Becoming (Nina)
“At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.”
While we were recording this past week’s episode on Imposter Syndrome, it was by complete coincidence that I’d been reading Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming.” It had been sitting on my bookshelf for years, collecting dust and continually ignored by a very busy eldest daughter who’d kept whispering, “eventually,” before its pages would be flipped through for the first time. Fittingly, that moment arrived just as I was in the process of launching my own bookstore, The Pouring Pages. Now, I not only get to read it, but I get to share it with you in a way I’ve never expected!
Before I tell you what it was like, it would be a travesty if I didn’t mention MY BOOKSTORE! WE OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED ON THE THIRD OF MARCH. You can now buy “Becoming” from The Pouring Pages! Whether you want a physical copy or e-book (powered by Bookshop.org) or audiobook (powered by libro.fm), feel free to drop by my site or click the buttons below!
This blog is sponsored by The Pouring Pages
Here to fulfill all your bookish needs, check out her website to get your books, or even to try out her cocktail recipes to pair with them.
SHOCKER! Filipina Disabled Woman Relates to Former First Lady, Michelle Obama!
To be completely frank: I did not have high hopes when I picked this book off my shelf and chose it as my subway reading for the week. That’s not to say that its accolades didn’t hold any merit; I knew it was a pick for Oprah’s Book Club and a worldwide bestseller, but I am and always will be a fiction/romance/fantasy girlie through and through. Besides, it was written by Michelle Obama, wasn’t it always bound to sell?
Ladies, that skeptical Nina is long gone and buried. While it took a while for its words to ingrain themselves in the folds of my brain (this is a rare foray into nonfiction for me), I quickly found myself writing in the margins of its pages. Lines like: “I was ambitious, though I didn’t know exactly what I was shooting for,” and “Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own,” drained my highlighter of its ink less than halfway through the book. Becoming isn’t the story of a First Lady in the White House, or even of the first Black First Lady in the White House. It’s the story of a woman learning to be herself in the world, in her relationship, and even for the country she loved even when it hurt her. That’s a story I relate to: a story I think most people can.
“I had so much—an education, a healthy sense of self, a deep arsenal of ambition—and I was wise enough to credit my mother, in particular, with instilling it in me.”
My mother died on the 20th of December 2023. I got a call at five in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise through my boyfriend-at-the-time-now-husband’s apartment window. I stared at a flashing red light of what I could only assume was a distant cell tower as my father announced that her battle with cancer had concluded, and she—the most stubborn woman I know—surrendered. Since then, I have wandered the world with a gaping hole in my chest where I knew half her DNA had remained, even when she did not. I have slowly forgotten the sound of her voice other than her somewhat disapproving “Nana” (a nickname she used for me), and longed for the arms I hadn’t been enveloped by since I last saw her off into an uber headed for JFK airport in May of 2022. With her death was weight: she was gone, and as the woman of my “house” (nuclear family), I felt the need to pick up the slack.
Except I was only 22. What was I supposed to have figured out?
I have often wondered what she would’ve thought, especially in the past year with so much change. What would have been her opinion or advice on the bookstore I opened? On the man I married and she hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting? On falling down and picking myself back up? Would she have been proud?
As I read the memoir in my hands, trapped in the confines of a subway car to work, Michelle Obama had almost wrapped them in the warmth of her words, in the bluntness of her opinion. For a moment, I did not miss my mother. Because what I knew of her was right there in black ink in front of me: when Michelle Obama wrote, “You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.” My mom hummed, “I told you so,” in agreement.
The First Lady
Too and too and too again—my margins would fill up with “haha sames” and “I’m glad it’s not just me.” As women, we get called hysterical a lot: just in different words now.
Michelle Obama, like many of us, has been categorized into boxes. Reasons why we should doubt ourselves, our voice. Reasons why we should not be listened to when we do get the courage to speak: no matter how hard, no matter how vast the void appears to be. “Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization,” she writes, “It’s the ugliest kind of power.”
The thing about Dominance is that it relies on a populace unable or unwilling to fight. It will beat you down, drown you out, and convince you that you never should’ve spoken in the first place. It relies on a form of learned helplessness: a shrug and a, “what can you do?” I’ve seen it in Filipino presidents and American ones. In countries where differing opinions turn into treason, where books and art become heavily curated and state-approved. Campaigns turn to propaganda, and as propaganda does, it propagates until it becomes status quo, and who would go against that?
My mother and I had a tumultuous relationship, and when she died, I was just beginning to understand her. She was a woman in a male-dominated field. She’d been fired for being too difficult to work with, as a woman. She was labeled as “opinionated.” She was called a “Leading Lady,” both as a compliment and insult at the same time, and when she was criticized, it wasn’t just as a woman at work, but as a mother. She drank at home, and as a child, I wondered if I wasn’t worth staying sober for. As an adult, I realize because it sometimes is too hard to be in that space with little to no support. Where Michelle Obama had friends like Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett to look to for how to be a mother and a leading woman, my mother had nobody that I knew of.
My mother called me “too opinionated” too. She claimed I was too loud, and that I fought too many battles at once. She couldn’t understand how my stubbornness persisted, even when it took me out of classrooms and into university administration meetings to talk about injustices within the education I received and double standards. To her, it was a curse. How could it not be? When she was just as stubborn and punished repeatedly for it?
But where my mother had nobody, I had her. I had the books she taught me to read. For every James Patterson novel she picked up, I picked up authors of my own: Rick Riordan, John Green, Socrates, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Yarros, and Abby Jimenez—all the way up to Michelle Obama. Until I learned the one thing my mother hadn’t had the pleasure to; the same thing the First Lady had learned before me: “no matter how it panned out, I knew I’d at least done something good for myself in speaking up about my needs. There was power, I felt, in just saying it out loud.”
What was the point of a voice, if you didn’t use it?
“I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all.”
We come from a long line of women before us, and when my mother left, I regretted the way I took that fact for granted. Now, I strive to do what I’m sure she did, too, in her own way: learn.
She learned different lessons than I did, stemming from a different place and a different time. As she fed me books, I’m sure she was fed different ones. They had different morals and lessons.
When I finished reading “Becoming,” I felt myself evolve so to speak. A grain of salt had almost been handed to me, and to all the women that led to me: that it was okay. I learned to forgive myself for my own internalized misogyny that I’d held before and used against my mom. I learned to forgive her for hers. I learned to forgive myself for not being anything more than “in progress,” because that truly is all I should be expected to be. I learned to forgive my mother for being the same.
Now, I am 23 and approaching 24. In a few weeks, I will have lived a year for every hour there is in a day. Despite it and because of it, I am still a work in progress. I do what I can: learn. I control what I can: myself. I give grace where I can spare it, and I try not to drink too heavily. In a world that expects eldest daughters to carry the weight of the family, I have learned the value of releasing it (and I’m working on doing it, when I remember to). I am exactly where I need to be, no matter what the imposter syndrome claims. If my mother could, if Michelle Obama could, maybe I can, too.
“Becoming” reminded me that growing up is exactly that: becoming. It’s a perpetual motion forward, a journey with no Happily Ever After. And as I continue on, I like to think my mother would feel the same way about myself as I sometimes do: proud of the woman I am and forever will be becoming.
