech. Though I’d
long grown comfortable on the biggest stages, I still found huge comfort in
preparation.

Back in 2008, during Barack’s first run for president, I’d rehearsed and re-
rehearsed my convention speech until I could place the commas in my sleep, in
part because I’d never given a speech on live television like that, and also because
the personal stakes felt so high. I was stepping onto the stage after having been
demonized as an angry black woman who didn’t love her country. My speech
that night gave me a chance to humanize myself, explaining who I was in my
own voice, slaying the caricatures and stereotypes with my own words. Four
years later, at the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, I’d spoken earnestly
about what I’d seen in Barack during his first term—how he was still the same
principled man I’d married, how I’d realized that “being president doesn’t change