Michelle Obama on the power of small

(Third of four parts)

When Michelle Obama came home from school complaining about the arrogance of a teacher, her mother Marian Robinson listened carefully. But Marian did not complain about the teacher, or demand a conference. Instead, she told her daughter, “You don’t have to like your teacher, and she doesn’t have to like you. But she’s got math in her head that you need in yours, so maybe you should just go to school and get the math.”

Marian smiled at the future first lady of the United States. “You can come home to be liked. We will always like you here.”

But what if your home is not safe, asks my teenage student, whose parents scream at her if she does not make the honor roll. What if your father favors your deceased sister, and wishes she were alive instead of you, says a second-generation member of a family business.

Build your own home, I tell them, even if it is not easy. Talk to your parents, I tell my student, and if they don’t listen, seek comfort in trusted teachers and friends. In the meantime, do your best in school and when you become financially independent, find your own safe place.

Your parents are still grieving, I tell the son, but know you are loved by your wife, your children, your employees. Do your best for the business, and do it also in honor of your sister.

“You may need to courageously remake your idea of home, scraping together a shelter for yourself,” says Obama in her book “The Light We Carry.”

“You may need to cultivate a chosen family rather than a biological one, protecting the boundaries that keep you safe. Some of us will have to make bold changes in our lives, rebuilding and repopulating our spaces many times over before we discover what home truly feels like, what it means to be accepted, supported, and loved,” she adds.

And when the world feels overwhelming, we can harness the power of small things. At the height of the pandemic, with national and global turmoil under her husband’s successor, Obama went into “low-grade depression.”

“Whether or not the 2016 election was a direct rebuke of [Barack and me],” she says, “it did hurt. It still hurts.”

She kept busy, but wondered if anything made a difference. When the Democratic Party asked her to speak at their national convention in 2020, she did not immediately commit.

At her lowest point, she picked up two beginner-sized knitting needles. “In all my decades of staying busy, I had always presumed that my head was fully in charge of everything, including telling my hands what to do. It hadn’t really ever occurred to me to let things flow the opposite way. But knitting … detoured me away from my anxiety, just enough to provide some relief.”

“Knitting is [not] a cure for anything. It won’t end racism or demolish a virus or vanquish depression. It won’t create a just world or slow climate change or heal anything big that’s broken. It’s too small for that … But sometimes the big stuff becomes easier to handle when you deliberately put something small alongside it.”

She continues to knit today.

Early in the pandemic, faced with worries that I did not want to spill over to students whom I continue to counsel, I started doing the Inquirer Crossword and Sudoku puzzles. Accomplishing these small things helps me manage larger ones.

“Look for something that’ll help rearrange your thoughts, a pocket of contentedness where you can live for a while,” Obama says. “And by this I don’t mean sitting passively in front of your television or scrolling through your phone. Find something that’s active, something that asks for your mind but uses your body as well. Immerse yourself in a process. And forgive yourself for temporarily ducking out of the storm … The hard problems and wearying thoughts will always be there … the answers slow to come.”

In 2020, Obama faced a camera in a small room—her first without a live audience—and spoke from the heart. She told her country about what they had lost and what they could still recover. She asked everyone to cast their vote.

Next week: Michelle Obama on going high

Get “The Light We Carry” by Michelle Obama at National Bookstore (nationalbookstore.com).

Queena N. Lee-Chua is with the board of directors of Ateneo’s Family Business Center. Get her book “All in the Family Business” at Lazada or Shopee, or the ebook at Amazon, Google Play, Apple iBooks. Contact the author at [email protected].