Y THE START of my second year in the Senate, my life had settled into a manageable rhythm. I would leave Chicago Monday night or early Tuesday morning, depending on the Senate’s voting schedule. Other than daily trips to the Senate gym and the rare lunch or dinner with a friend, the next three days would be consumed by a predictable series of tasks—committee markups, votes, caucus lunches, floor statements, speeches, photos with interns, evening fund-raisers, returning phone calls, writing correspondence, reviewing legislation, drafting op-eds, recording podcasts, receiving policy briefings, hosting constituent coffees, and attending an endless series of meetings. On Thursday afternoon, we would get word from the cloakroom as to when the last vote would be, and at the appointed hour I’d line up in the well of the Senate alongside my colleagues to cast my vote, before trotting down the Capitol steps in hopes of catching a flight that would get me home before the girls went to bed.

Despite the hectic schedule, I found the work fascinating, if occasionally frustrating. Contrary to popular perceptions, only about two dozen significant bills come up for a roll-call vote on the Senate floor every year, and almost none of those are sponsored by a member of the minority party. As a result, most of my major initiatives—the formation of public school innovation districts, a plan to help U.S. automakers pay for their retiree health-care costs in exchange for increased fuel economy standards, an expansion of the Pell Grant program to help low-income students meet rising college tuition costs—languished in committee.

On the other hand, thanks to great work by my staff, I managed to get a respectable number of amendments passed. We helped provide funds for homeless veterans. We provided tax credits to gas stations for installing E85 fuel pumps. We obtained funding to help the World Health Organization monitor and respond to a potential avian flu pandemic. We got an amendment out of the Senate eliminating no-bid contracts in the post-Katrina reconstruction, so more money would actually end up in the hands of the tragedy’s victims. None of these amendments would transform the country, but I took satisfaction in knowing that each of them helped some people in a modest way or nudged the law in a direction that might prove to be more economical, more responsible, or more just.

One day in February I found myself in particularly good spirits, having just completed a hearing on legislation that Dick Lugar and I were sponsoring aimed at restricting weapons proliferation and the black-market arms trade. Because Dick was not only the Senate’s leading expert on proliferation issues but also the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, prospects for the bill seemed promising. Wanting to share the good news, I called Michelle from my D.C. office and started explaining the significance of the bill—how shoulder-to-air missiles could threaten commercial air travel if they fell into the wrong hands, how small-arms stockpiles left over from the Cold War continued to feed conflict across the globe. Michelle cut me off.

“We have ants.”

“Huh?”

“I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.”

“Okay…”

“I need you to buy some ant traps on your way home tomorrow. I’d get them myself, but I’ve got to take the girls to their doctor’s appointment after school. Can you do that for me?”

“Right. Ant traps.”

“Ant traps. Don’t forget, okay, honey? And buy more than one. Listen, I need to go into a meeting. Love you.”

I hung up the receiver, wondering if Ted Kennedy or John McCain bought ant traps on the way home from work.

MOST PEOPLE WHO meet my wife quickly conclude that she is remarkable. They are right about this—she is smart, funny, and thoroughly charming. She is also very beautiful, although not in a way that men find intimidating or women find off-putting; it is the lived-in beauty of the mother and busy professional rather than the touched-up image we see on the cover of glossy magazines. Often, after hearing her speak at some function or working with her on a project, people will approach me and say something to the effect of “You know I think the world of you, Barack, but your wife…wow!” I nod, knowing that if I ever had to run against her for public office, she would beat me without much difficulty.

Fortunately for me, Michelle would never go into politics. “I don’t have the patience,” she says to people who ask. As is always the case, she is telling the truth.

I met Michelle in the summer of 1988, while we were both working at Sidley & Austin, a large corporate law firm based in Chicago. Although she is three years younger than me, Michelle was already a practicing lawyer, having attended Harvard Law straight out of college. I had just finished my first year at law school and had been hired as a summer associate.

