start to droop and I’d have to carry them to bed. Or I’d wait alone, hungry, and increasingly bitter as my own eyes got heavy and candle wax pooled on the table. On my way, I was learning, was the product of Barack’s eternal optimism, an indication of his eagerness to be home that did nothing to signify when he would actually arrive. Almost home was not a geo-locator but rather a state of mind. Sometimes he was on his way but needed to stop in to have one last forty-five-minute conversation with a colleague before he got into the car. Other times, he was almost home but forgot to mention that he was first going to fit in a quick workout at the gym.
In our life before children, such frustrations might have seemed petty, but as a working full-time mother with a half-time spouse and a predawn wake-up time, I felt my patience slipping away until finally, at some point, it just fell off a cliff. When Barack made it home, he’d either find me raging or unavailable, having flipped off every light in the house and gone sullenly to sleep.
* * *
We live by the paradigms we know. In Barack’s childhood, his father disappeared and his mother came and went. She was devoted to him but never tethered to him, and as far as he was concerned, there was nothing wrong in this approach. He’d had hills, beaches, and his own mind to keep him company. Independence mattered in Barack’s world. It always had and always would. I, meanwhile, had been raised inside the tight weave of my own family, in our boxed-in apartment, in our boxed-in South Side neighborhood, with my grandparents and aunts and uncles all around, everyone jammed at one table for our regular Sunday night meals. After thirteen years in love, we needed to think through what this meant.
When it came down to it, I felt vulnerable when he was away. Not because he wasn’t fully devoted to our marriage—this is and has always been a meaningful certainty in my life—but because having been brought up in a family where everyone always showed up, I could be extra let down when someone didn’t show. I was prone to loneliness and now also felt fierce about sticking up for the girls’ needs, too. We wanted him close. We missed him when he was gone. I worried that he didn’t understand what that felt like for us. I feared that the path he’d chosen for himself—and still seemed so clearly committed to pursuing—would end up steamrolling our every need. When he’d first approached me about running for state senate years earlier, there had been only two of us to think about. I had no conception of what saying yes to politics might mean for us later, once we’d added two children to the mix. But I now knew enough to understand that politics was never especially kind to families. I’d had a glimpse of it back in high school, through my friendship with Santita Jackson, and had seen it again when Barack’s political opponents had exploited his decision to stay with Malia in Hawaii when she was sick.
Sometimes, watching the news or reading the paper, I found myself staring at images of the people who’d given themselves over to political life—the Clintons, the Gores, the Bushes, old photos of the Kennedys—and wondering what the backstories were. Was everyone normal? Happy? Were those smiles real?
At home, our frustrations began to rear up often and intensely. Barack and I loved each other deeply, but it was as if at the center of our relationship there were suddenly a knot we couldn’t loosen. I was thirty-eight years old and had seen other marriages come undone in a way that made me feel protective of ours. I’d had close friends go through devastating breakups, brought on by small problems left unattended or lapses in communication that led eventually to irreparable rifts. A couple of years earlier, my brother, Craig, had moved temporarily back into the upstairs apartment we’d grown up in, living above our mother after his own marriage had slowly and painfully fallen apart.
Barack was reluctant at first to try couples counseling. He was accustomed to throwing his mind at complicated problems and reasoning them out on his own. Sitting down in front of a stranger struck him as uncomfortable, if not a tad dramatic. Couldn’t he just run over to Borders