Now I think it's one of the most useless questions an adult can ask of a child - What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something, and that's the end.
This is a question usually asked of children in an attempt to know which direction to steer them so that they end up at the career destination they have in mind for themselves. Obama, though, believes this to be an inane kind of question because it suggests that growing up is merely something that is chronological; we are grown up when we reach a designated age, and from that moment on, the question implies, we will stay the same thing that we have become for the next thirty, forty, fifty plus years of our lives. This is completely the opposite of what the book espouses.
The book's title suggests that even as an adult, one is always in the process of becoming more. Life is all about growth even after the point at which society considers a person to be "grown up". The author herself is a case in point, because in her life she has had to become many things; lawyer (the thing she would have said she wanted to be when she grew up), wife, mother, political wife, First Lady, celebrity - in her life, she has had to "be" all of those things, and so to ask a child to pinpoint a time at which they will "be" something is to prevent them from fulfilling a lifetime of potential and continually evolving as a person.
He's always asking, "Is that new? I haven't seen that before." It's like, why don't you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.
This is an illuminating quote on many levels. At face value, it is a snapshot of the Obama marriage which shows it to be similar in nature to every other marriage in America, even when the couple within it are the President and the First Lady of the country. However, it is also illuminating in what it shows about the differences in the way men and women view marriage, and the way in which Mrs Obama was forced to become a different kind of wife after entering the White House than she had been before.
Before her husband became President, Michelle was perhaps the more driven and successful of the two; however, after becoming First Lady she had to become used to taking on somewhat less "meaty" projects than she might otherwise have done before. The comment shows that whilst pre-presidency they might both have been concerned with the problem of world hunger, now that she was First Lady, it was only her husband who was able to concern himself with these issues.
