Michelle Obama’s memoir reads like a good friend telling you her life story and experiences. Some stories resonate more than others depending on who you are or where you’re from.
The book is divided into three parts, Becoming Me, Becoming Us, and Becoming More. Becoming Me covers the author’s childhood and early career days. Becoming Us is about Michelle and Barack, while Becoming More focuses on her advocacies as FLOTUS.
I highlighted a number of passages in the book that spoke to me and they were mostly concentrated on the latter part of Becoming Me and scattered across Becoming Us. For me, her struggles with balancing a career and the demands of motherhood hit home.
One of the things I like about this book is that it doesn’t really give answers on how to make the struggle easier because this is not a prescriptive book, but more of a thought-provoking and encouraging one. It does not hold answers to questions, rather it inspires you to find your strength and use that to fight your personal battles.
“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 stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother. 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.”
“Valerie never hesitated to step out of a big meeting when a call came in from her daughter's school. Susan, likewise, dashed out in the middle of the day if one of her sons spiked a fever or was performing in a preschool music show. They were unapologetic about prioritizing the needs of their children, even if it meant occasionally disrupting the flow at work, and didn't try to compartmentalize work and home.”
“Our afternoons together taught me that there was no formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. This was useful to see.”
“But no matter how it panned out, I knew I'd at least done something good for myself in speaking up about my needs. There was power, I felt, in just saying it out loud.”
“I'm not sure anyone around me would have said I wasn't doing enough, but I was always aware of everything I could have followed through on and didn't. There were certain small scale projects I chose not to take on. There were young employees whom I could have mentored better than I did. You hear all the time about the trade-ffs of being a working mother. These were mine. If I'd once been someone who threw herself completely into every task, I was not more cautious, protective of my time, knowing I had to maintain enough energy for life at home.”
These passages still stir up some dying embers left in my heart about this topic. Ultimately, I tried to make it work as a mother and career woman but the universe had other plans. I dove into the idea of being a working mother head-on with the confidence of previous experiences of people I know - they were able to make it work so I’ll just follow their framework to success. Somehow it didn’t work out for me and my family. I am not unhappy now, actually I am very happy but at the back of my mind, a nagging thought remains, asking why I had to be so different than most people I know?
It’s just so much easier to follow other people’s well-travelled path than carve one for myself. Yet my personal resolve to not let history repeat itself by being more present, more available for my child calls for a different road. I’m sure there are women who were able to do both but I have discovered the hard way that I am not one of them. My strength and effectiveness manifests itself when I dig deep into something than spread myself far and wide. This is one realization that I have slowly come to accept. xxx
