A Lesson in Choosing from the Nation’s Former Mom-in-Chief

Contributed

Obama: Michelle Obama, former First Lady, author, and icon, will appear in Erie on Oct. 12 for ‘A Moderated Conversation with Michelle Obama,’ part of the Jefferson Educational Society’s Global Summit XVIII at the Erie Insurance Arena.

As Barack Obama placed his hand on the Bible on a near-freezing day in 2009, my 10-year-old eyes were not fixed on him but on the young girl in the blue coat to his right – Malia. While I understood this was an important moment, I became more attentive to what the young girls were doing, and I wasn’t the only one.

From the moment that they essentially became American royalty, Michelle Obama was not willing to hand her children over to the Secret Service and nannies. Instead, she called herself Mom-in-Chief to signify her commitment to her children above all else, what she considers her “greatest accomplishment.”

Her commitment to family soon spread as she used her platform to support other families and children across the nation. But before I ever learned the names of her national initiatives, I learned that same lesson closer to home.

A handful of months after that chilly January day, Erie offered a warm welcome to R&B powerhouse Mary J. Blige. I was enamored by the star power of Blige, who traveled to Erie to help the ABC show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition rebuild the home of Clara Ward. Ward’s eastside home was literally crumbling around her as she focused her time and energy on helping children through her Youth Development Center, aiding children and families while battling her own illnesses and struggling to pay her bills.

I didn’t know Ward’s name before that, but she became my first real lesson in the quiet power of Black women who hold up everyone around them. Over the next eight years, I would learn that lesson many times over.

In 2010, Michelle launched Let’s Move!, an initiative to help end childhood obesity, resulting in healthier school lunch standards via the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and planting a White House Kitchen Garden. In 2011, she joined Jill Biden, Ed.D., in supporting military families in employment and wellness through the Joining Forces project. By 2014, she created Reach Higher, inspiring students to pursue higher education, and in 2015, Let Girls Learn expanded access to education for adolescent girls globally.

It was clear she wanted to make a path for girls, especially Black girls, to dream big and reach those dreams – a journey she personally navigated.

Michelle, her older brother Craig, and her parents lived in a small upstairs apartment on South Euclid Avenue in Chicago, which they rented from her great-aunt Robbie and great-uncle Terry, who lived downstairs. Space was very tight, and their grandfather eventually built a wooden partition in their bedroom to give Michelle and Craig the feeling of having their own private spaces.

Robbie taught piano downstairs, and Michelle began learning when she was just 4. She didn’t see eye-to-eye with Robbie, but she practiced over and over before her first formal piano recital and felt she was ready.

“As much as I found Robbie to be snippy and inflexible, I’d also internalized her devotion to rigor,” Michelle wrote in her 2018 bestselling memoir Becoming. “I knew my song so well I hardly had to think about it. I just had to start moving my hands.”

But there was one problem: she was sitting at a perfect piano. She was used to sitting in the “squat little music room,” at a piano with “a honky-tonk patchwork of yellowed keys” and a conveniently placed chip on the middle C key, so she always knew where to place her hands. “Now suddenly, I was aware of people watching me from their chairs as I stared hard at the high gloss of the piano keys, finding nothing there but sameness,” she writes. “I had no clue where to put my hands.”

She searched the audience looking for her mother’s face but instead found Robbie, coming to her aid. Up until that point, she saw Robbie as an enemy, but in that moment, she was an angel, perhaps knowing that Michelle was, for the first time in her life, coming face to face with the disparities of the world.

I cannot say it’s a disparity that I experienced, and neither did my family before me. What I did experience was the benefit of Michelle facing those disparities head-on.

After graduating from high school, she attended Princeton University, then Harvard Law School.

Immediately after graduating from Harvard, she began working at the law firm Sidley Austin LLP, where she met Barack. The two fell in love and married not far from where she grew up, and they stayed on the South Side to raise their two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

The family’s ascent to the White House proved that you don’t have to look a certain way, act a certain way, make a lot of money, or belong to a certain faith group to matter. She made her position as First Lady feel accessible to others, opening the White House to diverse groups, students, and community members, and she appeared on daytime talk shows and popular media outlets to connect with everyday citizens on a personal level. That’s something she continues to do even now. On Oct. 12, Erie will get an even closer look at her as the Jefferson Educational Society hosts “A Moderated Conversation with Michelle Obama” at the Erie Insurance Arena for Global Summit XVIII.

