it didn’t surprise me. This was the guy I’d married. I’d known his capabilities all along. Looking back, I think it was then that I quietly began to let go of the idea that there was any reversing his course, that he’d ever belong solely to me and the girls. I could hear it almost in the pulse of the applause. More of this, more of this, more of this.
The media response to Barack’s speech was hyperbolic. “I’ve just seen the first black president,” Chris Matthews declared to his fellow commentators on NBC. A front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read simply, “The Phenom.” Barack’s cell phone began to ring nonstop. Cable pundits were dubbing him a “rock star” and an “overnight success,” as if he hadn’t spent years working up to that moment onstage, as if the speech had created him instead of the other way around. Still, the speech was the beginning of something new, not just for him, but for us, our whole family. We were swept into another level of exposure and into the swift current of other people’s expectations.
It was surreal, the whole thing. All I could do, really, was joke about it.
“Must’ve been a good speech,” I’d say with a shrug as people began stopping Barack on the street to ask for his autograph or to tell him they’d loved what he’d said. “Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when we walked out of a restaurant in Chicago to find that a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk to wait for him. I said the same thing when journalists started asking for Barack’s thoughts on important national issues, when big-time political strategists started to hover around him, and when nine years after publication the formerly obscure Dreams from My Father got a paperback reissue and landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
“Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when a beaming, bustling Oprah Winfrey showed up at our house to spend a day interviewing us for her magazine.
What was happening to us? I almost couldn’t track it. In November, Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate, winning 70 percent of the vote statewide, the largest margin in Illinois history and the biggest landslide of any Senate race in the country that year. He’d won significant majorities among blacks, whites, and Latinos; men and women; rich and poor; urban, suburban, and rural. At one point, we went to Arizona for a quick getaway, and he was mobbed by well-wishers there. This for me felt like a true and odd measure of his fame: Even white people were recognizing him now.
* * *
I took what was left of my normalcy and wrapped myself in it. When we were at home, everything was the same. When we were with our friends and family, everything was the same. With our kids, it was always the same. But outside, things were different. Barack was flying back and forth to D.C. all the time now. He had a Senate office and an apartment in a shabby building on Capitol Hill, a little one-bedroom that was already cluttered with books and papers, his Hole away from home. Anytime the girls and I came to visit, we didn’t even pretend to want to stay there, booking a hotel room for the four of us instead.
I stuck to my routine in Chicago. Gym, work, home, repeat. Dishes in the dishwasher. Swim lessons, soccer, ballet. I kept pace as I always had. Barack had a life in Washington now, operating with some of the gravitas that came with being a senator, but I was still me, living my same normal life. I was sitting one day in my parked car at the shopping plaza on Clybourn Avenue, having some Chipotle and a little me-time after a dash through BabyGap, when my secretary at work called on my cell phone to ask if she could patch through a call. It was from a woman in D.C.—someone I’d never met, the wife of a fellow senator—who’d tried a few times already to reach me.
“Sure, put her through,” I said.
And on came the voice of this senator’s wife, pleasant and warm. “Well, hello!” she said. “I’m so glad to finally talk to you!”
I told her that I was excited to talk to her, too.
“I’m just calling to welcome you,” she said, “and to let you know that we’d like