the hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward the stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother. I wanted to have a work life and a home life, but with some promise that one would never fully squelch the other. I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all. It was an odd and confounding thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have everything? I had no idea.
Barack, meanwhile, came home from Bali looking tanned and carrying a satchel stuffed with legal pads, having converted his isolation into a literary victory. The book was basically finished. Within a matter of months, his agent had resold it to a new publisher, paying off his debt and securing a plan for publication. More important to me was the fact that within a matter of hours we’d returned to the easy rhythm of our newlywed life. Barack was here, done with his solitude, landed back in my world. My husband. He was smiling at the jokes I made, wanting to hear about my day, kissing me to sleep at night.
As the months went by, we cooked, worked, laughed, and planned. Later that spring, we had our finances in order enough to buy a condo, moving out of 7436 South Euclid Avenue and into a pretty, railroad-style apartment in Hyde Park with hardwood floors and a tiled fireplace, a new launchpad for our life. With Barack’s encouragement, I took another risk and switched jobs again, this time saying good-bye to Valerie and Susan at city hall in order to finally explore the kind of nonprofit work that had always intrigued me, finding a leadership role that would give me a chance to grow. There was still plenty I hadn’t figured out about my life—the riddle of how to be both a Mary and a Marian remained unsolved—but for now all those deeper questions drifted out to the margins of my mind, where they’d sit dormant and unattended for the time being. Any worries could wait, I figured, because we were an us now, and we were happy. And happy seemed like a starting place for everything.
13
My new job made me nervous. I’d been hired to be the executive director for the brand-new Chicago chapter of an organization called Public Allies, which itself was basically brand-new. It was something like a start-up inside a start-up, and in a field in which I had no professional experience to speak of. Public Allies had been founded only a year earlier in Washington, D.C., and was the brainchild of Vanessa Kirsch and Katrina Browne, who were both just out of college and interested in helping more people find their way into careers in public service and nonprofit work. Barack had met the two of them at a conference and become a member of their board, eventually suggesting they get in touch with me regarding the job.
The model was similar to what was being used at Teach for America, which itself was relatively new at the time: Public Allies recruited talented young people, gave them intensive training and committed mentorship, and placed them in paid ten-month apprentice positions inside community organizations and public agencies, the hope being that they’d flourish and contribute in meaningful ways. The broader aim was that these opportunities would give the recruits—Allies, we called them—both the experience and the drive to continue working in the nonprofit or public sector for years to come, thereby helping to build a new generation of community leaders.
For me, the idea resonated in a big way. I still remembered how during my senior year at Princeton so many of us had marched into MCAT and LSAT exams or suited up to interview for corporate training programs without once (at least in my case) considering or maybe even realizing that a wealth of more civic-minded job options existed. Public Allies was meant as a corrective to this, a means of widening the horizon for young people thinking about careers. But what I especially liked was that its founders were focused less on parachuting Ivy Leaguers into urban communities and more on finding and cultivating talent that was already there. You didn’t need a college degree to become an Ally. You needed only a high school diploma or GED, to be older than seventeen and younger than thirty, and to have shown