was a golden time for us, for the balance of our marriage, him with his purpose and me with mine. During a single, early week of senate business in Springfield, Barack had introduced seventeen new bills—possibly a record, and at the very least a measure of his eagerness to get something done. Some would ultimately pass, but most would get quickly picked off in the Republican-controlled chamber, downed by partisanship and a cynicism passed off as practicality among his new colleagues. I saw in those early months how, just as I’d predicted, politics would be a fight, and the fight would be wearying, involving standoffs and betrayals, dirty-deal makers and compromises that sometimes felt painful. But I saw, too, that Barack’s own forecast had been correct as well. He was strangely suited to the tussle of lawmaking, calm inside the maelstrom, accustomed to being an outsider, taking defeats in his easy Hawaiian stride. He stayed hopeful, insistently so, convinced that some part of his vision would someday, somehow, manage to prevail. He was getting battered already, but it wasn’t bothering him. It did seem he was built for this. He’d get dinged up and stay shiny, like an old copper pot.
I, too, was in the midst of a transition. I’d taken a new job, surprising myself somewhat by deciding to leave Public Allies, the organization I’d put together and grown with such care. For three years, I’d given myself to it with zeal, taking responsibility for the largest and the smallest of operational tasks, right down to restocking paper in the photocopier. With Public Allies thriving, and its longevity all but assured thanks to multiyear federal grants and foundation support, I felt that I could now step away in good faith. And it just so happened that in the fall of 1996 a new opportunity had cropped up almost out of nowhere. Art Sussman, the lawyer at the University of Chicago who’d met with me a few years earlier, called to let me know about a position that had just been created there.
The school was looking for an associate dean to focus on community relations, committing at long last to do a better job of integrating with the city, and most especially the South Side neighborhood that surrounded it, including through the creation of a community service program to connect students to volunteer opportunities in the neighborhood. Like the position at Public Allies, this new job spoke to a reality I’d lived personally. As I’d told Art years earlier, the University of Chicago had always felt less attainable and less interested in me than the fancy East Coast schools I’d ultimately attended, a place with its back turned to the neighborhood. The chance to try to lower those walls, to get more students involved with the city and more city residents with the university, was one I found inspiring.
All inspiration aside, there were underlying reasons for making the transition. The university offered the kind of institutional stability that a still-newish nonprofit could not. My pay was better, my hours would be more reasonable, and there were other people designated to keep paper in the copier and fix the laser printer when it broke. I was thirty-two years old now and starting to think more about what kind of load I wanted to carry. On our date nights at Zinfandel, Barack and I often continued a conversation we’d been having in one form or another for years—about impact, about how and where each one of us could make a difference, how best to apportion our time and energy.
For me, some of the old questions about who I was and what I wanted to be in life were starting to drift in again, fixing themselves at the forefront of my mind. I’d taken the new job in part to create a little more room in our life, and also because the health-care benefits were better than anything I’d ever had. And this would end up being important. As Barack and I sat holding hands across the table in the candle glow of another Friday night at Zinfandel, with the pot roast polished off and dessert on its way, there was one big wrinkle in our happiness. We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going well.
* * *
It turns out that even two committed go-getters with a deep love and a robust work ethic can’t will themselves into being pregnant. Fertility is not something