Michelle Obama: We had our daughters with IVF... and go to couples therapy
MICHELLE Obama yesterday revealed she felt ‘lost and alone’ after suffering a miscarriage and underwent IVF to conceive her two daughters.
‘I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were because we don’t talk about them,’ the former First Lady said.
Mrs Obama, 54, married the future president in 1992 but stressed their relationship has not always been easy as his political career often took him away.
She disclosed they have marriage counselling ‘when we need it’.
A driven lawyer and former university administrator, she said she was 34 or 35 when she realised the ‘biological clock is real because egg production is limited’.
She and Mr Obama, 57, ‘had to do IVF’ if they wanted to have a family, she told ABC’s Good Morning America TV programme. She said they were trying for a family but it ‘wasn’t going well’ and after a miscarriage Mrs Obama eventually conceived daughters Malia and Sasha, now 20 and 17, using IVF.
Mrs Obama is promoting her forthcoming memoir. She and her husband earned an astonishing £50million advance in a joint book deal. Mrs Obama said she wanted to use her book, Becoming, to help other women dealing with the same problems.
‘We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken,’ she said. ‘So, that’s one of the reasons why it’s important to talk to young mothers about the fact that miscarriages happen.
‘It’s the worst thing we do to each other as women – not share the truth about our bodies and how they work and how they don’t work.’
She said she also wanted others to understand that even the famously lovey-dovey Obamas have had to work on their marriage. ‘I know too many young couples who struggle and think somehow, there’s something wrong with them,’ she said.
‘I want them to know that Michelle and Barack Obama – who have a phenomenal marriage and who love each other – we work on our marriage and we get help with our marriage when we need it.’
Her husband has avoided getting too personal about his White House successor but Mrs Obama does not hide her anger at Donald Trump in her book.
She said she will ‘never forgive him’ for putting her family at risk by stirring up extremists when he questioned whether Mr Obama was a genuine US citizen.
She described Mr Trump’s behaviour as bigoted and dangerous and said it was ‘deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks’.
She was genuinely scared for her children’s safety, she went on.
‘What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls?’ her book says. ‘Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.’
She said she was shocked at his victory on election night and tried to ‘block it all out’. Mrs Obama expressed disbelief that so many women voted for a ‘misogynist’ over Hillary Clinton in 2016. She said her body ‘buzzed with fury’ after hearing the infamous tape recording in which Trump boasted of groping women.
President Trump responded to Mrs Obama’s book, saying yesterday: ‘She got paid a lot of money to write a book and they always expect a little controversy.’
The Obamas have said they will donate a ‘significant portion’ of their author proceeds to charity.
Despite rumours she might run for president, Mrs Obama reiterates in her book that politics isn’t for her. ‘I’ve never been a fan of politics, and my experience over the last ten years has done little to change that,’ she said. ‘I continue to be put off by the nastiness.’
‘We get help with our marriage’