A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [55]
With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. “She loved to take children—any child—and sit them in her lap and tickle them or play games with them and examine their hands, tracing out the miracle of bone and tendon and skin and delighting at the truths to be found there,” her son would write many years later. She was playful—making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” She was not firm about bedtimes, said Kadi Warner, who, with her then husband, John Raintree, lived with Ann for several months when Maya was nine, but she insisted that her children get up in the morning. She preferred humor to harping. Where her children were involved, she was easily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She took her role seriously, while acknowledging, sometimes jokingly, the limits of her influence. As she told an Indonesian friend, Julia Suryakusuma, “One of the areas where I failed as a mother was that I couldn’t get my children to floss their teeth.” At the same time, Ann was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Those included such things as honesty, hard work, and fulfilling one’s duty to others. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she had worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. Because of his intelligence and education, she wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.
“If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama remembers her saying, “you’re going to need some values.”
Honesty—Lolo should not have hidden the refrigerator in the storage room when the tax officials came, even if everyone else, including the tax officials, expected such things. Fairness—the parents of wealthier students should not give television sets to the teachers during Ramadan, and their children could take no pride in the higher marks they might have received. Straight talk—if you didn’t like the shirt I bought you for your birthday, you should have just said so instead of keeping it wadded up at the bottom of your closet. Independent judgment—just because the other children tease the poor boy about his haircut doesn’t mean you have to do it too.
If some of Ann’s values sound midwestern, as Obama suggests, some were also Javanese. In a detailed survey of scholarly studies of Javanese society and culture, an anthropologist at the University of Indonesia, named Koentjaraningrat, included, in a list of ideal human virtues, “keeping good relations with others, helping as much as possible, sharing with neighbors, trying to understand others, and placing oneself in the situation of others.”
When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. Don Johnston, who worked with her in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling