The book, Becoming, authored by Mrs. Michelle Obama is a subtle and inspiring memoir of her life’s journey of growing up, which she attempts to summon in the process of Becoming. It’s a beautiful and graceful memoir, any ordinary woman would discover her relevance to; be it growing up as a kid or teenage dates, girls’ friendships, vulnerabilities, career swerves, achievements, dissatisfaction, sacrifices, compromises, uncertainty and so on. The book inspires us to take pride on our own story, to gather the courage to voice, to widen our pathways and to acknowledge that there’s more growing to be done, as we embrace of our life’s journey, as she concludes on her narration: There’s a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s a grace in being willing to know and hear others. This is for me how we become.
She has beautifully calligraphed and organized her stories into three mains aspects of Becoming; viz. Becoming me; Becoming us and Becoming more.
Being born in the African American working-class family in the southside of Chicago, the process of her growing up as a child has always been rooted in course of embracing the truth of her family legacies rooted down the history of slavery and minority. A family of four, Michelle is the second child to her parents and as a normal working-class African American family, her family struggled for the daily existence of livelihoods tussled between stability and uncertainty. Raised by strong, determinant and optimistic parents, and aspired with simple desires of a normal kid, she describes herself as an ambitious, raucous and determined kid and she exemplifies this with incidents like her tough tussle with her aunt during one of her piano lesson, demanding to a do-over for the wrong pronunciation in her kindergarten class to confidently succeed in the second attempt. As a kid, she was rigorous, fastidious, demanding, and vocal, as she never wanted to settle for less, for just being a black African American lineage of slavery. The color of her skin and her lineage, always made her extra vulnerable, putting her in the sphere of suspicions, judgments, resentment, and mistrust. Her journey to university initiated with the judgmental opinion of the college counselor, who considered her, as not being “Princeton Materials”, but she was determined not to let someone else's opinion dislodge everything she knew about herself, and finally she succeeded in getting admission in Princeton and become a Harvard graduate in law.
In the following, Becoming Us, she puts her journey with Barrack Obama, a Harvard graduate, and another black American; while she worked as the corporate lawyer. She gets inspired and extracted by his intellectuality, brilliance, visions, and determinations, to make meaningful impacts on the community. The relation, flourishes under differences between a box checker, taught to follow established path; and a visionary, optimistic fact guy, while also having different family upbringings: conventional traditional family versus complex diverse family stories. Her journey as a wife has been nothing different than any other wife’s; that, to standby, support and priorities dreams and career of her husband, while as a wife she struggles hard to maintain equilibrium between her family life, career, and fast-changing pace of her husband’s political career, though having struggled with the moments of insecurity, invisibility, judgments and self-sacrificing, as she gravitates herself in the normalcy of wife and mother. Her struggle for conceiving was not much different from any normal woman who has suffered or gone through a similar battle of infertility and miscarriages.
She was always reluctant to be part of politics and had little faith in it, so as a couple, they had continuous discussions over whether Barack should run for politics. She describes her struggle during her supporting role in the campaigns of Barracks’ Presidency. How her confidence and friendly attitude was targeted by the cynical critics and opponents for being an arrogant and indecent act and how media news attempted to put her individual hard work and achievements in the shadow of her husband’s political influence. During her tenure as the First lady, prioritizing the needs of her children, and letting them give an environment of normalcy for growing up, was all she struggled as a mother and mixing up liveliness, in the tradition of formality, in the white house. Her journey in the white house has been the continuous quest for normalcy and meaningful contributions to the community in the ways she could. As she describes, she was made to uphold the role of the First lady, the unofficial, the unclear, unprescribed role. But yet, she was determined to contribute to the purposeful work. Her initiation to combat child obesity by feeding healthy food to children initiated with a simple act of establishing gardens for locally grown products in the compound of White house. She managed to initiate leadership and mentoring programs for girls in the white house and to let in the children visit the white house on different occasions.
Becoming, is the story of an ordinary woman, who traveled the extraordinary path and managed to define herself in her own endurance, determination, and values instilled by her parents. Her father, despite suffering the constant pain of disability never let the family worry about him, her mother as a stay at home mom put every effort to secure and protect their children. She credits their parenthood for letting them grow up as independent, self-reliant, optimistic strong adults, capable of handling their own lives’ issues. However, she carries the heaviness of being a black African American woman and the burden of being an only black person or only female black person in the social domain defined by whiteness and maleness.
The story inspires us to value truth, griefs, resentments, strength, and authenticity, letting go of stereotypical biasness floating on the established norms and rules.
‘Becoming is not about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously towards a better self. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done’, Michelle Obama, Becoming.
THANK YOU, MICHELLE, FOR INSPIRING ANY NORMAL WOMAN LIKE ME TO SEE VALUES AND EMBRACE OUR OWN STORIES...... Finally concluding from your own words: If you don’t get there and define yourself, you will be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
Brinda Shrestha .