In full transparency, I am part of the small team at the Jefferson, and I have my own responsibilities to make the Summit possible alongside my incredible coworkers, but I did not choose who was invited. Last year, after President Obama’s Global Summit appearance, I did hear the whispers of people asking, “How will they top this?” and “What will they do next?”

So when I learned that the First Lady had accepted the invitation, pride swelled within me, because although Barack’s legacy is largely defined by his presidency and political achievements, Michelle’s is cultural. While her husband was commander-in-chief, she was chief cultural commander, demanding equity, empathy, fairness, and inclusion.

She has continued to share that sentiment even after leaving the White House.

In 2018, she shared how those values became so important to her when she published her memoir, Becoming – a candid look at her life as a wife, mother, Black woman, and First Lady that spent over 130 weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers list and earned her a Grammy. In 2022, she followed it with The Light We Carry, offering practical tools for navigating uncertain times. She’s backed that storytelling with action. Through the Girls Opportunity Alliance, she supports girls’ education worldwide; through When We All Vote, she’s helped register voters by the millions; and through the Partnership for a Healthier America, she’s helped curb food insecurity across the country. In 2018, she and Barack co-founded Higher Ground Productions, extending her “when they go low, we go high” ethos into storytelling that bridges cultural divides and elevates underrepresented voices.

Michelle continues that commentary on her podcast IMO with her brother Craig. The two host famous guests and answer listener-submitted questions, advising on personal dilemmas, relationships, parenting, and careers.

During a live recording of that podcast at SXSW London in June 2025, Michelle explained that in the new chapter of her life post-White House and as her children are grown up, she’s focused more on herself and letting those of us coming after her flourish.

“The choices I make now are going to be for me – not for my husband, my kids, the country, the world,” she said. “At some point, it’s important for our generation to step out of the way and be prepared to step out of the way so that the next generation can really sit in these seats.”

The same idea of choosing what serves her now and capitalizing on her authenticity provides some insight into what she might talk about when she comes to Erie in October.

Namely, her newest book The Look, published in November 2025, is a 200-photograph collection that traces her style evolution from First Lady to post-White House life, revealing the team and thinking behind some of her most iconic looks. She’s spoken candidly about the racialized and gendered scrutiny she faced over her clothes and her body, and about her choice, in recent years, to reclaim that image on her own terms – favoring designers of color who’d never dressed a First Lady before, and swapping the chemically straightened hair of her early White House years for the natural, protective braided styles she wears now.

This new chapter is also fitting as it brought her back to where her story started. In June, Michelle and Barack opened the Obama Presidential Center, a 19-acre campus in Chicago’s Jackson Park – steps from the South Side neighborhood where she grew up learning piano from her great-aunt Robbie. The $850 million campus includes interactive exhibits spanning the nation’s founding through the Civil Rights Movement and Obama’s 2008 election, a full-scale replica of the Oval Office, a gallery devoted to Michelle’s most iconic looks, a fruit and vegetable garden, an athletic center, and a new branch of the Chicago Public Library complete with a President’s Reading Room. It was built, deliberately, as a community hub rather than a monument – a place designed around the idea that ordinary citizens, not just presidents, have the power to enact change.

Barack has said he doesn’t want the Center to be an exercise in nostalgia that “lets us off the hook” when looking to the future. Instead, he wants visitors to walk away thinking, “that was possible, which means I can do that.”

In a speech that moved her husband to tears, Michelle returned to that same idea of choice. She named the moment plainly: “anxious and divisive times,” things feeling “upside down,” fact and fiction blurring together. The woman married to the “Hope Guy” made sure that people know hope, like nostalgia, is not just a feeling.

“Hope is a choice,” she said. “Whether or not we use our voices to speak up is a choice. Voting is a choice. Being a decent human being is a choice. Believing that we still hold the power to build a country that reflects us all is a choice.”

As Mom-in-Chief, memoirist, and advocate, she’s made the same case again and again: the future isn’t handed to us. It’s built, deliberately, by the people willing to do the work. So when Michelle Obama takes the stage in Erie on Oct. 12, the real question isn’t how we topped last year’s visit – it’s what we’ll choose to take from this one.

Monday, Oct. 12 // 6 p.m. // Erie Insurance Arena, 809 French St. // For info or virtual tickets, visit: jeserie.org.

Chloe Forbes is the assistant director of publications at JES, and a contributing writer at the Erie Reader. Reach her at chloeforbes14@gmail.com