For many women ‘wife’ can feel like a loaded word
In an exclusive extract from her new memoir, Michelle Obama tells how, as a young married woman, she struggled to assert her independence
IT sounds a little like a bad joke, doesn’t it? What happens when a solitude-loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman who does not love solitude one bit?
The answer, I’m guessing, is probably the best and most sustaining answer to nearly every question arising inside a marriage, no matter who you are or what the issue is: You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.
Which is to say that at the start of 1993, Barack flew to Bali and spent about five weeks living alone with his thoughts while working on a draft of his book Dreams From My Father, filling yellow legal pads with his fastidious handwriting, distilling his ideas during languid daily walks amid the coconut palms and lapping tide.
I, meanwhile, stayed home on Euclid Avenue, living upstairs from my mother as another leaden Chicago winter descended, shellacking the trees and sidewalks with ice.
I kept myself busy, seeing friends and hitting workout classes in the evenings. In my regular interactions at work or around town, I’d find myself casually uttering this strange new term — “my husband”. My husband and I are hoping to buy a home. My husband is a writer finishing a book. It was foreign and delightful and conjured memories of a man who simply wasn’t there.
I missed Barack terribly, but I rationalised our situation as I could, understanding that even if we were newly-weds, this interlude was probably for the best.
He had taken the chaos of his unfinished book and shipped himself out to do battle with it. Possibly this was out of kindness to me, a bid to keep the chaos out of my view. I’d married an outside-the-box thinker, I had to remind myself. He was handling his business in what struck him as the most sensible and efficient manner, even if outwardly it appeared to be a beach vacation — a honeymoon with himself (I couldn’t help but think in my lonelier moments) to follow his honeymoon with me.
You and I, you and I, you and I. We were learning to adapt, to knit ourselves into a solid and forever form of us. Even if we were the same two people we’d always been, the same couple we’d been for years, we now had new labels, a second set of identities to wrangle. He was my husband. I was his wife. We’d stood up at church and said it out loud, to each other and to the world. It did feel as if we owed each other new things.
For many women, including myself, “wife” can feel like a loaded word. It carries a history.
If you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, wives seemed to be a genus of white women who lived inside television sitcoms — cheery, coiffed, corseted. They stayed at home, fussed over the children, and had dinner ready on the stove. They sometimes got into the sherry or flirted with the vacuum-cleaner salesman, but the excitement seemed to end there.
The irony, of course, was that I used to watch those shows in our living room on Euclid Avenue while my own stay-at-home mom fixed dinner without complaint and my own clean-cut dad recovered from a day at work.
My parents’ arrangement was as traditional as anything we saw on TV. Barack some- times jokes, in fact, that my upbringing was like a black version of Leave It to Beaver, with the South Shore Robinsons as steady and fresh- faced as the Cleaver family of Mayfield, USA — though of course we were a poorer version of the Cleavers, with my dad’s blue city worker’s uniform subbing for Mr Cleaver’s suit.
Barack makes this comparison with a touch of envy, because his own childhood was so different, but also as a way to push back on the entrenched stereotype that African Americans primarily live in broken homes, that our families are somehow incapable of living out the same stable, middle-class dream as our white neighbours.
Personally, as a kid, I preferred The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which I absorbed with fascination. Mary had a job, a snappy wardrobe, and great hair. She was independent and funny, and unlike other ladies on TV, her problems were interesting. She had conversations that weren’t about children or homemaking. She didn’t let Lou Grant boss her around, and she wasn’t fixated on finding a husband. She was youthful and at the same time grown-up.
In the pre- pre- pre-internet landscape, when the world came packaged almost exclusively through three channels of TV, this stuff mattered. If you were a girl with a brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into something more than a wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess.
And here I was now, 29 years old, sitting in the very same apartment where I’d watched all that TV and consumed all those meals dished up by the patient and selfless Marian Robinson.
I had so much — an education, a healthy sense of self, a deep arsenal of ambition — and I was wise enough to credit my mother, in particular, with instilling it in me.
She’d taught me how to read before I started kindergarten, helping me sound out words as I sat curled like a kitten in her lap, studying a library copy of Dick and Jane. She’d cooked for us with care, putting broccoli and Brussels sprouts on our plates and requiring that we eat them.
She’d hand sewn my prom dress, for God’s sake.
The point was, she’d given diligently and she’d given everything. She’d let our family define her. I was old enough now to realise that all the hours she gave to me and [brother] Craig were hours she didn’t spend on herself.
My considerable blessings in life were now causing a kind of psychic whiplash. I’d been raised to be confident and see no limits, to believe I could go after and get absolutely anything I wanted. And I wanted everything. Because, as Suzanne would say, why not?
I wanted to live with the hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward the stabilising, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother.
I wanted to have a work life and a home life — but with some promise that one would never fully squelch the other. I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all.
It was an odd and confounding thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have everything?
I had no idea.
‘My blessings in life were now causing a kind of psychic whiplash’ ‘If you were a girl with a brain, Mary Tyler Moore was a goddess’