to invite you to join something very special.”
She’d called to ask me to be in some sort of private organization, a club that, from what I gathered, was made up primarily of the wives of important people in Washington. They got together regularly for luncheons and to discuss issues of the day. “It’s a nice way to meet people, and I know that’s not always easy when you’re new to town,” she said.
In my whole life, I’d never been asked to join a club. I’d watched friends in high school go off on ski trips with their Jack and Jill groups. At Princeton, I’d waited up sometimes for Suzanne to come home, buzzed and tittering, from her eating-club parties. Half the lawyers at Sidley, it seemed, belonged to country clubs. I’d visited plenty of those clubs over time, raising money for Public Allies, raising money for Barack’s campaigns. You learned early on that clubs, in general, were saturated with money. Belonging signified more than just belonging.
It was a kind offer she was making, coming from a genuine place, and yet I was all too happy to turn it down.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s so nice of you to think of me. But actually, we’ve made the decision I won’t be moving to Washington.” I let her know that we had two little girls in school in Chicago and that I was pretty attached to my job. I explained that Barack was settling into life in D.C., commuting home when he could. I didn’t mention that we were so committed to Chicago that we were looking to buy a new house, thanks to the royalty money that was starting to come in from the renewed sales of his book and the fact that he now had a generous offer on a second book—the surprise harvest of Barack’s magic beans.
The senator’s wife paused, letting a delicate beat pass. When she spoke again, her voice was gentle. “That can be very hard on a marriage, you know,” she said. “Families fall apart.”
I felt her judgment then. She herself had been in Washington for many years. The implication was she’d seen things go poorly when a spouse stayed back. The implication was that I was making a dangerous choice, that there was only one correct way to be a senator’s wife and I was choosing wrong.
I thanked her again, hung up, and sighed. None of this had been my choice in the first place. None of this was my choice at all. I was now, like her, the wife of a U.S. senator—Mrs. Obama, she’d called me throughout the conversation—but that didn’t mean I had to drop everything to support him. Truly, I didn’t want to drop a thing.
I knew there were other senators with spouses who chose to live in their hometowns rather than in D.C. I knew that the Senate, with fourteen of its one hundred members being female, was not quite as antiquated as it had once been. But still, I found it presumptuous that another woman would tell me I was wrong to want to keep my kids in school and remain in my job. A few weeks after the election, I’d gone with Barack to Washington for a daylong orientation offered to newly elected senators and their spouses. There’d been only a few of us attending that year, and after a quick introduction the politicians went one way, while spouses were ushered into another room. I’d come with questions, knowing that politicians and their families were expected to adhere to strict federal ethics policies dictating everything from whom they could receive gifts from to how they paid for travel to and from Washington. I thought maybe we’d discuss how to navigate social situations with lobbyists or the legalities of raising money for a future campaign.
What we got, however, was an elaborate disquisition on the history and architecture of the Capitol and a look at the official china patterns produced for the Senate, followed by a polite and chitchatty lunch. The whole thing had gone on for hours. It would have been funny, maybe, if I hadn’t taken a day off from work and left our kids with my mother in order to be there. If I was going to be a political spouse, I wanted to treat it seriously. I didn’t care about the politics per se, but I also didn’t want to screw anything up.
The truth