It was a difficult, transitional period in my life. I had enrolled in law school after three years of work as a community organizer, and although I enjoyed my studies, I still harbored doubts about my decision. Privately, I worried that it represented the abandonment of my youthful ideals, a concession to the hard realities of money and power—the world as it is rather than the world as it should be.

The idea of working at a corporate law firm, so near and yet so far removed from the poor neighborhoods where my friends were still laboring, only worsened these fears. But with student loans rapidly mounting, I was in no position to turn down the three months of salary Sidley was offering. And so, having sublet the cheapest apartment I could find, having purchased the first three suits ever to appear in my closet and a new pair of shoes that turned out to be a half size too small and would absolutely cripple me for the next nine weeks, I arrived at the firm one drizzly morning in early June and was directed to the office of the young attorney who’d been assigned to serve as my summer advisor.

I don’t remember the details of that first conversation with Michelle. I remember that she was tall—almost my height in heels—and lovely, with a friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse. She explained how work was assigned at the firm, the nature of the various practice groups, and how to log our billable hours. After showing me my office and giving me a tour of the library, she handed me off to one of the partners and told me that she would meet me for lunch.

Later Michelle would tell me that she had been pleasantly surprised when I walked into her office; the drugstore snapshot that I’d sent in for the firm directory made my nose look a little big (even more enormous than usual, she might say), and she had been skeptical when the secretaries who’d seen me during my interview told her I was cute: “I figured that they were just impressed with any black man with a suit and a job.” But if Michelle was impressed, she certainly didn’t tip her hand when we went to lunch. I did learn that she had grown up on the South Side, in a small bungalow just north of the neighborhoods where I had organized. Her father was a pump operator for the city; her mother had been a housewife until the kids were grown, and now worked as a secretary at a bank. She had attended Bryn Mawr Public Elementary School, gotten into Whitney Young Magnet School, and followed her brother to Princeton, where he had been a star on the basketball team. At Sidley she was part of the intellectual property group and specialized in entertainment law; at some point, she said, she might have to consider moving to Los Angeles or New York to pursue her career.

Oh, Michelle was full of plans that day, on the fast track, with no time, she told me, for distractions—especially men. But she knew how to laugh, brightly and easily, and I noticed she didn’t seem in too much of a hurry to get back to the office. And there was something else, a glimmer that danced across her round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her, the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly unravel. That touched me somehow, that trace of vulnerability. I wanted to know that part of her.

For the next several weeks, we saw each other every day, in the law library or the cafeteria or at one of the many outings that law firms organize for their summer associates to convince them that their life in the law will not be endless hours of poring through documents. She took me to one or two parties, tactfully overlooking my limited wardrobe, and even tried to set me up with a couple of her friends. Still, she refused to go out on a proper date. It wasn’t appropriate, she said, since she was my advisor.

“That’s a poor excuse,” I told her. “Come on, what advice are you giving me? You’re showing me how the copy machine works. You’re telling me what restaurants to try. I don’t think the partners will consider one date a serious breach of firm policy.”

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Okay, I’ll quit. How’s that? You’re my advisor. Tell me who I have to talk to.”

Eventually I wore her down. After a firm picnic, she drove me back to my apartment, and I offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins across the street. We sat on the curb and ate our cones in the sticky afternoon heat, and I told her about working at Baskin-Robbins when I was a teenager and how it was hard to look cool in a brown apron and cap. She told me that for a span of two or three years as a child, she had refused to eat anything except peanut butter and jelly. I said that I’d like to meet her family. She said that she would like that.

I asked if I could kiss her. It tasted of chocolate.

We spent the rest of the summer together. I told her about organizing, and living in Indonesia, and what it was like to bodysurf. She told me about her childhood friends, and a trip to Paris she’d taken in high school, and her favorite Stevie Wonder songs.

