I’d been waiting a long time for this. I wanted a family and Barack wanted a family, too, and now here I was alone in the bathroom of our apartment, trying, in the name of all that want, to screw up the courage to plunge a syringe into my thigh.
It was maybe then that I felt a first flicker of resentment involving politics and Barack’s unshakable commitment to the work. Or maybe I was just feeling the acute burden of being female. Either way, he was gone and I was here, carrying the responsibility. I sensed already that the sacrifices would be more mine than his. In the weeks to come, he’d go about his regular business while I went in for daily ultrasounds to monitor my eggs. He wouldn’t have his blood drawn. He wouldn’t have to cancel any meetings to have a cervix inspection. He was doting and invested, my husband, doing what he could do. He read all the IVF literature and would talk to me all night about it, but his only actual duty was to show up at the doctor’s office and provide some sperm. And then, if he chose, he could go have a martini afterward. None of this was his fault, but it wasn’t equal, either, and for any woman who lives by the mantra that equality is important, this can be a little confusing. It was me who’d alter everything, putting my passions and career dreams on hold, to fulfill this piece of our dream. I found myself in a small moment of reckoning. Did I want it? Yes, I wanted it so much. And with this, I hoisted the needle and sank it into my flesh.
* * *
About eight weeks later, I heard a sound that erased all traces of resentment: a swishing, watery heartbeat picked up on ultrasound, emanating from the warm cave of my body. We were pregnant. It was for real. Suddenly the responsibility and relative sacrifice meant something completely different, like a landscape taking on new colors, or all the furniture in a house being rearranged so that now everything appeared perfectly in place. I walked around with a secret inside me. This was my privilege, the gift of being female. I felt bright with the promise of what I carried.
I would feel this way right through, even as first-trimester fatigue left me drained, as my job stayed busy and Barack continued making his weekly treks to the state capital. We had our outward lives, but now there was something inward happening, a baby growing, a tiny girl. (Because Barack’s a fact guy and I’m a planner, finding out her gender was obligatory.) We couldn’t see her, but she was there, gaining in size and spirit as fall became winter and then became spring. That thing I’d felt—my envy for Barack’s separateness from the process—had now utterly reversed itself. He was on the outside, while I got to live the process. I was the process, indivisible from this small, burgeoning life that was now throwing elbows and poking my bladder with her heel. I was never alone, never lonely. She was there, always, while I was driving to work, or chopping vegetables for a salad, or lying in bed at night, poring over the pages of What to Expect When You’re Expecting for the nine hundredth time.
Summers in Chicago are special to me. I love how the sky stays light right into evening, how Lake Michigan gets busy with sailboats and the heat ratchets up to the point that it’s almost impossible to recall the struggles of winter. I love how in summer the business of politics slowly starts to go quiet and life tilts more toward fun.
Though really we’d had no control over anything, somehow in the end it felt as if we’d timed it all perfectly. Very early in the morning on July 4, 1998, I felt the first twinges of labor. Barack and I checked into the University of Chicago hospital, bringing both Maya—who’d flown in from Hawaii to be there the week I was due—and my mom for support. It was still hours before the barbecue coals would start to blaze across the city and people would spread their blankets on the grass along the lakeshore, waving flags and waiting for the spectacle of the city fireworks to bloom over the water. We’d miss all of it that year anyway, lost in a whole new blaze