Becoming

One spring morning, a petting zoo of big cats (lions, cheetahs, panthers) arrives at the White House, and they are let free on the lawn. When Michelle, Barack, Sasha, and Malia go out to see them, assured that they have bene sedated, the cats lunge the family. The Secret Service runs out, tranquilizer guns in hand, but they miss the lions and hit Sasha. Michelle then bolts upright in bed, having had a very bad dream.

Michelle constantly feels vulnerable, and she is newly aware of the chaos and tragedy of the world: an earthquake in Haiti, an oil rig explosion, revolution in Egypt. She understands both Barack’s and her responsibility to remain calm in the face of tragedy, hardship, and confusion. After the BP oil spill is cleaned up, many Americans are wary of swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. So the family takes a vacation to Florida to swim in the water, a symbolic gesture that the water is safe.

In the midst of tragedy, Michelle also sees, there is resilience. She visits military members and their families in hospitals, quickly realizing that often the last thing that they needed was “anyone’s pity.” One sign outside a door instructs visitors not to feel sorry for him, as he got his injuries serving a country he loves. Michelle writes that she’s never seen the “fortitude and loyalty” that she found during these visits—describing an instance when a severely injured young man had seen Michelle and tried to stand up to salute the wife of his commander in chief.

Despite the weight on Barack’s shoulders, he manages to be “admirably present and undistracted” when he is with Michelle and the girls. Michelle and Barack try not to speak about work, instead focusing on tales and updates from their daughters’ lives.

A year after launching Let’s Move!, Michelle and her team see results. They have installed six thousand salad bars in school cafeterias. Walmart has pledged to cut the amount of sugar, salt, and fat in its food products and reduced prices on produce. Five hundred mayors in towns across the country have committed to tackling childhood obesity on the local level.

Michelle had also worked hard in 2010 to push a new child nutrition bill through Congress, wading into politics for the first time. The law expands healthy food in public schools and regulates junk food that is sold to children via vending machines. The bill passes just before Republicans gain control of the House after the midterms. She proudly watches as Barack signs it into law, knowing that she is responsible not only for this but also for creating a network of advocates speaking up for children’s health.

Michelle takes on a second initiative with Jill Biden called Joining Forces. They identify concrete ways to support military families, like reaching out to powerful CEOs and getting them to commit to hire “a significant number of veterans and military spouses.” They get pledges from universities to train teachers and professors to better understand the needs of military children. And they try to fight the stigma surrounding mental health issues that many troops experience when returning home.

While the issues that Michelle takes on are somewhat compact and manageable, Barack’s are not. She observes how he consumes as much information as possible to make informed decisions about the country’s future. The last thing he does each night is  read ten letters from Americans, selected by a staffer from the fifteen thousand that pour in each day. Some are positive and some are critical, but he views it as part of the responsibility that comes with the office to know what Americans are experiencing.

In the winter of 2011, Michelle and Barack begin hearing that reality-show host and New York real-estate developer Donald Trump is thinking about running for president. He often gives “yammering, inexpert critiques of Barack’s foreign policy decisions” and openly questions Barack’s American citizenship, giving new life to the so-called “birthers.” Michelle writes that this theory’s “underlying bigotry and xenophobia” are “hardly concealed,” but on top of that it is dangerous, fueling hatred and threats made against Barack.

A few months after the birther rumors resurface, a man parks his car close to the White House and fires a semi-automatic rifle at the top floors. A bullet hits one of the windows in a room where Michelle likes to have tea. No one is hurt, but Michelle’s mother and Sasha were home. For weeks Michelle looks at the crater in the bulletproof glass in the window, knowing how vulnerable they are.

Michelle has been concerned for her family’s safety for years, and many people openly and earnestly express their concerns for her family’s safety, as well. Once, a mother of another student asked Malia, practicing on the tennis courts at her school, if she was afraid to be out in the open. Malia responded, “If you’re asking me whether I ponder my death every day, the answer is no.” The mother later wrote a note apologizing to Michelle for putting stress on a child who could do nothing about it.

Though Michelle sees the challenges her daughters face, she knows that they have a great deal of advantage in their lives. Michelle feels that she has a larger obligation to children in general, to give them some of the opportunity she experienced in her life. She realizes that her accomplishments were largely owed to the “many small ways [she’d] been buttressed over the years, and the people who’d helped build [her] confidence over time."

With this in mind, Michelle starts a leadership and mentoring program at the White House, choosing twenty high school girls from around D.C. and pairing them with a female mentor, coming to the white house for monthly get-togethers like informal chats, field trips, and sessions on things like choosing a career. She hopes that they go on to feel comfortable and confident in any room, raising their voice anywhere.

Two years after arriving at the White House, Michelle and Barack continue to try to ease the formality of the place by inviting more people, and especially children, when foreign dignitaries or artists visit. She wants to highlight the importance of exposing kids to the arts, knowing how the arts have contributed to her own development. She recalls when a young composer named Lin-Manuel Miranda attended the first White House poetry and spoken-word event and debuted a song from a project he was just beginning, a musical about former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.

Over the years, Michelle has learned to keep her true friends close—she is still greatly connected to the group of mothers that she became a part of several years earlier. In 2011, Michelle makes an effort to reinvest in those friendships, and to recognize that sometimes it’s okay to prioritize herself and her friends, especially when she is so used to sacrificing so much for kids and spouses. She organizes getaway trips for herself and these friends.

On the first Sunday in May 2011, Michelle goes out to dinner on a particularly busy weekend. She arrives home to discover that Barack is about to address the nation. Michelle catches Barack in the hallway of the residence. “We got him,” he says, “and no one got hurt.” This is how Michelle learns that a team of U.S. Navy SEALs had stormed a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. That evening, people take to the streets, linked both by patriotism and the grief that had been borne on 9/11. America gets a chance to “feel its own resilience.”