But it wasn’t until I met Michelle’s family that I began to understand her. It turned out that visiting the Robinson household was like dropping in on the set of Leave It to Beaver. There was Frasier, the kindly, good-humored father, who never missed a day of work or any of his son’s ball games. There was Marian, the pretty, sensible mother who baked birthday cakes, kept order in the house, and had volunteered at school to make sure her children were behaving and that the teachers were doing what they were supposed to be doing. There was Craig, the basketball-star brother, tall and friendly and courteous and funny, working as an investment banker but dreaming of going into coaching someday. And there were uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, stopping by to sit around the kitchen table and eat until they burst and tell wild stories and listen to Grandpa’s old jazz collection and laugh deep into the night.

All that was missing was the dog. Marian didn’t want a dog tearing up the house.

What made this vision of domestic bliss all the more impressive was the fact that the Robinsons had had to overcome hardships that one rarely saw on prime-time TV. There were the usual issues of race, of course: the limited opportunities available to Michelle’s parents growing up in Chicago during the fifties and sixties; the racial steering and panic peddling that had driven white families away from their neighborhood; the extra energy required from black parents to compensate for smaller incomes and more violent streets and underfunded playgrounds and indifferent schools.

But there was a more specific tragedy at the center of the Robinson household. At the age of thirty, in the prime of his life, Michelle’s father had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For the next twenty-five years, as his condition steadily deteriorated, he had carried out his responsibilities to his family without a trace of self-pity, giving himself an extra hour every morning to get to work, struggling with every physical act from driving a car to buttoning his shirt, smiling and joking as he labored—at first with a limp and eventually with the aid of two canes, his balding head beading with sweat—across a field to watch his son play, or across the living room to give his daughter a kiss.

After we were married, Michelle would help me understand the hidden toll that her father’s illness had taken on her family; how heavy a burden Michelle’s mother had been forced to carry; how carefully circumscribed their lives together had been, with even the smallest outing carefully planned to avoid problems or awkwardness; how terrifyingly random life seemed beneath the smiles and laughter.

But back then I saw only the joy of the Robinson house. For someone like me, who had barely known his father, who had spent much of his life traveling from place to place, his bloodlines scattered to the four winds, the home that Frasier and Marian Robinson had built for themselves and their children stirred a longing for stability and a sense of place that I had not realized was there. Just as Michelle perhaps saw in me a life of adventure, risk, travel to exotic lands—a wider horizon than she had previously allowed herself.

Six months after Michelle and I met, her father died suddenly of complications after a kidney operation. I flew back to Chicago and stood at his gravesite, Michelle’s head on my shoulder. As the casket was lowered, I promised Frasier Robinson that I would take care of his girl. I realized that in some unspoken, still tentative way, she and I were already becoming a family.

THERE’S A LOT of talk these days about the decline of the American family. Social conservatives claim that the traditional family is under assault from Hollywood movies and gay pride parades. Liberals point to the economic factors—from stagnating wages to inadequate day care—that have put families under increasing duress. Our popular culture feeds the alarm, with tales of women consigned to permanent singlehood, men unwilling to make lasting commitments, and teens engaged in endless sexual escapades. Nothing seems settled, as it was in the past; our roles and relationships all feel up for grabs.

Given this hand-wringing, it may be helpful to step back and remind ourselves that the institution of marriage isn’t disappearing anytime soon. While it’s true that marriage rates have declined steadily since the 1950s, some of the decline is a result of more Americans delaying marriage to pursue an education or establish a career; by the age of forty-five, 89 percent of women and 83 percent of men will have tied the knot at least once. Married couples continue to head 67 percent of American families, and the vast majority of Americans still consider marriage to be the best foundation for personal intimacy, economic stability, and child rearing.

