TIFFANY DUFU
It’s only in recent decades that first ladies have been allowed to be imperfect. Until women like Eleanor Roosevelt, who on more than one occasion publicly disagreed with her husband’s policies, and Betty Ford, who was transparent about her battle with alcoholism, the First Lady represented the embodiment of feminine perfection: Stepford Wife-in-Chief. Michelle Obama is only the third to have a professional or graduate degree, public evidence of intellectual prowess and independence, and to have balanced her own high-profile career with her private role as wife and mother. She, along with Hillary Clinton, charted a path that allows future first ladies to do it their way. Her polarity inspires all of us to break the mold.
Michelle Obama is a wife, mother, sister, daughter and friend. She is a career woman, civic volunteer, gardener, rapper, dancer, pet owner and fitness ambassador. She is funny, honest, and down to earth. She has managed to pull off a nearly impossible feminine feat: she is both liked and respected. And she accomplishes all of this on a global stage. Managing the details of her life must be exhausting, but she makes it look so easy.
How does she have it all?
The irony is that Michelle Obama makes it look easy precisely because she is complicated. Simultaneously flawless and imperfect, she brilliantly navigates opposing forces. And in the tension we can all see ourselves.
In my work, I address the daunting pressure women face to do it all. A woman’s failure to do so is such a ubiquitous trope it has made for blockbuster comedy in films such as I Don’t Know How She Does It. I’ve navigated this pressure myself and have learned that behind every great woman who isn’t driving herself crazy to be perfect, there’s a village of people who applaud and support her beautiful imperfections.
In Amy Cuddy’s book, Presence, she defines presence as a “state of being attuned to and able to comfortably express our true thoughts, feelings, values and potential.”1 Michelle Obama has presence with a capital P in large part because she is comfortable with herself. The seeds of Mrs. Obama’s self-assuredness were planted on the South Side of Chicago where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, instilled in her enormous confidence. Her brother, Craig, remembers their father saying: “You don’t want to do things because you’re worried about people thinking they’re right; you want to do the right things.” According to Craig, being raised in this kind of environment: “You grow up not worrying about what people think about you.”2 The affirmation Michelle absorbed in her youth became the core of her current conviction about her identity. “I have never felt more confident in myself, more clear on who I am as a woman,” she said a few months before she turned 50.3
I know from listening to hundreds of women’s stories that powerful presence is only attained through recognizing our unique value. Yet even for me, understanding my value has been a tough journey. I remember sitting in a graduate school literary theory class, questioning my own credibility and feeling “lucky” that I was admitted into the program because deep down I didn’t feel deserving. Twenty years later, in any room I’m in, whether I’m on a stage, in a parent-teacher conference, or sitting at a board table, I try to be cognizant of the lens that would be missing if my voice was absent. I’ve even taught myself how to recognize my value in a dressing room. I used to try on a dress, look in the mirror, and ask, “Can I wear this dress?” Now I pose confidently in the mirror and ask myself, “Can this dress wear me?” It’s this feeling, that you are no longer a planet orbiting someone else’s sun, but are now your own center of gravity, that Michelle emits so powerfully.
Michelle Obama isn’t worried about what people think about her because she knows what she stands for. She puts herself out there to achieve her goal in ways the public has never seen a First Lady do. To build intimacy and goodwill she hugs everyone—including the Queen of England, who apparently hadn’t been hugged in 57 years. To promote healthy eating she personally planted a garden on the White House lawn, which resulted in numerous press photos of her literally getting her hands dirty. For the first time in our nation’s history we saw a sweaty First Lady. We’ve also seen one that raps and dances. In an effort to raise awareness about the importance of getting a college education, Michelle Obama teamed up with comedian Jay Pharoah to drop rhymes in a music video. To advocate healthy living and combat obesity, she challenged Ellen DeGeneres to an on-air dance-off. In her antics we see her vulnerability and her courage. Michelle Obama has beautifully established trust with millions of people, especially the nation’s youth. “Although I’m the first lady of the United States, I’m no different from you,” she told a group of high school students.4 And we all believe her.
Michelle Obama has convinced us that she’s “real” even though she lives in an alternate reality from the rest of us. Though it’s likely been a long time since she stayed up all night making lemon bars for the school bake sale or had to feed her kids fast food from the drive-through at the end of a long working mommy day, when asked whether she’s ever had a mom crisis she unequivocally responds, yes. “There’s not a minute that goes by that I’m not hoping and praying that I’m doing right by these girls … All we can do is do our best … You don’t know until it’s over.”
