Dearest Michelle Obama: With Love, With Gratitude From A Daughter Ready To Heal

You could feel her power before she ever said a single word, Michelle Obama, our Forever First Lady in her 2025 Monse pants suit, her Jimmy Choos and that sensual all down her back single braid. But none that rivaled that signature walk of hers, that walk that carries so much information. So much wisdom. And so much healing. 

I watched her, wondering: had I ever appreciated that last part, the healing part, before? I mean feel it all the way down where our specific blood begins to flow free to our specific  heart, our specific soul. Whether I did not before, I know I saw its full majesty last night as Mrs. Obama headed toward the podium.

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I saw it first when Mommy suddenly appeared and curled up beside me, smiling that wide-as-the-Texas-sky smile she got every single time she saw the woman who told the world she now lived in a home built by slaves, who said When they go low, we go high. Remember that Mommy, and how you said, brows slightly raised in that modest but somehow all-knowing kind of sing song way, That’s ri-I-ght. The extra “I” always held, a long soprano of a sound.

I leaned into Mommy last night, like I did when as a small girl, like I did when I was a grown woman with my own small girl. As I did when that small girl was headed into her senior year in college. 

Three Years, Three Months, Nine Days, Eight Hours

By the time Michelle Obama took the stage, my mother, Dolores June Bullard, had been dead three years, three months, nine days and near eight hours. But she’s never left my side, all that grace, all that brilliance, all that artistry in the body of one almost 5’4” Black woman who was born during those Great Depression years that stretched out longer, burrowed themselves deeper into the lives of  Black Americans who’d just before had been seeking the warmth of another sun.

A memory: I’m with Mommy at the old house at 777 Francis Street in South Bend, Indiana, the one we still visited annually then because Aunt Mary and Uncle Art were still alive. Everyone else just about had long ago settled in Chicago but Mary was my Grandmother Harriet’s sister, and until the day she died, lived and loved and prayed in the city where she once held hands with her sister Harriet, Mommy’s mommy. 

I was leaving the South
to fling myself into the unknown . . .
I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns
and, perhaps, to bloom

Richard Wright

 

The Way of Midwest Mommys

Aunt Mary loved Mommy hard in a family love wasn’t guaranteed. Without being asked and most assuredly without fuss–in the best tradition of the women of the Midwest–Aunt Mary spent her life nurturing her family of eight–and Mommy from at least the day she was four and stood graveside and obiliging the adults who surely whispered it was time to say goodbye now.

Goodbye Mommy, she must have said to Harriet Anderson, her mother, my grandmother, who succumbed to pneumonia at just 26, the age Mommy was stunned to live past. The details of her death were weirdly thin to me when I thought about them when I was grown enough to have started this work of writing I choose, this life of journaling and documenting. 

But that day in the house on Francis, Aunt Mary sat Mommy and me down and told us. Her voice was the low kind of whisper that telegraphed we would never speak of this again.  Abortion she finally said at the end of a  long story told short. My grandmother, my mother’s Mommy, died alone on her kitchen floor of a self-induced abortion two years after her husband, my mother’s father, left and never came back. 

Aunt Mary pivoted after saying that final word–abortion–extra-hushed the way people used to do with the acronym, AIDS.  “I’m only tellin ya because this one is so nosy,” she said, her head nodding in my direction. “Won’t stop asking questions.” 

“Not from the day she started speaking,” Mommy concurred, following the pivot to me, a generation sandwiched in between my mother’s and my daughter’s who grew up, unlike them,  assuming a certain body privilege so thoroughly that it wasn’t until we were a few miles into this new millennium that we even noticed it for real, for real. Oh my Mommy: how she never said although always knew–and not because of her mother whose final chapter she wouldn’t learn of until she’d almost edged out of her 60s, looking all of 45 with her beautiful self.

Once Mommy was 16 trying to outrun the Christian Science judgment she feared would choke her in broad daylight on the Chicago Southside that became home after her grandparents took their final bow in South Bend. And that Southside of such mean strict borders only a human-invented God would deign to create. 

But it was also the Southside where she graduated high school from top of her class–and two years younger than her peers; the Southside where The Defender honored right before graduation, right before she learned she was pregnant by a boy who left her to fare alone as she grew a universe inside herself who became my brother, John. 

This Is A Love Story

By the time of me, a little more than decades, had passed between the opening of my brother’s life and the opening of my own.  Mommy was married to my Papa for more than10 years into what became a 67-year love story. I grew up in a house where I never once saw my parents fight. I grew up in the arms of a woman who cared for the same adults who once denigrated a scared, isolated girl, told she’d be nothing, never imagining thePhi Beta Kappa double-degreed woman who was right about to finish her doctorate at Columbia University when suddenly there was me.