Still, there’s no denying that the nature of the family has changed over the last fifty years. Although divorce rates have declined by 21 percent since their peak in the late seventies and early eighties, half of all first marriages still end in divorce. Compared to our grandparents, we’re more tolerant of premarital sex, more likely to cohabit, and more likely to live alone. We’re also far more likely to be raising children in nontraditional households; 60 percent of all divorces involve children, 33 percent of all children are born out of wedlock, and 34 percent of children don’t live with their biological fathers.

These trends are particularly acute in the African American community, where it’s fair to say that the nuclear family is on the verge of collapse. Since 1950, the marriage rate for black women has plummeted from 62 percent to 36 percent. Between 1960 and 1995, the number of African American children living with two married parents dropped by more than half; today 54 percent of all African American children live in single-parent households, compared to about 23 percent of all white children.

For adults, at least, the effect of these changes is a mixed bag. Research suggests that on average, married couples live healthier, wealthier, and happier lives, but no one claims that men and women benefit from being trapped in bad or abusive marriages. Certainly the decision of increasing numbers of Americans to delay marriage makes sense; not only does today’s information economy demand more time in school, but studies show that couples who wait until their late twenties or thirties to get married are more likely to stay married than those who marry young.

Whatever the effect on adults, though, these trends haven’t been so good for our children. Many single moms—including the one who raised me—do a heroic job on behalf of their kids. Still, children living with single mothers are five times more likely to be poor than children in two-parent households. Children in single-parent homes are also more likely to drop out of school and become teen parents, even when income is factored out. And the evidence suggests that on average, children who live with both their biological mother and father do better than those who live in stepfamilies or with cohabiting partners.

In light of these facts, policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and that discourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue. For example, most people agree that neither federal welfare programs nor the tax code should penalize married couples; those aspects of welfare reform enacted under Clinton and those elements of the Bush tax plan that reduced the marriage penalty enjoy strong bipartisan support.

The same goes for teen pregnancy prevention. Everyone agrees that teen pregnancies place both mother and child at risk for all sorts of problems. Since 1990, the teen pregnancy rate has dropped by 28 percent, an unadulterated piece of good news. But teens still account for almost a quarter of out-of-wedlock births, and teen mothers are more likely to have additional out-of-wedlock births as they get older. Community-based programs that have a proven track record in preventing unwanted pregnancies—both by encouraging abstinence and by promoting the proper use of contraception—deserve broad support.

Finally, preliminary research shows that marriage education workshops can make a real difference in helping married couples stay together and in encouraging unmarried couples who are living together to form a more lasting bond. Expanding access to such services to low-income couples, perhaps in concert with job training and placement, medical coverage, and other services already available, should be something everybody can agree on.

But for many social conservatives, these commonsense approaches don’t go far enough. They want a return to a bygone era, in which sexuality outside of marriage was subject to both punishment and shame, obtaining a divorce was far more difficult, and marriage offered not merely personal fulfillment but also well-defined social roles for men and for women. In their view, any government policy that appears to reward or even express neutrality toward what they consider to be immoral behavior—whether providing birth control to young people, abortion services to women, welfare support for unwed mothers, or legal recognition of same-sex unions—inherently devalues the marital bond. Such policies take us one step closer, the argument goes, to a brave new world in which gender differences have been erased, sex is purely recreational, marriage is disposable, motherhood is an inconvenience, and civilization itself rests on shifting sands.

I understand the impulse to restore a sense of order to a culture that’s constantly in flux. And I certainly appreciate the desire of parents to shield their children from values they consider unwholesome; it’s a feeling I often share when I listen to the lyrics of songs on the radio.

But all in all, I have little sympathy for those who would enlist the government in the task of enforcing sexual morality. Like most Americans, I consider decisions about sex, marriage, divorce, and childbearing to be highly personal—at the very core of our system of individual liberty. Where such personal decisions raise the prospect of significant harm to others—as is true with child abuse, incest, bigamy, domestic violence, or failure to pay child support—society has a right and duty to step in. (Those who believe in the personhood of the fetus would put abortion in this category.) Beyond that, I have no interest in seeing the president, Congress, or a government bureaucracy regulating what goes on in America’s bedrooms.

