And as our friendship grew, and I learned more about Barack, he introduced me to the work he'd done when he first moved to Chicago after college. Ins… - Michelle Obama

Kamala and Tim, they have lived amazing lives and I am confident that they will lead with compassion, inclusion, and grace. But they are still only human. They are not perfect. And like all of us, they will make mistakes. But luckily y’all, this is not just on them. No, uh-uh. This is up to us, all of us, to be the solution that we seek. It’s up to all of us to be the antidote to the darkness and division. Look, I don’t care how you identify politically — whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above. This is our time to stand up for what we know in our hearts is right. To stand up, not just for our basic freedoms but for decency and humanity; for basic respect, dignity, and empathy; for the values at the very foundation of this democracy.

a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately — even alone.

If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.