Becoming in a Promised Land

I am reading two books at the same time right now. Barack Obama’s A Promised Land and Michelle Obama’s Becoming.  I sometimes read more than one book at a time, but I don’t think I have ever read two books by a couple, writing about their own lives as well as each other’s, nearly contemporaneously. What makes these two books even more unique is that they are authored by an ex-President and First Lady.

Barack’s book is quintessential Barack Obama — strong, self-confident with occasional self-doubt peeking through, but always focused on what he wants to change. It’s a Presidential memoir, of course, so it is primarily about policy. Michelle’s book has a different purpose. It is a reflection about how she came to be who she is still becoming. Her story is the story of so many accomplished women, filled with more than a touch of doubt but also so much resilience and courage.  Both of their books are filled with stories of love and affection for each other, but they also remember and see events quite differently — male and female perspectives on self and family don’t always match.

In a recent interview, Barack was teased by Late Show Stephen Colbert because he describes their courting in just a few paragraphs in his book, while Michelle spends a lot more time in her book describing their first meeting and her reaction to this “weirdly elegant guy.” His excuse for the relatively brief mention of their meeting is that she described it so well he doesn’t really need to amplify on it. But they remember their first encounter in different ways. He remembers being immediately taken by her confidence, intelligence and beauty and calls her “wickedly smart,” and “smitten almost from the second I saw her.” She, on the other hand, was immediately skeptical of this guy with a “big smile and a whiff of geekiness,” who was just another intern she was supposed to supervise. What struck her about him was “how assured he seemed of his own direction in life. He was oddly free of doubt.”  Yet, while Michelle already had a law degree, a job in a prestigious law firm, and seemed to have achieved everything she had always set out to do, she continued to wonder “is this all there is?”

As their relationship develops, Michelle began to worry that she had no strong goals that she wanted to achieve. What she thought were her goals — to go to a good college (Princeton!) and get a law degree (Harvard!) and then a job in a good law firm, had already been achieved.  But she wasn’t totally happy. She discovered she was now falling in love with a guy whose “forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.”  She “saw it coming…like a barreling wave with a mighty undertow,” and she realized she needed to quickly anchor herself or be swept away.

The remainder of Michelle’s book describes her journey of self-realization and purpose, while Barack’s book takes off from his prior book Dreams from my Father, as he attempts to describe what it was like to run for office and finally become President. Michelle spends a good amount of time describing her childhood in a warm, loving family living on the south side of Chicago.  Against a backdrop of struggle and occasional self-doubt, she manages to achieve all of the things she set out to do.  Her story describes what so many women have experienced in their lives, trying to live up to their own dreams even when those dreams can be punctured by well meaning adults around them. Michelle became a lawyer, but that life was turned upside down by a different direction that the man with whom she fell in love wanted to pursue. He helped her realize she really did not love being a lawyer, and his support propelled her to search for work that would be more fulfilling. She ended up applying her considerable skills to nonprofit organizations and to causes that allowed her to help institutions like the University of Chicago better understand the communities which they served. And of course, as First Lady, she became a symbol to millions of young girls and was able to elevate issues like child nutrition to national attention.

What struck me about Michelle’s book is that for women of my generation the choices were even more narrow. In the 1950s I was told by a guidance counselor that I could be a nurse or a teacher. I was not offered other options. After fainting in an ER while on a field trip, I realized that nursing was not going to work. So I abandoned health care (becoming a doctor was not even considered) and took the steps required to become an English teacher, a profession I practiced and enjoyed for many years. But while I saw my friends getting advanced degrees and my husband obtaining his Ed.D. at Harvard, I remained unfocused and unsatisfied. It wasn’t until we moved to Santa Cruz in the early 1970s that my volunteer work on a health care board made me realize that health care was what I really loved. I wasn’t going to be a doctor in my 40s, but was it too late to change direction? It turned out that it was not too late for me. With the support of my husband and family, I got a Ph.D. and was able to go on and enjoy the remainder of my career working in the health policy area I had always wanted.

As I look at both Barack and Michelle’s career trajectories, I see two very different journeys. Barack meandered and zigzagged; Michelle barreled ahead with rocket intensity. When they met, she thought she was where she wanted to be; he knew he was not. His intensity and purpose actually helped her look inward and find her own purpose too. What makes her book so compelling is the honesty with which she describes her successes and failures. As Barack’s career soared, she became almost the Biblical version of a “help meet,” managing to find her own purpose even as she did all the things required to support his purpose.

How many  other women have struggled to find meaning and purpose as they balanced their own career with family and motherhood?  Most of us. But it makes me wonder yet again about how we are raising our children as it relates to gender roles. Are we teaching them to reach for the sky or just settle? Why do we assume marriage is the only way to be truly successful? Why do women still do more of the work to raise a family, even now in 2021?  And when Michelle describes her journey as only starting, can we also support both our daughters and sons to value the journey not just the destination? She says, “For me, becoming is not about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self…Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.”

As I finish both of these books, I am grateful at how willing they have been to let us into their lives and see their struggles so clearly. It is incredibly challenging to figure out what you are good at doing and then find a way to do it. For Barack and Michelle Obama it has been a journey to a promised land they are still moving toward. I can’t wait to see what their next chapters will hold.