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In an exclusive extract from her new book, the former first lady shares what she learned about raising a family while living in the White House
After Barack was elected president, word got out that Marian Robinson, my 71-year-old mother, was planning to move to the White House with us. The idea was that she’d help look after Sasha and Malia, who were seven and 10 at the time, at least until they were settled. She’d make sure that everyone adjusted OK and then move back to Chicago. The media seemed instantly charmed by this notion, requesting interviews with my mother and producing a slew of stories, dubbing her “First Granny” and “Grandmother-in Chief”. It was as if a new and potentially exciting character had been added to the cast of a network drama. Suddenly, my mother was in the news. She was news.
If you’ve ever met my mother, however, you’ll know that the last thing she wants is to be well known. She agreed to do a handful of interviews, figuring it was just part of the larger transition process, though she said, again and again, that she was surprised that anyone would care.
By her own measure, my mom is nothing special. She also likes to say that while she loves us dearly, my brother and I are not special, either. We’re just two kids who had enough love and a good amount of luck and happened to do well as a result. She tries to remind people that neighbourhoods like the South Side of Chicago are packed full of “little Michelles and little Craigs”. They’re in every school, on every block. It’s just that too many of them get overlooked and underestimated. This would probably count as the foundational point of my mom’s larger philosophy: “All children are great children.”
My mother is now 85. She operates with a quiet and mirthful grace. Glamour and gravitas mean nothing to her. She sees right through it, believing that all people should be treated the same. I’ve seen her talk to the pope and to the postman, approaching them both with the same mild-mannered, unflappable demeanour. If someone asks her a question, she responds in plain and direct terms, never catering her answers to suit a particular audience. This is another thing about my mother: she doesn’t believe in fudging the truth.
What this meant as we transitioned into the White House was that any time a reporter posed a question to my mom, she would answer it candidly rather than soft-pedalling her thoughts or hewing to any set of talking points generated by nervous communications staffers.
Which is how she surfaced in the national news, describing how she’d been dragged kicking and screaming from her quiet little bungalow on Euclid Avenue and more or less forced to live at the nation’s most famous address. She was not being ungracious; she was just being real. How my mom expressed herself to the reporters on this matter was no different than how she’d expressed herself to me. She had not wanted to come to Washington, but I had flat-out begged her. My mother was the rock of our family. Since the time our daughters were babies, she’d helped us out around the edges of our regular childcare arrangements, filling the gaps as Barack and I often improvised and occasionally flailed our way through different career transitions, heavy workload cycles, and the ever-burgeoning after-school lives of our two young girls.
So, yes, I did kind of force her to come.
The problem was that she was content at home. She had recently retired. She liked her own life in her own space and was uninterested in change more generally. The house on Euclid had all her trinkets. It had the bed she’d slept in for more than 30 years. Her feeling was that the White House felt too much like a museum and too little like a home. (And yes, of course, she voiced this observation directly to a reporter.) But even as she made it known that her move to Washington was largely involuntary and intended to be temporary, she affirmed that her love for Sasha and Malia in the end eclipsed everything else. “If somebody’s going to be with these kids other than their parents,” she told a reporter, giving a shrug, “it better be me.”
After that, she decided she was pretty much done giving interviews.
“My mother steadies us all.”
Once she’d moved in, my mother became very popular in the White House, even if she wasn’t looking to be. Everyone referred to her simply as “Mrs R”. People on staff enjoyed her precisely because she was so low-key. The butlers, who were mostly Black, liked having a Black grandma in the house. They showed her photos of their own grandkids and occasionally tapped her for life advice. Secret Service agents kept tabs on her on days when she wandered out the gates and headed to the CVS [pharmacy] on 14th Street or when she dropped by Betty Currie’s house – Betty being Bill Clinton’s former secretary – to play cards. The staff housekeepers were often trying to get my mother to let them do more for her, though Mom made it clear that nobody should wait on or clean up after her when she knew perfectly well how to do all that herself.
“Just show me how to work the washing machine and I’m good,” she said.
Aware of the favour she was doing us, we tried to keep her duties light. She rode with Sasha and Malia to and from school, helping them adjust to the new routine. On days I was busy with Flotus duties, she made sure the girls had snacks and whatever else they needed for after-school activities. Just as she had when I was an elementary-school student, she listened with interest to their tales about what had unfolded over the course of the day. When she and I had time alone, she’d fill me in on anything I’d missed in the kids’ day and then she’d do the same sort of listening for me, acting as my sponge and sounding board.
