The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama

Author:Michelle Obama [Obama, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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These days, I’ll sometimes catch sight of my husband from a slight distance and feel as if I’m peering through the scrim of time. What I see is a gray-haired, slightly less scrawny, slightly more world-weary version of the twenty-seven-year-old guy who arrived as a summer associate at my corporate law office decades ago, damp from a rainstorm, having traveled without an umbrella, and only a little bit sheepish for having shown up late to his first day of work. What made his smile so memorable? Why did his voice sound so good?

He was charming then. He is charming now. He was minorly famous then—a law student whose intellect was creating something of a stir in legal circles—and he is, I suppose, majorly famous now. But all that said, he’s really the exact same person, with the same poise, the same heart and hang-ups, the same perennial struggle to be punctual or to remember something as basic and functional as an umbrella on a rainy day. He’s that same quixotic, alternately smooth and geeky person I found in the waiting area of the law firm all those years ago, whose hand I shook, whose lanky height and unusual countenance I took in for the first time, not yet understanding that I was looking at my truest love and my life’s greatest disrupter.

Like a lot of people, I had ideas about what marriage would be like, and few of them turned out to be right. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to play fortune-telling games like MASH, which forecast where we’d live, what kind of car we’d drive, and how many kids we’d have, or another that involved folding up a piece of paper, origami-style, covered with hidden options for who we would marry written under the flaps. We’d giggle and gasp at the various results: Would I really marry Marlon Jackson from the Jackson 5, live in California, and drive a station wagon? Would my friend Terry actually have nine kids with our classmate Teddy and live in a mansion in Florida?

What I knew was that the possibilities seemed both grand and endless. What I thought I knew was that the end result would be a dreamy spectacle of a wedding followed by years of hot bliss and a passionate, never-settle-for-less style of living. Because wasn’t that how it was supposed to be? I was too young, still, to see my own parents’ marriage as something I wouldn’t mind having for myself one day. They were committed and companionable, running a serviceable and friendly joint operation, governed by common sense. They made each other laugh. They got all the chores done. At Valentine’s Day and on my mom’s birthday every year, my dad would drive over to the Evergreen Plaza shopping center and buy her a fancy new outfit, delivering it to her gift-wrapped with a bow.

I understood they were generally happy, but I had also watched a lot of All My Children, absorbing

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