Sublime

Barack

was a box checker—marching to the resolute beat of effort/result, effort/result—a

Her goal was to push us out into the world.

relished the swerve.

zipped myself back into my junior-associate existence,

motorcade, the agents, the aides, and the media, with me at

self-reliant and curiously hardwired for optimism.

At the school, she talked about her own childhood and the barriers she’d had to overcome, how education had always provided her a path forward.

Still, this wasn’t enough to insulate Michelle from the wildly unrealistic and often contradictory social pressures that women with children absorbed from the media, their peers, their employers, and, of course, the men in their lives.