A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [153]
When we met in July 2010, Obama was eighteen months into his term as president. It had been a scorching summer. The administration had been taken up with the war in Afghanistan, the biggest oil spill in history, an economic recovery that felt fitful at best. That morning, however, Obama had signed into law a major overhaul of the financial regulatory system, the product of a series of reforms he had proposed thirteen months earlier. By the time he settled into a chair in the Oval Office that afternoon, he seemed downright buoyant. He spoke about his mother with fondness, humor, and a degree of candor that I had not expected. There was also in his tone at times a hint of gentle forbearance. Perhaps it was the tone of someone whose patience had been tested, by a person he loved, to the point where he had stepped back to a safer distance. Or perhaps it was the knowingness of a grown child seeing his parent as irredeemably human.
“She was a very strong person in her own way,” Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother. “Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent—the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother, who was a much more orderly and much more conservative—I don’t mean politically but conservative in terms of how you structure your life—a much more conventional person. Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”
Disorganized, I observed, could mean almost anything—from a messy house to a messy life.
“All of the above,” he said.
As a child, the president went on to say, he did not care that his mother was uninterested in housekeeping or cooking or traditional homemaker activities. In fact, she used to joke about that. But in her handling of financial matters, he said, she put herself in vulnerable positions and was “always at the margins.” He ascribed the struggle over her insurance at the end of her life to “the fact that she’d never make a decision about a job based on did it provide health insurance benefits that were stable and secure, or a pension, or savings or things like that.” Her neglect of those details was a source of tension between her and her parents, “because they always felt they had to kind of come in and provide assistance to smooth over some of her choices.”
But he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents in the round, “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give—“a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.” People wonder about his calm and even-keeled manner, the president observed. He credited the temperament he was born with and the fact that “from a very early age, I always felt I was loved and that my mother thought I was special.”
Looking back, he said, many of his life choices were informed by her example. His decision to go into public service, he said, grew out of values she instilled—“a sense that the greatest thing you can do in the world is to help somebody else, be kind, think about issues like poverty and how can you give people a greater opportunity ? . . . So I have no doubt that a lot of my career choices are rooted in her and