A key aspect of Becoming is Michelle Obama’s discussion of how her life has been shaped by dueling priorities—that of being a wife, a mother, and someone who wants to be fulfilled professionally. She recounts the ways in which she juggles these commitments, but at the same time, she emphasizes that there is no one right way to do so. Ultimately, Michelle demonstrates that no matter what, anyone juggling these priorities will be forced to make many compromises. Michelle acknowledges that she is unable to assume all of these responsibilities without making some sacrifices, but she can learn to prioritize the things that are most important to her personally—and she suggests that readers can learn to do the same for themselves.
Michelle first confronts the battle of priorities when she marries Barack. She understands that marriage is built on love, but it is maintained through compromise and understanding of each other’s needs. Michelle and Barack have largely united outlooks and opinions, but there are aspects of their characters that appear to be in opposition. For example, Barack doesn’t mind a mess and feels “no compunction to fold his clothes,” while Michelle prefers order over chaos. These differing attitudes towards life, however trivial, require them to be understanding of one another’s values. Their marriage also brings up other basic values that require compromise. When Michelle lives in Chicago and Barack is attending Harvard Law School, Michelle demands that they speak on the phone often in order to keep their connection to each other. Though Barack admits that he’s “not much of a phone guy,” Michelle is adamant about making sure that they are able to hear each other’s voices. Just after their wedding and honeymoon, Barack has a deadline to finish a book to help pay off some of his debt. Realizing he needs time and space to accomplish this, his mother rents a cabin for him for six months in Indonesia so that he can get it done. Michelle has a hard time losing Barack for this amount of time just after their wedding, but this event quickly makes her aware that they will both have to make sacrifices in their marriage for the sake of their jobs. When Michelle and Barack start to have difficulties because Barack is constantly away as an Illinois State Senator in Springfield, he agrees to couple’s counseling despite the fact that he is reluctant at first, knowing that compromise is important in making their marriage work.
After their older daughter Malia is born, Michelle and Barack learn how parenting also requires compromises—compromises that aren’t always fulfilling. At the time, Michelle is working at the University of Chicago as an associate dean. She whittles down her job to be part-time, thinking that she’ll be getting the best of both worlds. But, she writes, “to me, it felt like a sanity-warping double bind. I battled guilt when I had to take work calls at home. I battled a different sort of guilt when I sat at my office distracted by the idea that Malia might be allergic to peanuts. Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything.” Beyond just making compromises, Michelle finds that she also has to learn how to make those compromises feel meaningful and effective. Barack also experiences this when they take a trip to Hawaii and Malia gets sick, forcing Barack to miss voting on an important crime bill. He chooses taking care of his daughter over an important vote, which later has serious political costs. But he understands that there are times when his child must take precedence, and he knows that sacrifices have to be made in his career in order to do that. After the Obamas’ younger daughter Sasha’s birth, Michelle makes it clear to potential employers that she will be juggling priorities. She interviews for a job as the executive director of the hospital at the University of Chicago and brings Sasha along, showing her interviewer very clearly that she has responsibilities as a parent and requires compromise from her job as well. But at the same time, Michelle points out that when Barack is finishing up at the White House, their daughters are just about to graduate from high school—he has sacrificed a great deal of family time during his daughters’ most formative years in order to run the country. In many ways, Barack makes the opposite choice from Michelle. While Michelle rededicates herself to taking care of their daughters while in the White House, Barack (by necessity) focuses more on work. But Michelle doesn’t make any kind of judgement about her family’s priorities. Instead, she argues that everyone has different priorities and means for being fulfilled, and that everyone must make different sacrifices in order to find meaning and balance in their lives.
Certainly Michelle makes difficult choices about the kind of mother, worker, and spouse that she wants to be. But she makes clear throughout the book that there is no right way to make these choices, and that everyone has to evaluate their own priorities and desires in life. And in keeping with her optimism and her view on how people continue to grow, change, and “become,” she also emphasizes that these priorities can (and often must) evolve over time.
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Marriage, Parenthood, and Work Quotes in Becoming
I informed Barack that if our relationship was going to work, he’d better get comfortable with the phone. “If I’m not talking to you,” I announced, “I might have to find another guy who’ll listen.” I was joking, but only a little.
“I’m just not fulfilled,” I said.
I see now how this must have come across to my mother, who was then in the ninth year of a job she’d taken primarily so she could help finance my college education, after years of not having a job so that she’d be free to sew my school clothes, cook my meals, and do laundry for my dad, who for the sake of our family spent eight hours a day watching gauges on a boiler at the filtration plant.
It sounds a little like a bad joke, doesn’t it? What happens when a solitude-loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman who does not love solitude one bit?
The answer, I’m guessing, is probably the best and most sustaining answer to nearly every question arising inside a marriage, no matter who you are or what the issue is: You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.
None of this was his fault, but it wasn’t equal, either, and for any woman who lives by the mantra that equality is important, this can be a little confusing. It was me who’d alter everything, putting my passions and career dreams on hold, to fulfill this piece of our dream. I found myself in a small moment of reckoning. Did I want it? Yes, I wanted it so much. And with this, I hoisted the needle and sank it into my flesh.
In the end, the year 2000 arrived without incident. After a couple of days of rest and some antibiotics, what indeed had turned out to be a nasty ear infection for Malia cleared up, returning our toddler to her normal bouncy state. Life would go on. It always did. On another perfect blue-sky day in Honolulu, we boarded a plane and flew home to Chicago, back into the chill of winter and into what for Barack was shaping up to be a political disaster.
Somewhat brazenly, I suppose, I laid all this out in my interview with Michael Riordan, the hospital’s new president. I even brought three-month-old Sasha along with me, too. I can’t remember the circumstances exactly, whether I couldn’t find a babysitter that day or whether I’d even bothered to try. Sasha was little, though, and still needed a lot from me. She was a fact of my life—a cute, burbling, impossible-to-ignore fact— and something compelled me almost literally to put her on the table for this discussion. Here is me, I was saying, and here also is my baby.
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.
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.