Moreover, I don’t believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing people into the relationships we think are best for them—or by punishing those who fail to meet our standards of sexual propriety. I want to encourage young people to show more reverence toward sex and intimacy, and I applaud parents, congregations, and community programs that transmit that message. But I’m not willing to consign a teenage girl to a lifetime of struggle because of lack of access to birth control. I want couples to understand the value of commitment and the sacrifices marriage entails. But I’m not willing to use the force of law to keep couples together regardless of their personal circumstances.

Perhaps I just find the ways of the human heart too various, and my own life too imperfect, to believe myself qualified to serve as anyone’s moral arbiter. I do know that in our fourteen years of marriage, Michelle and I have never had an argument as a result of what other people are doing in their personal lives.

What we have argued about—repeatedly—is how to balance work and family in a way that’s equitable to Michelle and good for our children. We’re not alone in this. In the sixties and early seventies, the household Michelle grew up in was the norm—more than 70 percent of families had Mom at home and relied on Dad as the sole breadwinner.

Today those numbers are reversed. Seventy percent of families with children are headed by two working parents or a single working parent. The result has been what my policy director and work-family expert Karen Kornbluh calls “the juggler family,” in which parents struggle to pay the bills, look after their children, maintain a household, and maintain their relationship. Keeping all these balls in the air takes its toll on family life. As Karen explained when she was director of the Work and Family Program at the New America Foundation and testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families:

Americans today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than they did in 1969. Millions of children are left in unlicensed day care every day—or at home alone with the TV as a babysitter. Employed mothers lose almost an hour of sleep a day in their attempt to make it all add up. Recent data show that parents with school age children show high signs of stress—stress that has an impact on their productivity and work—when they have inflexible jobs and unstable after-school care.

Sound familiar?

Many social conservatives suggest that this flood of women out of the home and into the workplace is a direct consequence of feminist ideology, and hence can be reversed if women will just come to their senses and return to their traditional homemaking roles. It’s true that ideas about equality for women have played a critical role in the transformation of the workplace; in the minds of most Americans, the opportunity for women to pursue careers, achieve economic independence, and realize their talents on an equal footing with men has been one of the great achievements of modern life.

But for the average American woman, the decision to work isn’t simply a matter of changing attitudes. It’s a matter of making ends meet.

Consider the facts. Over the last thirty years, the average earnings of American men have grown less than 1 percent after being adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of everything, from housing to health care to education, has steadily risen. What has kept a large swath of American families from falling out of the middle class has been Mom’s paycheck. In their book The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi point out that the additional income mothers bring home isn’t going to luxury items. Instead, almost all of it goes to purchase what families believe to be investments in their children’s future—preschool education, college tuition, and most of all, homes in safe neighborhoods with good public schools. In fact, between these fixed costs and the added expenses of a working mother (particularly day care and a second car), the average two-income family has less discretionary income—and is less financially secure—than its single-earner counterpart thirty years ago.

So is it possible for the average family to return to life on a single income? Not when every other family on the block is earning two incomes and bidding up the prices of homes, schools, and college tuition. Warren and Tyagi show that an average single-earner family today that tried to maintain a middle-class lifestyle would have 60 percent less discretionary income than its 1970s counterpart. In other words, for most families, having Mom stay at home means living in a less-safe neighborhood and enrolling their children in a less-competitive school.

That’s not a choice most Americans are willing to make. Instead they do the best they can under the circumstances, knowing that the type of household they grew up in—the type of household in which Frasier and Marian Robinson raised their kids—has become much, much harder to sustain.

BOTH MEN AND women have had to adjust to these new realities. But it’s hard to argue with Michelle when she insists that the burdens of the modern family fall more heavily on the woman.

