BECOMING ME, BECOMING US, BECOMING MORE. I love this piece not only because it speaks to me as a posse popularly known as minority but because Michelle is indeed a remarkable writer and orator. She walks us through her childhood stories and struggles that make her who she is. I am elated that this memoir was our first book in our book club and we sure had a healthy and rich discussion from this. I have so many wonderful notes below. Go ahead and get engulfed in the Shangri-La of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama’s literary expedition.
When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson’s world was the south side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig shared a bedroom in their family’s upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be unspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton, where she learned for the first time what it felt like to be the only black woman in a room, to the glassy office tower where she worked as a high-powered corporate lawyer- and where, one summer morning, a law student named Barack Obama appeared in her office and upended all her carefully made plans.
Here, for the first time, Michelle Obama describes the early years of her marriage as she struggles to balance her work and family with her husband fast-moving political career. She takes us inside their private debate over whether he should run for the presidency and her subsequent role as a popular but oft-criticized figure during the campaign. Narrating with grace, good, humor, and uncommon candor, she provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of her family’s history-making launch into the global limelight as well as their life inside the white house over eight momentous years-as she comes to know her country and her country comes to know her.
Becoming takes us through modest Iowa kitchens and ballrooms at Buckingham Palace, through moments of heart-stopping grief and profound resilience, bringing us deep into the soul of a singular, ground-breaking figure in history as she strives to live authentically, marshaling her personal strength and voice in service of a set of higher ideals. In telling her story with honesty and boldness, she issues a challenge to the rest of us: who are we and who do we want to become?
Notes from BECOMING
2 SPEECH YOU MUST WATCH!!!
BARACK OBAMA- 2004 Democratic National Convention Boston
MICHELLE OBAMA- Pepsi centre in Denver- Page 271
- There’s a lot I still don’t know about America, about life, about what the future might bring. But I do know myself. My father, Fraser taught me to work hard, laugh often, and keep my word. My mother, showed me how to think for myself and to use my voice. Together, in our cramped apartment on the south side of Chicago, they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country.
- Michelle- I knew my parents wouldn’t care whether I’d read every card correctly. I just wanted to achieve.
- FAILURE is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately by FEAR.
- Michelle’s Mother- “You don’t have to like your teacher”, she told me one day after I came home spewing complaints.”But that woman’s got the kind of math in her head that you need in yours. Focus on that and ignore the rest
- I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately- even alone
- Do we SETTLE for the world as it is, or do we WORK for the world as it should be?
- CRONYISM-the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications.
- We are each the sum total of our respective genetic codes as well as everything installed in us by our parents and their parents before them
- Barack was a serial over-committer. I was coming to understand, taking on new projects without much regard for limits of time and energy
- About her miscarriage- It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out
- We live by paradigms we know
- For better or worse, I’d had fallen in love with a man with a vision who was optimistic without being naïve, undaunted by conflict, and intrigued by how complicated the world was.
- He had to do everything TWICE as well. You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far
- I’d learned through the campaign stumbles that I had to be BETTER, FASTER, SMARTER, AND STRONGER than ever.
- Page 286- All their secret service names- Renaissance, Renegade, Raindance, Rosebud, Radiance
- White house facts- 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 28 fireplaces and 6 floors
- We gather because we have chosen HOPE over FEAR, UNITY of purpose over CONFLICT and DISCORD
- Life was better, always, when we could measure the warmth
- GRIEF and RESILIENCE live together. I learned this not just once as First Lady but many times over
- Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.
- It had hurt a little bit, realizing he was so close to having more freedom and more time, just as our daughters were beginning to step away. But we had to let them go. The future was theirs, Just as it should be
- When they go LOW, we go HIGH
- The OBAMA’s accomplishment reiterated- Page 414
- For me, BECOMING isn’t about arriving or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously towards a better self. The journey doesn’t end. I became a mother, but I still have a lot to learn from and give to my children. I became a wife, but I continue to adapt to and be humbled by what it means to truly love and make a life with another person. I have become, by certain measures, a person of POWER, and yet there are moment still when I feel INSECURE and UNHEARD.