A

more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to counteract it.

Looking around at the three hundred or so people sitting on the stage that
morning, the esteemed guests of the incoming president, it felt apparent to me
that in the new White House, this effort wasn’t likely to be made. Someone from
Barack’s administration might have said that the optics there were bad—that what
the public saw didn’t reflect the president’s reality or ideals. But in this case,
maybe it did. Realizing it, I made my own optic adjustment: I stopped even
trying to smile.

transition is exactly that—a passage to something new. A hand goes on a
Bible; an oath gets repeated. One president’s furniture gets carried out while
another’s comes in. Closets are emptied and refilled. Just like that, there are new
heads on new pillows—new temperaments, new dreams. And when your term is
up, when you leave the White House on that very last day, you’re left in many
ways to find yourself all over again.

I am now at a new beginning, in a new phase of life. For the first time in
many years, I’m unhooked from any obligation as a political spouse,
unencumbered by other people’s expectations. I have two nearly grown
daughters who need me less than they once did. I have a husband who no longer
carries the weight of the nation on his shoulders. The responsibilities I’ve felt—to
Sasha and Malia, to Barack, to my career and my country—have shifted in ways
that allow me to think differently about what comes next. I’ve had more time to
reflect, to simply be myself. At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I
always will be.

For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain
aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach
continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end. I became a mother,
but I still have a lot to learn from and give to my children. I became a wife, but I
continue to adapt to and be humbled by what it means to truly love and make a
life with another person. I have become, by certain measures, a person of power,
and yet there are moments still when I feel insecure or unheard.

It’s all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience
and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to
be done.