Michelle Obama: ‘Sorry Bono, don’t think for one second you could ever compete’

Leave it to Michelle Obama to achieve the near-impossible, writing a self-help book that doesn’t make your toenails curl from all the cringing. Please don’t be put off by the title. The Light We Carry is her follow-up to 2018′s Becoming, one of the best-selling memoirs in publishing history. It is full of useful insights: from choosing a partner to dealing with fear, from the art of friendship to coping with low-level depression.

By some miracle, the girl from the South Side of Chicago (“it wasn’t Sesame Street” she informs us drily) who became the first black First Lady in American history has, despite being married to former US president Barack Obama and living a life that’s almost unimaginable for most of us, remained deeply relatable. So relatable that you might find yourself, like me, in a nodding frenzy, turning down page corners and underlining whole paragraphs of this book.

Or maybe you know everything there is to know about life already. For the rest of us, this is a brilliant manual for living well, loving boldly, parenting wisely and so much more. This book was put in my hands at a bit of a low point and I found it hugely comforting, helpful and inspiring. Here are just a few lessons from the book that will stay with me …

How something small like knitting can help with the big stuff …

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It’s no surprise to read that Obama was stung by the 2016 election of Donald Trump. “It did hurt. It still hurts,” she writes. “It shook me profoundly to hear the man who’d replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable, refusing to condemn white supremacists or to support people demonstrating for racial justice.”

Between that hurt and the pandemic, she found herself slipping under a “blanket of despondency” and something that felt like “low grade” depression. She was in a place many of us can identify with. There was hopelessness and “not enoughness”. Around this time she started knitting to settle her anxious mind, but don’t worry, she’s not saying it fixed anything, only that it helped as a tool.

“I’m not here to tell you that knitting is a cure for anything. It won’t end racism or demolish a virus or vanquish depression. It won’t create a just world or slow climate change or heal anything big that’s broken. It’s too small for that. It’s so small it hardly seems to matter. And this is part of my point. I’ve come to understand that sometimes the big stuff becomes easier to handle when you deliberately put something small alongside it.”

The woman who brought us the phrase “when they go low, we go high” tells us “when I hit a point of feeling or thinking or seeing too much, I’ve learned to make the choice to go toward the small … I pick up the knitting needles and give my hands a chance to take over, to quietly click us out of that hard place”. She knit a soft crew-neck jumper for Barack because he gets chilly easily in winter. She made an alpaca halter top with pretty coiled straps for one of her daughters. She made an “itty bitty green hat” for a friend’s baby. For a moment, she could see that what she had made was exactly enough. And that felt like progress.

How it’s important to learn to feel comfortably afraid …

In a chapter called Decoding Fear, Obama tells a story from her childhood where she almost missed out on a chance to star in a school play because she was gripped by fear at the thought of sharing a stage with a giant stuffed turtle. She uses this story to dig down into the importance of examining fear. “I think it’s always worth asking yourself: Am I afraid because I am in actual danger or is it simply because I am staring newness in the face?” she writes.

Fear of newness, of being shifted out of her comfortable, settled, quiet life almost meant that she almost vetoed Barack Obama standing for president. Her husband had left the decision up to her. “I didn’t want change. I didn’t want discomfort or uncertainty, or loss of control. I didn’t want my husband to run for president because there was no predicting what lay on the other side of the experience. I had legitimate worries, of course, but what was I actually afraid of? It was the newness.” She said yes, as we all know, but says “it’s strange to think I could have altered the course of history with my fear”.

She goes on to explain how she was brought up to “go forth with a spoonful of fear and come back with a wagon full of competence”. The goal, she maintains, is not to banish fear but to understand it, and in understanding that your “fearful mind” is the self protecting impulse you knew as a child, to learn to live with it. She writes: “I’ve lived with my fearful mind for fifty-eight years now. We don’t get along. She makes me uneasy, she likes to see me weak. She keeps a giant overstuffed file folder containing every mistake and misstep I’ve ever made and is constantly scanning the universe for further evidence of my failings. She hates how I look, all the time and no matter what …. She’s every monster I’ve ever known and she is also me.”

The key, according to Obama, is to try to accept the fearful mind and address her (or him) with familiarity. She does it with the words: “Oh hello, it’s you again. Thanks for showing up. For making me so alert. But I see you. You’re no monster to me”.

How not to start your day with self-loathing, instead “start kind” …

Obama’s book is full of wisdom and insights from others. She has a story about her friend’s husband Ron, who has a way of starting his day that reminds me of Bill Cullen, who famously every morning looked in the mirror and told himself he was terrific and that he was going to have a great day.

Ron’s routine is even simpler. He starts each day looking into the mirror and saying “Heeyyy Buddy!”. “It sounds,” writes Obama “as if he’s saying hello to a beloved coworker or an old friend who’s turned up out of the blue. As if he’s pleasantly surprised by the person who has shown up to join him for whatever the day holds in store.” It was, she continues, “a glimpse of someone choosing to begin the day with kindness towards himself”.