As a parent myself, on most days I doubt whether my job will ever be “over.” It seems that with each developmental phase, what my kids require from me changes. Yet I remain consistent in my overall parenting strategy: focus eighty percent of your effort on being the kind of person you’d want your children to be. They are watching us carefully and they are sophisticated sponges. What I most want them to soak up is that they, too, can keep it real, that they can be the most authentic versions of themselves.
Michelle Obama is also both disciplined and flexible. For someone who makes it all look so natural, Michelle Obama is very well rehearsed. She likes control and puts herself in positions where the risk of a mistake or a surprise is minimal.5 On the campaign trail she often spent hours researching and preparing for a speech. Just like her confidence, Michelle’s work ethic was instilled early. Her father was the epitome of grit. His multiple sclerosis entitled him to disability benefits, yet he worked managing high-pressure water boilers at a water filtration plant his entire adult life, never retiring. Having a parent with a disability meant that Michelle learned the value of structure and the power of daily habits. As a student she would often stay up very late or get up early to study. Now that she’s raising her own daughters, she is instilling in them a similar discipline. Though the Obamas are privileged with a staff to manage every household detail, Michelle insists that her daughters make their own beds each morning. She also picks one of their sports herself—to ensure the girls get regular practice doing something they don’t necessarily like. Michelle Obama’s number one rule? No whining.
In Rory Vaden’s book, Take the Stairs, he explores the role that self-discipline plays in our success. In a world that values one-stop shopping and quick and easy recipes, it turns out that achieving what we want requires instituting mundane daily practice that we might not necessarily enjoy. For me, one of those practices is running. One mile can be grueling, especially on a cold, dark winter morning. Yet my physical fitness promotes endurance in other areas of my life, and I’ve never had so many aha moments or innovative ideas as when my body is in motion. I’ve met women whose self-discipline manifests in other ways. One of my colleagues sets her intention each morning at 5 a.m. through meditation. I recently met a young writer. She drafts ten pages per day with or without muse.
For the First Lady discipline is the key to excellence and exercising your highest potential. It’s also the key to championship. When initially exploring a presidential bid with political consultants, including David Axelrod, it was Michelle who insisted they develop a strategy that would be the safest path to the White House. She wasn’t interested in pursuing Barack’s candidacy unless that was the number one goal. Michelle’s mother, Marian, competed in the Illinois Senior Olympics right before turning sixty. “You don’t just run to be running,” she famously said, “you run to win.”6
Michelle’s commitment to discipline surprisingly gives way to flexibility. For her, achieving excellence requires adaptation. Michelle was furious on the campaign trail when campaign staffers were slow to give her feedback about her communication style, which was perceived in the media as too edgy. She wanted to be an asset to the campaign and insisted that she could adapt, which she did.7 Fast forward eight years; her speech at the 2016 Democratic convention turned the tide of party divisiveness, inspired the nation, and was heralded as one of the best speeches in political convention history. Talk about taking the edge off.
One of the beautiful ways in which her flexibility manifests is in her willingness to meet people where they are, especially when they have opposing views. In 2001, Michelle had only been on her new job as director of community outreach for the University of Chicago medical center for a few weeks when an activist, Omar Shareef, disrupted the groundbreaking ceremony of a new children’s hospital. He was leading protesters who accused the university of not giving enough business to African American construction workers. Michelle immediately invited Shareef to discuss the matter. She was savvy enough to know that the most effective way to represent the interest of the university was to meaningfully engage the local community and listen to their concerns. Within four weeks, she had brokered an agreement.8
Another way that Michelle reaches people where they are is by plugging into popular culture. Michelle Obama has mastered the art of leveraging celebrities that we care about to make us care about the things she does. She enlisted music heavy hitters Missy Elliott, Kelly Rowland, Janelle Monae, Jada Grace and Kelly Clarkson to release a song “This Is for My Girls.” The hit single is the latest fuel for her Let Girls Learn/#62MillionGirls initiative, which promotes girls’ education globally. Michelle Obama’s flexibility usually serves the cause. “There are many people who can’t hear me precisely because I’m first lady of the United States,” she recently told an audience at the interactive media festival South by Southwest.9 She always has a message, but understands that she is not always the best person to deliver it.
Like her discipline, Michelle Obama is passing along her flexibility to her daughters and to us. Her advice for her older daughter, Malia: “I just encourage her to breathe … to lower the perfection bar.” Her advice to other women: “Be open. Give yourself a break. Stop thinking that there is an answer to that question. Just live your life and figure out what’s in your heart. What you need will change every year. And you’ve got to be ok with that.”
