were sold.
I watched him step forward, knowing that I myself wasn’t ready. In nearly
four years as First Lady, I had consoled often. I’d prayed with people whose
homes had been shredded by a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, huge swaths of
the town turned to matchsticks in an instant. I’d put my arms around men,
women, and children who’d lost loved ones to war in Afghanistan, to an
extremist who’d shot up an Army base in Texas, and to violence on street corners
near their own homes. In the previous four months, I’d paid visits to people
who’d survived mass shootings at a movie theater in Colorado and inside a Sikh
temple in Wisconsin. It was devastating, every time. I’d tried always to bring the
most calm and open part of myself to these meetings, to lend my own strength by
being caring and present, sitting quietly on the riverbed of other people’s pain.
But two days after the shooting at Sandy Hook, when Barack traveled to
Newtown to speak at a prayer vigil being held for the victims, I couldn’t bring
myself to join him. I was so shaken by it that I had no strength available to lend.
I’d been First Lady for almost four years, and there had been too much killing
already—too many senseless preventable deaths and too little action. I wasn’t sure
what comfort I could ever give to someone whose six-year-old had been gunned
down at school.
Instead, like a lot of parents, I clung to my children, my fear and love
intertwined. It was nearly Christmas, and Sasha was among a group of local
children selected to join the Moscow Ballet for two performances of The
Nutcracker, both happening on the same day as the vigil in Newtown. Barack
managed to slip into a back row and watch the dress rehearsal before leaving for
Connecticut. I went to the evening show.
The ballet was as beautiful and otherworldly as any recounting of that story
ever is, with its prince in a moonlit forest and its swirling pageantry of sweets.
Sasha played a mouse, dressed in a black leotard with fuzzy ears and a tail,
performing her part while an ornate sleigh drifted through the swelling orchestral
music and showers of glittering fake snow. My eyes never left her. My whole
being was grateful for her. Sasha stood bright-eyed onstage, looking at first like
she couldn’t believe where she was, as if she found the whole scene dazzling and
unreal. Which of course it was. But she was young enough still that she could
give herself over to it, at least for the moment, allowing herself to move through
this heaven where nobody spoke and everyone danced, and a holiday was always
just about to arrive.