Obama is a fan of the idea of starting kind in all sorts of ways, especially in a world where criticism and judgement can cloud all the joy. She quotes writer Toni Morrison speaking on Oprah, about being a parent or more generally an adult in the presence of children. “When a kid walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child. Does your face light up? That’s what they’re looking for.”

Obama explains how Morrison had learned, through parenting, to “dial back the judgement, to lead with something warmer, truer and more immediate - a lit up face, an unfettered sense of gladness, a recognition not of the combed hair or pulled up socks, but of the whole person who’d shown up before her. “Because, when they walked into a room I was glad to see them,” Morrison said. “It’s just as small as that, you see,”

The advice from Obama is to find your own version of Ron’s “Heeyy Buddy!” so you can start kind yourself each day. “None of this has to be done out loud, and it definitely does not need to be done in front of the mirror. You’re just trying, one way or the other, to box out the inner critic and push your gladness up front.”

How monogamous relationships are a choice and you find yourself choosing again and again to remain rather than run …

If you are an admirer of Barack Obama, the chapter called Partnering Well will do nothing to dim your enthusiasm. But more than well-worn Barack insights about how he sometimes leaves his socks on the floor, Michelle Obama writes a searingly honest appraisal of how long term relationships survive.

She’s asked all the time about her relationship with Barack, the “glittery” side as she calls it. I’m not surprised. Sometimes the way they look at each other after more than twenty years together would make you sick with jealousy. (There are some black and white photos in the book of them messing around and embracing that sum this up in a beautiful way). Obama serves us up dollops of realness about their relationship, the way their work with each other but also the ways in which they clash. She explores her philosophy on marriage and long-term relationships.

“If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You’ll find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter into a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in between space bouncing between the poles of beautiful and horrible.”

There is a fascinating glimpse into their relationship when in its early stages Barack brought her to Hawaii, where he was born, to meet his family for the first time. It was Christmas time. Each day they’d walk from Barack’s grandparent’s apartment several miles to Waikiki Beach, spreading towels on the beach, swimming and talking. And then at some point Barack would stand up, towel the sand off his body and say “Well, we’ve got to get back”. They’d schlep back all the way to a no-frills dinner with his grandparents, instead of what Michelle was imagining, a top-floor honeymoon suite in a hotel.

It took her years, she writes, to realise what she was being shown. That what would keep her heart stoked for the long haul was not mai tais or sunsets or honeymoon suites. It took ten evenings in a high-rise apartment watching Barack to fully understand what she was seeing.

“I was with a man who was doggedly devoted to his family, who went back every morning and every night, knowing it’d be a year before he’d be able to return. I was seeing his version of constancy, the way his sky was arranged. Later, after we’d moved in together I’d realise that even when physically separated, Barack remained at the centre of his family.”

When they sought a counsellor when their children were small, struggling with the distance his political career necessitated, she was reminded that their foundations were already strong. “The girls and I would remain at the centre of his universe no matter what. He’d shown it to me on that very first trip”.

How Michelle Obama’s Ma is a world-class philosopher who deserves a book of her own …

Apparently, when VIPs came to the White House for fancy dinners the main person they wanted to meet was Obama’s mother Marian Shields Robinson, known simply by staff as Mrs R. As it turned out Mrs R wasn’t bothered about meeting famous types. According to Obama she was dragged “kicking and screaming” to the White House, but Michelle “a grown up child” was desperate for the “gladness” she knew her widowed mother would bring to what was an formal, museum-like home.

Obama writes: “She came to D.C with only one intention, and that was to be a reliable support to Barack and me and a caring grandmother to our two kids. [Sasha and Malia]. Everything else was just fuss and noise”.

When any visiting celebs who came to dinner asked to see Mrs R, they were told she was on the third floor, in a sitting room that looked out over the Washington Monument. “Grandma’s upstairs in her happy place,” Obama would say. This, she adds, was code for “Sorry, Bono, Mom’s got a glass of wine, some pork ribs on her TV tray and Jeopardy! Is on. Don’t for one second think you could ever compete …”

Obama includes five pieces of advice from Mrs R, which are worth buying the book for alone. One of them is “Come home. We will always like you here”. As I mentioned, I read this book at a low point, and I am not ashamed to admit this section made me cry.

Mrs R constantly said “We will always like you here” to Obama and her brother Craig growing up. Once when Obama was in high school, she was complaining about a maths teacher she thought was arrogant. Her mother nodded, shrugged and told her irritated daughter: “But she’s got math in her head that you need in yours, so maybe you should just go to school and get the math”. Obama writes about how her mother looked at her then and smiled, as if this should be the simplest thing in the world to grasp: “You can come home to be liked. We will always like you here”.

In 2016, a month before Donald Trump was sworn in and eight years after she’d moved into The White House, Mrs R happily packed her bags.

Her daughter writes: “There was no fanfare, and at her insistence, no farewell party, either. She just moved out of the White House and went back to Chicago, returning to her place on Euclid Avenue. To her old bed and old belongings, pleased that she’d gotten the job done”.

In conclusion, after The Light We Carry the next self-help book I want to read is The Tao Of Marian Shields Robinson. Please make it happen, Michelle.

The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times by Michelle Obama is published this week by Viking