by citizens and lawmakers around the country—to prevent more massacres by passing basic, sensible laws concerning how guns were sold.
I watched him step forward, knowing that I myself wasn’t ready. In nearly four years as First Lady, I had consoled often. I’d prayed with people whose homes had been shredded by a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, huge swaths of the town turned to matchsticks in an instant. I’d put my arms around men, women, and children who’d lost loved ones to war in Afghanistan, to an extremist who’d shot up an Army base in Texas, and to violence on street corners near their own homes. In the previous four months, I’d paid visits to people who’d survived mass shootings at a movie theater in Colorado and inside a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. It was devastating, every time. I’d tried always to bring the most calm and open part of myself to these meetings, to lend my own strength by being caring and present, sitting quietly on the riverbed of other people’s pain. But two days after the shooting at Sandy Hook, when Barack traveled to Newtown to speak at a prayer vigil being held for the victims, I couldn’t bring myself to join him. I was so shaken by it that I had no strength available to lend. I’d been First Lady for almost four years, and there had been too much killing already—too many senseless preventable deaths and too little action. I wasn’t sure what comfort I could ever give to someone whose six-year-old had been gunned down at school.
Instead, like a lot of parents, I clung to my children, my fear and love intertwined. It was nearly Christmas, and Sasha was among a group of local children selected to join the Moscow Ballet for two performances of The Nutcracker, both happening on the same day as the vigil in Newtown. Barack managed to slip into a back row and watch the dress rehearsal before leaving for Connecticut. I went to the evening show.
The ballet was as beautiful and otherworldly as any recounting of that story ever is, with its prince in a moonlit forest and its swirling pageantry of sweets. Sasha played a mouse, dressed in a black leotard with fuzzy ears and a tail, performing her part while an ornate sleigh drifted through the swelling orchestral music and showers of glittering fake snow. My eyes never left her. My whole being was grateful for her. Sasha stood bright-eyed onstage, looking at first like she couldn’t believe where she was, as if she found the whole scene dazzling and unreal. Which of course it was. But she was young enough still that she could give herself over to it, at least for the moment, allowing herself to move through this heaven where nobody spoke and everyone danced, and a holiday was always just about to arrive.
* * *
Bear with me here, because this doesn’t necessarily get easier. It would be one thing if America were a simple place with a simple story. If I could narrate my part in it only through the lens of what was orderly and sweet. If there were no steps backward. And if every sadness, when it came, turned out at least to be redemptive in the end.
But that’s not America, and it’s not me, either. I’m not going to try to bend this into any kind of perfect shape.
Barack’s second term would prove to be easier in many ways than his first. We’d learned so much in four years, putting the right people into place around us, building systems that generally worked. We knew enough now to avoid some of the inefficiencies and small mistakes that had been made the first time around, beginning on Inauguration Day in January 2013, when I requested that the viewing stand for the parade be fully heated this time so our feet wouldn’t freeze. In an attempt to conserve our energy, we hosted only two inaugural balls that night, as opposed to the ten we’d gone to in 2009. We had four years still to go, and if I’d learned anything, it was to relax and try to pace myself.
Sitting next to Barack at the parade after he’d renewed his vows to the country, I watched the flow of floats and the marching bands moving in and out of snappy formation, already able to savor more than I had our first time around. From my vantage point,