“Well I suppose people thought there was a choice: you or my dissertation. But it wasn’t ever a choice.” She told me that her whole life, sealing her words with a forehead kiss I’d seal right back on her forehead.

Marian Robinson’s Baby Girl, Michelle Lavaughn Robinson Obama

When Michelle Obama took the stage and grounded her offering in the love and power of a great woman, her mother, Marian Robinson, who left on a day in May three years after my Mommy left on a day in May; and Michelle Obama, daughter of the Southside like Mommy was a daughter of Southside where our family still lives (shout out East 108!); and Michelle Obama who showed us just a small measure of the pain she feels because I know that pain too well–the toxicity of it, the crippling power of it, the mean wizardry of it that makes is so most never notice all the ways it make you bleed out, again and again and again and again.

How could anyone ever measure the loss of the person who loved them so hard in a world that did not that it planted the seed that became the courage that became the willingness to Do Something? But for the first time since May 8th, 2021, I felt what I hadn’t since the first afternoon and night: the right to grieve, to cry openly like I am right now, to cry without trying to be silent, to cry and reach through the years and planes of existence so that felt, actually truly felt the arms of my mother, Dolores June Bullard, holding me.

Holding me like she would never stop holding me, which is when I knew I was in the presence of a master healer, our Michelle Lavaughn Robinson Obama who called my mother, who called our mothers home to us last night from the very start, saying, 

“…I am realizing that, until recently, I have mourned the dimming of [American] hope. And maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings, that deep pit in my stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future. And for me, that mourning has also been mixed with my own personal grief. 

“The last time I was here in my hometown was to memorialize my mother — the woman who showed me the meaning of hard work and humility and decency, the woman who set my moral compass high and showed me the power of my own voice…I still feel her loss so profoundly. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be steady enough to stand before you tonight, but my heart compelled me to be here because of the sense of duty that I feel to honor her memory. And to remind us all not to squander the sacrifices our elders made to give us a better future.

“…[M]y mom, in her steady, quiet way, lived out that striving sense of hope every single day of her life. She believed that all children, all — all people have value. That anyone can succeed if given the opportunity. She and my father did not aspire to be wealthy. In fact, they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed. 

 Black and Woman and White House and Mommy

Just like you, Mommy. Michelle Obama is talking about her mother but its all about you too Mommy. Michelle Obama who swole you all up with pride from the very beginning, We loved the all-black t-shirt and leggings, hair pressed and pulled back that fist bump night that white pretended was some kind of terrible. From that moment,  you were all in, Southside girl to Southside girl. You who always had room for another mouth even if meant cold water stretching the eggs.

You who survived 16 and being sworn off by almost everyone except the most important one: you. I know you were quiet in your refusal to accept their words.  Neither did you ever brag or even consider bragging it when your life showed them the power of a young girl’s refusal that allowed her to become a woman who would go on to lead the creation of the first-ever childcare center at the City University of New York. Other girls and young women would not have to wait as you had to wait, 20 years, before knowing the dream of graduating from walking across that stage as Pomp and Circumstance conferred that yes, this is happening. 

And you, Mommy who became a Dean of Students who chose to march alongside students who were protesting during those Black Power years, calling the police never once a consideration. I was so little but I can almost still hear those dinner time discussions you and Papa had.

Oh Mommy. How can I know this specific moment of Black and Woman and White House all together? God How you would have smiled. There was a moment in 2019 and again in 2020 when we had a kind of view, but by then the meds were more harmful than the cancer.

Even still, the night before the last day, you said what I could not imagine would the final words you’d say to me, but there they were: “I love you. Just write,” you made sure I heard you say, you made sure I promised you I’d would. 

I couldn’t for so long, Mommy, not after you left and then Papa followed right behind you and Greg Tate followed right behind you and Baba Sekou followed right behind you and then Peter, our Peter followed to0, three years and two days after you.

But last night when I  heard Michelle Obama as though I was hearing you, Michelle Obama, daughter of Marian Robinson, and how she seemed to promise that healing was possible and I believed her: me, the daughter of Dolores June Bullard who healed herself and a full generation of young Black women–Mommy! I’m doing something today. I’m using words as actions.

And writing today Mommy, as best I can, I’m writing a love letter to Michelle Obama. A letter about you, Mommy. I’m writing about you

SEE MORE:

Timeless Michelle Obama Quote That Inspire Greatness

‘This Is Our Time’: Read Michelle Obama’s Full DNC Speech

 

 

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