We are loving so much about former President Barack Obama‘s new memoir A Promised Land, which is out today — and not only because we’re finally (finally!) in a place where we can feel somewhat hopeful about the United States again. Aside from political insights and words of wisdom, Obama also shares plenty of (often heart-wrenching) truths about what it means to be a working parent.
At one point early in the book, Obama describes cuddling with baby Malia shortly after her birth in 1998. “I thought about the generations of men who had missed such moments,” he writes of all the American fathers who had been workers first, parents second — or, you know, third or fourth. He goes on to reference his own father, economist Barack Hussein Obama Sr., who divorced Barack Jr.’s mom and left the U.S. for Kenya in 1964, when Barack Jr. was three. The father and son met only one more time, seven years later.
“I thought about my own father,” Obama continues in the memoir, “whose absence had done more to shape me than the brief time I’d spent with him.” He concludes that he “realized that there was no place on earth I would rather be” than with his children.
This echoes what Obama wrote on Instagram this week, along with a throwback photo of his family: “The fact that my own father was largely absent from my childhood helped shape my ideas about the kind of father I intended to be. When Malia was born, I made a promise to myself that my kids would know me, that they’d grow up feeling my love keenly and consistently, knowing that I’d always put them first.”
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Still, putting family first is easier said than done — even (especially?) for the president of the United States. In the memoir, Obama also notes that he was only able to stay home for a few weeks after Malia was born. He then outlines the difficulties of going back to work and the inequalities of emotional labor and childcare that almost tore him and Michelle apart.
“Michelle bore the brunt of all this,” Barack writes in A Promised Land of Michelle’s early-motherhood days spent “shuttling between mothering and work, unconvinced that she was doing either job well…knowing the whole cycle would start all over again in a few short hours while her husband was off doing ‘important things.'” He adds that they argued more than pre-kids, and that Michelle even told him at one point, “‘This isn’t what I signed up for, Barack… I feel like I’m doing it all by myself.’” It’s uncanny how much we regular non-presidential mothers can relate to that statement.
So how did they come out on the other side? Dedication, hard work, recommitment to equality, and of course counseling. As Michelle Obama told Oprah in 2018, both she and Barack needed to share their “vulnerability and also learn to love differently.”
Despite Barack’s demanding career and the hard road to get there, he’s a hell of a lot more present in his children’s lives than his father was in his. Consider Obama just one example of how our own childhood trauma or abandonment doesn’t make us worse parents; it can even make us better, stronger, more determined ones.
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