For the first few years of our marriage, Michelle and I went through the usual adjustments all couples go through: learning to read each other’s moods, accepting the quirks and habits of a stranger underfoot. Michelle liked to wake up early and could barely keep her eyes open after ten o’clock. I was a night owl and could be a bit grumpy (mean, Michelle would say) within the first half hour or so of getting out of bed. Partly because I was still working on my first book, and perhaps because I had lived much of my life as an only child, I would often spend the evening holed up in my office in the back of our railroad apartment; what I considered normal often left Michelle feeling lonely. I invariably left the butter out after breakfast and forgot to twist the little tie around the bread bag; Michelle could rack up parking tickets like nobody’s business.

Mostly, though, those early years were full of ordinary pleasures—going to movies, having dinner with friends, catching the occasional concert. We were both working hard: I was practicing law at a small civil rights firm and had started teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, while Michelle had decided to leave her law practice, first to work in Chicago’s Department of Planning and then to run the Chicago arm of a national service program called Public Allies. Our time together got squeezed even more when I ran for the state legislature, but despite my lengthy absences and her general dislike of politics, Michelle supported the decision; “I know it’s something that you want to do,” she would tell me. On the nights that I was in Springfield, we’d talk and laugh over the phone, sharing the humor and frustrations of our days apart, and I would fall asleep content in the knowledge of our love.

Then Malia was born, a Fourth of July baby, so calm and so beautiful, with big, hypnotic eyes that seemed to read the world the moment they opened. Malia’s arrival came at an ideal time for both of us: Because I was out of session and didn’t have to teach during the summer, I was able to spend every evening at home; meanwhile, Michelle had decided to accept a part-time job at the University of Chicago so she could spend more time with the baby, and the new job didn’t start until October. For three magical months the two of us fussed and fretted over our new baby, checking the crib to make sure she was breathing, coaxing smiles from her, singing her songs, and taking so many pictures that we started to wonder if we were damaging her eyes. Suddenly our different biorhythms came in handy: While Michelle got some well-earned sleep, I would stay up until one or two in the morning, changing diapers, heating breast milk, feeling my daughter’s soft breath against my chest as I rocked her to sleep, guessing at her infant dreams.

But when fall came—when my classes started back up, the legislature went back into session, and Michelle went back to work—the strains in our relationship began to show. I was often gone for three days at a stretch, and even when I was back in Chicago, I might have evening meetings to attend, or papers to grade, or briefs to write. Michelle found that a part-time job had a funny way of expanding. We found a wonderful in-home babysitter to look after Malia while we were at work, but with a full-time employee suddenly on our payroll, money got tight.

Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance. When I launched my ill-fated congressional run, Michelle put up no pretense of being happy with the decision. My failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endearing. Leaning down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek. By the time Sasha was born—just as beautiful, and almost as calm as her sister—my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained.

“You only think about yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.”

I was stung by such accusations; I thought she was being unfair. After all, it wasn’t as if I went carousing with the boys every night. I made few demands of Michelle—I didn’t expect her to darn my socks or have dinner waiting for me when I got home. Whenever I could, I pitched in with the kids. All I asked for in return was a little tenderness. Instead, I found myself subjected to endless negotiations about every detail of managing the house, long lists of things that I needed to do or had forgotten to do, and a generally sour attitude. I reminded Michelle that compared to most families, we were incredibly lucky. I reminded her as well that for all my flaws, I loved her and the girls more than anything else. My love should be enough, I thought. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing to complain about.

It was only upon reflection, after the trials of those years had passed and the kids had started school, that I began to appreciate what Michelle had been going through at the time, the struggles so typical of today’s working mother. For no matter how liberated I liked to see myself as—no matter how much I told myself that Michelle and I were equal partners, and that her dreams and ambitions were as important as my own—the fact was that when children showed up, it was Michelle and not I who was expected to make the necessary adjustments. Sure, I helped, but it was always on my terms, on my schedule. Meanwhile, she was the one who had to put her career on hold. She was the one who had to make sure that the kids were fed and bathed every night. If Malia or Sasha got sick or the babysitter failed to show up, it was she who, more often than not, had to get on the phone to cancel a meeting at work.

