and bloom. We were thinking not about country but about family as Malia Ann Obama, one of the two most perfect babies ever to be born to anyone, anywhere, dropped into our world.
14
Motherhood became my motivator. It dictated my movements, my decisions, the rhythm of every day. It took no time, no thought at all, for me to be fully consumed by my new role as a mother. I’m a detail-oriented person, and a baby is nothing if not a reservoir of details. Barack and I studied little Malia, taking in the mystery of her rosebud lips, her dark fuzzy head and unfocused gaze, the herky-jerky way she moved her tiny limbs. We bathed and swaddled her and kept her pressed to our chests. We tracked her eating, her hours of sleep, her every gurgle. We analyzed the contents of each soiled diaper as if it might tell us all her secrets.
She was a tiny person, a person entrusted to us. I was heady with the responsibility of it, fully in her thrall. I could lose an hour just watching her breathe. When there’s a baby in the house, time stretches and contracts, abiding by none of the regular rules. A single day can feel endless, and then suddenly six months have blown right past. Barack and I laughed about what parenthood had done to us. If we’d once spent the dinner hour parsing the intricacies of the juvenile justice system, comparing what I’d learned during my stint at Public Allies with some of the ideas he was trying to fit into a reform bill in the legislature, we now, with no less fervor, debated whether Malia was too dependent on her pacifier and compared our respective methods for getting her to sleep. We were, as most new parents are, obsessive and a little boring, and nothing made us happier. We hauled little Malia in her baby carrier with us to Zinfandel for our Friday night dates, figuring out how to streamline our order so we could be in and out quickly, before she got too restless.
Several months after Malia was born, I’d returned to work at the University of Chicago. I negotiated to come back only half-time, figuring this would be a win-win sort of arrangement—that I could now be both career woman and perfect mother, striking the Mary Tyler Moore/ Marian Robinson balance I’d always hoped for. We’d found a babysitter, Glorina Casabal, a doting, expert caregiver about ten years older than I was. Born in the Philippines, she was trained as a nurse and had raised two kids of her own. Glorina—“Glo”—was a short, bustling woman with a short, practical haircut and gold wire-rimmed glasses who could change a diaper in twelve seconds flat. She had a nurse’s hyper-competent, do-anything energy and would become a vital and cherished member of our family for the next few years. Her most important quality was that she loved my baby passionately.
What I didn’t realize—and this would also go into my file of things many of us learn too late—is that a part-time job, especially when it’s meant to be a scaled-down version of your previously full-time job, can be something of a trap. Or at least that’s how it played out for me. At work, I was still attending all the meetings I always had while also grappling with most of the same responsibilities. The only real difference was that I now made half my original salary and was trying to cram everything into a twenty-hour week. If a meeting ran late, I’d end up tearing home at breakneck speed to fetch Malia so that we could arrive on time (Malia eager and happy, me sweaty and hyperventilating) to the afternoon Wiggleworms class at a music studio on the North Side. To me, it felt like a sanity-warping double bind. I battled guilt when I had to take work calls at home. I battled a different sort of guilt when I sat at my office distracted by the idea that Malia might be allergic to peanuts. Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.
Meanwhile, it seemed that Barack had hardly missed a stride. A few months after Malia’s birth, he’d been reelected to a four-year term in the state senate, winning with 89 percent of the vote. He