Becoming

Politics aside, I loved Becoming. Just one day after finishing the book, I already miss my new friend, Michelle Obama. I'd love to meet her for coffee or a glass of wine.

What did I like most about it? The fact that I could easily forget that I was reading the memoir of a former first lady. It felt like I was reading about someone I grew up with in Brooklyn. Or perhaps someone I'd attended college with. I have a few years on Michelle Obama, but she was writing about things I could 100% relate to. On so many levels. She worried that readers wouldn't see themselves reflected in her life. Here is one reader that did.

Like Obama, I grew up in a family of 4 with two loving parents. With a mom who went to bat for me at school when things didn't seem quite right academically. In a working class neighborhood, not realizing how middle class our neighborhoods were until we were thrust into life at east coast Ivy League institutions. LIke Obama, I always wondered if I was enough. I worried that I was an imposter. Unlike Obama who headed straight to law school after Princeton, because that was what other people would expect her to do, I didn't apply to business school until after I'd been out of college a few months. But I went to business school because of the expectations of others and not because I thought that was really what my next step needed to be. Obama talks about "the swerve," that point in life when you do something unexpected. Because of her marriage to a loving and supportive husband, her swerve was much more of a conscious decision than mine was.

Not only did we both have children born on major holidays, our children were born on the same major holiday. "Any parent of a child born on a major holiday knows that there's already a certain line to be walked between an individual celebration and more universal festivities." How many times did I tell my son - and myself - that the Fourth of July fireworks were celebrating him?

The Obamas collected what she called trinkets for their daughters. I called them souvenirs.I had three kids so we collected snow globes, souvenir mugs and key chains!

 In the girls' rooms we'd put on a display the growing collections of trinkets that Barack made a habit of bringing home from his various travels - snow globes for Sasha, key chains for Malia.

Michelle Obama was able to get to where she got with the support of friends. She really gets what being a friend and having a friend is all about. It's about "a thousand small kindnesses... swapped back and forth and over again." She was a bit wiser than me and more assertive than me.

We were all so used to sacrificing for our kids, our spouses, and our work. I had learned through my years of trying to find balance in my life that it was okay to flip those priorities and care only for ourselves once in a while. I was more than happy to wave this banner on behalf of my friends, to create the reason - and the power of a tradition - for a whole bunch of women to turn to kids, spouses, and colleagues and say, Sorry, folks, I'm doing this for me.

Obama, like me, loves a good sitcom.

I loved the Robinson's family's take on bullies. Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.

Obama's explanation of why each vote counts really resonated with me. I'd heard local election stories about why each and every vote counts. But she went through the steps of why each vote mattered in national elections.

I'd seen how just a handful of votes in every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both simple and incredibly effective.

 The final passage that I highlighted in the memoir was "I'm an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey." I couldn't agree more!