If Michelle is vain about anything, it's not her fancy degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law, or even her husband's presidential aspirations, but the family she was born into. Her parents lavished her with "structure and consistency and chores,'' made their kids budget their allowance and their time, and played board games with them every Saturday night. Marian was home full-time until her children were in high school, then worked in a bank. The family's one-bedroom apartment-the upper floor of a bungalow in the South Shore neighborhood-was so snug that Michelle and Craig slept in the living room, which they divided with partitions, up until they packed for college. Marian still lives there; she occupies the whole house now, in the same part of town where both she and her husband were born.
"We used to talk about things before they came up, all the problems you might run into," Marian says. "My husband and I would talk about the things that we had done that were pretty stupid, [like] why we didn't finish school."
"They didn't hide stuff from us, like why our grandparents were separated,'' agrees Michelle. Only, oops, that was a private discussion: "Are you going to put that in there?'' her mom asks, pretending to huff before laughing again. ("My mom laughs at everything, and I know that now,'' her daughter teases, "but when you're a kid, you think, Oh, I'm pretty funny.'') Not that every topic of discussion was immediately hauled into the open. When Michelle first started dating Barack, for instance, his mother-in-law says, "I didn't know his mother was white for a long time. It didn't come up. Not that it made any difference, because that wasn't an issue in our family.'' Neither Barack nor Michelle ever mentioned that he was running for editor of the Harvard Law Review, either, for that matter. Marian admits she wasn't bowled over immediately by her daughter's suitor, because he didn't talk about himself. "But since I've gotten to know him,'' Marian says, drawing out the words for emphasis, "I find I'm quite impressed with the man.''
Though something of a perfectionist, Michelle was actually the laid-back one in her family. Craig, who is two years older, "was one of these people who are always preparing for an impending disaster,'' Michelle says. He practiced dragging their father down the stairs in the event of a fire. He also practiced writing with his left hand, in case something happened to his right, as well as going around the house blindfolded, in case he lost his eyesight. "Part of that,'' Marian says quietly, "had to do with the fact that he had a handicapped father.''
Paradoxically, perhaps, their father's illness taught both of his children that if he could get up and go to work and enjoy his life, then they didn't have to feel constrained, either, in any way. With one exception: How would Michelle ever find a man who could live up to her father's example? "That was the kind of guy my sister was looking for,'' her brother said. "We used to joke as a family, 'She'll never find a guy like that, because they don't exist anymore.''' What she sought most of all in a mate was Fraser's glass-half-full fortitude-and there's a pretty straight line between that worldview and Obama's "Yes, we can!''
Michelle met her future husband in 1988, when he took a summer job at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she specialized in intellectual property law. She was assigned to mentor Obama, who had just finished his first year at Harvard Law. As he recalled their first meeting in The Audacity of Hope, "I remember that she was tall-almost my height in heels-and lovely, with a friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse.'' He was smitten from the get-go, but she worried that it wasn't a good idea to date someone from the office. Even when she brought him home to meet the family, they at first assumed that "he was just another one who wasn't going to make it,'' her brother said. "It was hard to pass muster with my sister." Michelle asked Craig to check out Barack by playing basketball with him-she'd always heard their dad say that you could tell a lot about a man's character on the court. And? "No personality flaws with respect to the basketball evaluation,'' Craig said. So Michelle and Barack started dating.
At a rally last year in New Hampshire, Michelle described falling in love with her husband's ideals. "He talked about the simple notion that we as Americans understand the world as it is-and it is a world sometimes that is disappointing and unfair-but our job as American citizens is to work toward building the world as it should be." Her husband has written that what he wanted more than anything was to be the kind of father he'd never had. After his parents divorced and his father returned to Africa, he visited him only once. In a speech he gave on Father's Day, Obama said, "I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle-that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my girls.''
Obama wanted a partner who would expect nothing less and a woman who saw parenthood that same way. In a recent interview with
Reader's Digest, he credits Michelle with creating a "zone of normalcy" for his daughters. The girls still go to the same school. Michelle dropped them off and picked them up each day until recently, when her mother took over. They still don't have a nanny. "Their lives haven't changed or been disrupted, and that's been Michelle's greatest gift to me," says her husband.
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