Finally, Michelle Obama is both traditional and disruptive. The self-proclaimed mom-in-chief embraces cultural norms about women’s reign at home. Being a mother is her first priority. And she advances societal stereotypes about men’s lackluster domestic performance, making public comments about Barack’s untidiness and unwillingness to chip in: “He can cook, but he doesn’t.” In many ways they are a typical couple. She tries to get him to quit smoking. He tries to get her to take bigger risks.
Like many women, Michelle Obama’s early impressions about women’s roles were formed at home. Marian Robinson was one of the very few stay-at-home mothers in their South Side Chicago neighborhood, a privilege that allowed her to volunteer her time and imbed in her children a strong commitment to civic engagement. But she also learned traditional ideals from society at large. Like many young girls of her era, Michelle had an Easy Bake Oven and plenty of Barbie dolls. “Barbie seemed to be the standard for perfection,” she said later. “That was what the world told me to aspire to.”10 Michelle watched the same “choosy moms choose Jif” commercials that we all did, and she too was indoctrinated with the message that a woman’s most important job is caregiver.
It was only later that Michelle Robinson came to believe her adult life would involve more than cooking for Ken in their dream house. For Michelle, to forgo pursuing a career would be to squander the education she and her parents worked so hard for her to attain. It also represented a huge financial risk, since her husband’s career as an activist and politician was hardly a guarantee of economic freedom. After her marriage in 1992 she refused to conform to the domestic model of stay-at-home mom or socialite, always having a career separate from her husband that was stable. But the demands of working full time outside the home and being the boss inside the home took its toll. Soon she would discover, like so many of us, that our favorite TV mom sold us a bill of goods. Claire Huxtable couldn’t possibly have cooked, cleaned, looked fabulous, had a delightful marriage, birthed and raised five perfectly well-behaved children … and made partner at a law firm. Eventually, the reality of doing it all began to create a rift in Michelle and Barack’s relationship.
Early in their marriage it bothered Michelle that Barack’s career took priority over hers and tension between them mounted, but instead of stewing in resentment indefinitely she decided to be the change agent in her own life, the way she had been taught. She decided to shape what was in her control. Eventually she came to realize that “I needed support. I didn’t necessarily need it from Barack.”11 Michelle refused to be the working mommy martyr and began doing one of the most difficult things for working mothers: she prioritized herself. She started leaving the house at dawn to go workout, which forced her husband to take care of the girls in the morning. She built a village of friends, family and babysitters so that support would always be a text away. She learned to ask for help and no longer considered her success a solo endeavor. The combination of her traditional and disruptive personas represents a modern mantra: a good woman sacrifices, but not at her own expense.
Michelle Obama takes her job as First Lady just as seriously as any other. She sees it as another important opportunity she doesn’t want to squander. “This is a rare platform and I have to use it to the best of my ability.”
When you google the word “perfect” the first definition is “having all the required or desirable elements, qualities or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be.” The sample sentence? She strove to be the perfect wife.
It took me a long time to adopt this mantra myself and to embrace my own imperfection. For the first eight years of my marriage I was not so much striving as I was on autopilot. During my childhood my mother was a homemaker and preacher’s wife. My security was her pep talks, peach cobbler, and the meticulousness with which she cornrowed my sister’s and my hair in the same direction. I wanted to be like her. And I was just as inspired by my mother-in-law, who left her village in Ghana as a girl to board a ship alone to London. Many years later she returned home with a nursing degree, husband, three children and an entrepreneurial spirit, eventually building the largest commercial fishing venture in the country. Her best advice to me: If things are getting easier, it’s probably because you’re headed downhill. Standing next to my husband on my wedding day, informed by their examples, I just assumed that my primary role as wife and mother would involve plenty of hard work, sacrifice and selflessness. Little did I know, standing under the arch, that too much of anything is peril. It took three years after having my first child for me to discover that we can achieve more by not caring which direction the clothes hangers are facing, by not apologizing with reckless abandon, by letting the mail pile up and by ordering take-out. I now know the same secret that Michelle does: in order to have it all we can’t do it all.
Michelle Obama is the perfect First Lady because she is imperfect. Michelle doesn’t pretend to be the perfect anything. And she admonishes women to not give in to the pressure. “We have to get off the guinea pig wheel of trying to meet other people’s expectations,” she told me when I met her at the White House. But she does aspire to excellence. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint my parents. I wouldn’t want to disappoint the country.”12
Her complexity is her dichotomy. That is why she resonates. American society has a knack for punishing complex women. We like them to fit one mold. But because Michelle lives in the middle, no matter who you are when you look at her you see yourself.