When she wasn’t looking after the girls, my mom made herself deliberately scarce. Her feeling was that we should have our own family life, independent of her. And she felt that she, too, should have a life independent of us. She liked her freedom. She liked her space. She had come to DC with only one intention, and that was to be a reliable support to Barack and me and a caring grandmother to our two kids. Everything else, as far as she saw it, was just fuss and noise.
Sometimes we would host VIP guests for a dinner party in the White House residence. They’d look around and ask where my mother was, wondering whether she’d be joining us for the meal.
I’d usually just laugh and point up towards the third floor, where she had a bedroom and liked to hang out in a nearby sitting room, which had big windows that looked out at the Washington Monument. “Nope,” I’d say, “Grandma’s upstairs in her happy place.”
This essentially was code for: “Sorry, Bono, Mom’s got a glass of wine, some pork ribs on her TV tray, and Jeopardy! is on. Don’t for one second think you could ever compete … ”
My mom ended up staying with us in the White House for the whole eight years.
As teens do, our girls tested a few limits. Someone posted an eyebrow-raising bikini selfie on Instagram. Someone talked back to the president
Our girls morphed from wide-eyed elementary-schoolers into teenagers in full bloom, intent on achieving independence and the privileges of adult life. As teenagers do, they tested a few limits and did some dumb things. Someone got grounded for missing curfew. Someone posted an eyebrow-raising bikini selfie on Instagram and was promptly instructed by the East Wing communications team to remove it. Someone once had to be dragged by Secret Service agents from an out-of-hand, unsupervised high-school party just as local law enforcement was arriving. Someone talked back to the president of the United States when he had the audacity to ask how she could possibly study Spanish while listening to rap.
An episode of even mild disobedience or misbehaviour from our adolescent daughters would set off a ripple of unsettling worry in me. It preyed upon my greatest fear, which was that life in the White House was messing our kids up.
One tiny thing would go wrong, and my mother-guilt would kick in. I’d start second-guessing every choice Barack and I had ever made. Self-scrutiny is something women are programmed to excel at, having been thrust into systems of inequality and fed fully unrealistic images of female “perfection” from the time we were kids ourselves. None of us – truly none – ever live up.
For mothers, the feelings of not-enoughness can be especially acute. The images of maternal perfection we encounter in advertisements and across social media are often no less fake than what we see on the enhanced and Photoshopped female bodies that are so often upheld as the societal gold standard for beauty. But still, we are conditioned to buy into it, questing after not just the perfect body, but also perfect children, perfect work-life balances, perfect family experiences, and perfect levels of patience. It’s hard not to look around as a mother and think, Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?
I am as prone to this type of self-laceration as the next person. At any sign of conflict or challenge with our kids, I would instantly and ferociously start scanning for my own mistakes. Had I been too tough on them or too indulging? Had I been too present or too absent? Was there some parenting book I’d forgotten to study 15 years earlier? Was this a bona fide crisis, a sign of bigger problems? Which critical life lessons had I failed to impart? And was it too late now?
As a parent, you are always fighting your own desperation not to fail at the job you’ve been given. There are whole industries built to feed and capitalise on this very desperation, from baby brain gyms and ergonomic strollers to Sat coaches. It’s like a hole that can’t ever be filled.
I’m sorry to say that this doesn’t end with any one milestone, either. The desperation doesn’t go away when your kid learns to sleep or walk, or graduates from high school, or even moves into their first apartment and buys a set of steak knives. You will still worry! You will still be afraid for them! Even now, my husband, the former commander-in-chief, can’t help but to text cautionary news stories to our daughters – about the dangers of highway driving or walking alone at night. When they moved to California, he emailed them a lengthy article about earthquake preparedness and offered to have Secret Service give them a natural-disaster-response briefing. (This was met with a polite “No thanks”.)
Caring for your kids and watching them grow is one of the most rewarding endeavours on Earth, and at the same time it can drive you nuts.
Over the years, I’ve had one secret weapon to help stem the tide of parental anxiety, though – and that’s my own mother.
If you’re around her enough, you will start to notice that she is prone to dropping little pearls of wisdom into everyday conversation. Usually, they’re connected to her belief that it’s possible to raise decent children without drama or fuss. These are never blustery proclamations delivered with fury or passion. They tend to be wry thoughts that just slip out quietly, almost like stray pennies falling from her pocket.
To be continued… (The Guardian)