Barack Obama reiterates the stress involved in his executive role as the President of the United States (2008-2016) which inadvertently caused issues with wife, Michelle.
In his new 768 page memoir, A Promised Land, he reveals how being the president of the US took a toll on his now 28 year marriage to wife Michelle, 56.
Obama said that behind the scenes, friends and even family treated her as “secondary” in importance to him.
Obama writes that once they were in the White House as America’s first family along with daughters Malia, now 22, and Sasha, now 19, “I continued to sense an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant, like the faint thrum of a hidden machine.”
Not only had Michelle’s duties amplified as first lady, she was also the subject of “scrutiny and attacks.”
“It was as if, confined as we were within the walls of the White House, all her previous sources of frustration became more concentrated, more vivid, whether it was my round the clock absorption with work, or the way politics exposed our family to scrutiny and attacks, or the tendency of even friends and family members to treat her role as secondary in importance,” he continued.
He said that caused him to lay awake at night next to Michelle, thinking of life before his presidency, “when everything between us felt lighter, when her smile was more constant and our love less encumbered, and my heart would suddenly tighten at the thought that those days might not return.”
Meanwhile, the erstwhile US president took to social media to acknowledge his mother’s moral culture inculcated in him to thrive successfully as just a man, husband, father, and US president. The father of two wrote:
“As I recount in my book, A Promised Land, my mother, Ann Dunham, was strong, smart, and marched to her own beat. For her, the world offered endless opportunities for moral instruction. My sister Maya and I got early lessons about the struggle for civil rights, the impact of poverty on people around the world, and the importance of respecting other cultures and considering other points of view. My mother believed that power came not from putting people down but rather through lifting them up. And she was always certain that in the face of injustice and humanity’s more primal impulses, logic and progress would always prevail. “The world is complicated, Bar,” she used to say. “That’s why it’s interesting.” #APromisedLand”
Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, becomes available for sale on November 17, 2020.
