Becoming — A Reflection While Still Reading

I’ve been reading Michelle Obama’s book “Becoming” and feeling a lot of emotions. She takes us through her childhood on the Southside of Chicago, through her college life at Princeton, into her law career and corporate America. She walks us through her romance with Obama, then her marriage, and of course, through her years in the White House as first lady. I have missed her presence on the national stage, and after reading the book, I miss her even more.

Reading about her childhood is like sitting next to a warm fire, or as some of my friends have said, “reading it or listening to her is a balm.” She and I are nearly the same age, and so many of her early experiences reminded me of my own. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say I believe this book works because she tells her story so humbly, moving through the different stages in her life with deep reflection and awareness of how she got where she is. She shares a story not steeped in privilege but one of a girl with loving parents, a loving community, healthy ambition, hard work, and high moral character. Her story is essentially American but an America that looks and feels and cries and is moved by love and perplexed by hate in the same way I am. Her accomplishments, though they are obviously hers, feel like mine, too, because she brings the reader along with her in such an inclusive and humble way, you feel like you are walking beside her, not gazing from a distance.

I am still reading, and now that I’m reading about the days in the White House. It’s pretty traumatic to relive from her inside lens the type of assault the family suffered, and regularly. Nonetheless, even these parts have Michelle’s balanced commentary, mixed, of course, with many of the great initiatives she brought to young girls and to school-age children and to the public. I don’t know all the reasons Michelle named her book Becoming, but for me, besides the obvious that it’s about her coming of age and becoming FLOTUS, I see the title as having overtones of America still trying to become what it promised it is supposed to be. Also, for me, The Obama’s are proof that America can become and cannot.