Becoming — Michelle Obama
For those who don’t know, it’s a memoir that encompasses basically her entire life, so there are three parts: becoming me, becoming us, and becoming more.
- Becoming me, it’s start from her childhood and it’s goes to her entire school life in addition to her Princeton undergrad years, her Harvard ball years, and the beginning of her youthful career as an attorney working for Sidley & Austin in Chicago.
- Becoming us, it’s about her relationship with Barack how it kind of blossoms and becomes something very important to her, but it also talks about her career struggles, she realized that she doesn’t want work for a big law firm because she doesn’t think that she’s effecting change properly, and this part, it’s also talking about Barack’s desire to run public office so and it goes through his campaign for the Illinois state senate and also the US senate and of course the 2008 presidential election in the united state.
- Becoming more, and it’s starts with Barack Obama becoming the 44th president of United State and it goes through her entire term as the first lady.
Truly, this book affected me in a way that I’ve never experienced before like there were times when I was reading this book where I thought this was written for me. Michelle was in my brain she took the things that I care about and the things I needed to hear and she put them all in this one book. The content, what she’s saying that really pierces me and it kind of settle inside of me and ignite something within me when I’m reading this book, it’s just so incredibly inspiring.
She talks about how she struggled to fit in as a cool kid, or smart kid, or black kid or being too white or too black and trying to straddle between these two different worlds that she came from of her heritage and also her modern culture and trying to balance that two, and not really meeting the expectation communities of people and how difficult that constantly is especially for a black woman living in America today.
One of the things I really love about this book was vulnerable. Michelle Obama talks about marriage counseling that she and Barack. When I think of their relationship they are one of the couples that we look up to in a lot of ways, because everything seems so idyllic, so to read about her difficulties of when Barack says he’s going to be home doesn’t mean he’s going to home in five minutes, it means he way be intending to come home soon, but he’s going to stop off on the way to meeting someone else or doing something on the way home and this balance between having your husband around, having your partner around , the father of your children and trying to raise them in a normal way while at the same time someone who is ascending of the political ladder and has all of these aims, the pressure, time, and commitment that goes with it and she very openly talks about the challenges of that the things that she was not happy about that, she didn’t want him to really campaign at the beginning and having to go through those trials, tribulations and finding ways to work through it. Sometimes when we look at the relationship we see couples like Barack and Michelle we think they look perfect, it’s seems like they’re living happily after but as we all have learned with social media we never know what’s going on behind the scenes. So it’s great to hear the story of what it takes to make marriage and relationship lasts and work.
And also the vulnerability with which her share, talking about IVF treatment so that she could have children both Sasha and Malia. Talking about her sisterhood where Michelle and her friends would get to together go on retreats and spend time away from everything and it’s highlighted to me that she just like an ordinary person, somebody who needs that break and refresh from the demands of day-to-day life, and the importance of taking time away to reset, regroup and refocus, and I believe that ease creates an agency destroy so it’s great to hear her story how she’s applying this.
The thing I learned about both Barack and Michelle that is their commitment to social change. She talks early on in the books and I was very interested in this as to what Barack Obama was like and what she was like at the very beginning, what was the early part of their journey like before they became an icon that we look up and there were two things that really stood up to me, one Barack used to suspend every single spare bit of money he had on books, learning, and education. Even though they both working in the city they still are balancing other things, he was doing community activism with small groups of people in the sports hall and churches and trying to help them, even though he’s not really getting anything out of it. And second story was really interesting moment she described when she woken up and she’d seen him sad in the hotel room with deep thought and contemplation and she asked him what was going on, Barack’s turn around and said to her that he just thinks about income inequality. Now how many times do we spend time thinking about big issues in our time before we have the glamor, the glory that goes with it, but just the everyday things, the litter on the street that we live in, the robberies and the crime that’s going on, the mental health issues, and again this highlighted me that throughout their journey.
It’s not important who you are being like that respect place so much focus on trying to be a certain way, but instead sometimes it’s more useful to do is focus on what we’re becoming. All we can think about how we would like things to be. The direction that we want to move towards and this book is a whole adventure and her journey is all about becoming, becoming first lady, becoming Michelle Obama, becoming a mother, becoming a wife, but also maintaining her identity throughout these things and that different curveballs are gonna come our way, but we have to go within, introspect, use the resources and people around us, our intelligence, and creativity to make the best of what we have.
The powerful quote that I got from the book is if you don’t define who you are, someone else is gonna do that for you and they are probably not going to do as good job as you might do. So you constantly have to re-identify and redefine who am I, if I’m the first lady in the White House what do I want to be, how do I want to operate within these boundaries and trust me she had those boundaries where the media was painting her as the stereotype of an angry black woman, but leaping out of that definition, finding out and discovering herself and imprinting that on the velum. This is who I am, this is what I’m gonna be, I’m going to set up a gardening program, I’m going to educate people about obesity because I’m noticing how it’s affecting my children and I’m thinking about not the world as it is but the world as it should be.
