sometimes just the assurance that whoever was spilling her guts in a given moment wasn’t the only one ever to have a teenager who was acting out or a boss she couldn’t stand. Often, we steadied one another just by listening. And saying good-bye at the end of each weekend, we vowed we’d do it all again soon.
My friends made me whole, as they always have and always will. They gave me a lift anytime I felt down or frustrated or had less access to Barack. They grounded me when I felt the pressures of being judged, having everything from my choice of nail-polish color to the size of my hips dissected and discussed publicly. And they helped me ride out the big, unsettling waves that sometimes hit without notice.
On the first Sunday in May 2011, I went to dinner with two friends at a restaurant downtown, leaving Barack and my mother in charge of the girls at home. The weekend had seemed especially busy. Barack had been pulled into a flurry of briefings that afternoon, and we’d spent Saturday evening at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where in his speech Barack made a few pointed jokes about Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice career and his birther theories. I couldn’t see him from my seat, but Trump had been in attendance. During Barack’s monologue, news cameras zeroed in on him, stone-faced and stewing.
For us, Sunday nights tended to be quiet and free. The girls were usually tired after a weekend of sports and socializing. And Barack, if he was lucky, could sometimes squeeze in a daytime round of golf on the course at Andrews Air Force Base, which left him more relaxed.
That night, after catching up with my friends, I arrived home around 10:00, greeted at the door by an usher, as I always was. Already, I could tell something was going on, sensing a different-from-normal level of activity on the ground floor of the White House. I asked the usher if he knew where the president was.
“I believe he’s upstairs, ma’am,” he said, “getting ready to address the nation.”
This is how I realized that it had finally happened. I knew it was coming, but I hadn’t known exactly how it would play out. I’d spent the last two days trying to act completely normal, pretending I didn’t know that something dangerous and important was about to take place. After months of high-level intelligence gathering and weeks of meticulous preparation, after security briefings and risk assessments and a final tense decision, seven thousand miles from the White House and under cover of darkness, an elite team of U.S. Navy SEALs had stormed a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, looking for Osama bin Laden.
Barack was coming out of our bedroom as I walked down the hall in the residence. He was dressed in a suit and red tie and seemed thoroughly jacked up on adrenaline. He’d been carrying the pressure of this decision for months.
“We got him,” he said. “And no one got hurt.”
We hugged. Osama bin Laden had been killed. No American lives had been lost. Barack had taken an enormous risk—one that could have cost him his presidency—and it had all gone okay.
The news was already traveling across the world. People were clogging the streets around the White House, spilling out of restaurants, hotels, and apartment buildings, filling the night air with celebratory shouts. The sound of it grew so loud and jubilant it roused Malia from sleep in her bedroom, audible even through the ballistic glass windows meant to shut everything out.
That night, there was no inside or outside, anyway. In cities across the country, people had taken to the streets, clearly drawn by an impulse to be close to others, linked not just by patriotism but by the communal grief that had been born on 9/11 and the years of worries that we’d be attacked again. I thought about every military base I’d ever visited, all those soldiers working to recover from their wounds, the many people who’d sent family members to a faraway place in the name of protecting our country, the thousands of children who’d lost a parent on that horrible, sad day. There was no restoring any one of those losses, I knew. Nobody’s death would ever replace a life. I’m not sure anyone’s death is reason to celebrate, ever. But what America got that night was a moment of release, a