It wasn’t just the constant scrambling between her work and the children that made Michelle’s situation so tough. It was also the fact that from her perspective she wasn’t doing either job well. This was not true, of course; her employers loved her, and everyone remarked on what a good mother she was. But I came to see that in her own mind, two visions of herself were at war with each other—the desire to be the woman her mother had been, solid, dependable, making a home and always there for her kids; and the desire to excel in her profession, to make her mark on the world and realize all those plans she’d had on the very first day that we met.

In the end, I credit Michelle’s strength—her willingness to manage these tensions and make sacrifices on behalf of myself and the girls—with carrying us through the difficult times. But we also had resources at our disposal that many American families don’t have. For starters, Michelle’s and my status as professionals meant that we could rework our schedules to handle an emergency (or just take a day off) without risk of losing our jobs. Fifty-seven percent of American workers don’t have that luxury; indeed, most of them can’t take a day off to look after a child without losing pay or using vacation days. For parents who do try to make their own schedules, flexibility often means accepting part-time or temporary work with no career ladder and few or no benefits.

Michelle and I also had enough income to cover all the services that help ease the pressures of two-earner parenthood: reliable child care, extra babysitting whenever we needed it, take-out dinners when we had neither the time nor the energy to cook, someone to come in and clean the house once a week, and private preschool and summer day camp once the kids were old enough. For most American families, such help is financially out of reach. The cost of day care is especially prohibitive; the United States is practically alone among Western nations in not providing government-subsidized, high-quality day-care services to all its workers.

Finally, Michelle and I had my mother-in-law, who lives only fifteen minutes away from us, in the same house in which Michelle was raised. Marian is in her late sixties but looks ten years younger, and last year, when Michelle went back to full-time work, Marian decided to cut her hours at the bank so she could pick up the girls from school and look after them every afternoon. For many American families, such help is simply unavailable; in fact, for many families, the situation is reversed—someone in the family has to provide care for an aging parent on top of other family responsibilities.

Of course, it’s not possible for the federal government to guarantee each family a wonderful, healthy, semiretired mother-in-law who happens to live close by. But if we’re serious about family values, then we can put policies in place that make the juggling of work and parenting a little bit easier. We could start by making high-quality day care affordable for every family that needs it. In contrast to most European countries, day care in the United States is a haphazard affair. Improved day-care licensing and training, an expansion of the federal and state child tax credits, and sliding-scale subsidies to families that need them all could provide both middle-class and low-income parents some peace of mind during the workday—and benefit employers through reduced absenteeism.

It’s also time to redesign our schools—not just for the sake of working parents, but also to help prepare our children for a more competitive world. Countless studies confirm the educational benefits of strong preschool programs, which is why even families who have a parent at home often seek them out. The same goes for longer school days, summer school, and after-school programs. Providing all kids access to these benefits would cost money, but as part of broader school reform efforts, it’s a cost that we as a society should be willing to bear.

Most of all, we need to work with employers to increase the flexibility of work schedules. The Clinton Administration took a step in this direction with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), but because it requires only unpaid leave and applies only to companies with more than fifty employees, most American workers aren’t able to take advantage of it. And although all other wealthy nations but one provide some form of paid parental leave, the business community’s resistance to mandated paid leave has been fierce, in part because of concerns over how it would affect small businesses.

With a little creativity, we should be able to break this impasse. California has recently initiated paid leave through its disability insurance fund, thereby making sure that the costs aren’t borne by employers alone.

We can also give parents flexibility to meet their day-to-day needs. Already, many larger companies offer formal flextime programs and report higher employee morale and less employee turnover as a result. Great Britain has come up with a novel approach to the problem—as part of a highly popular “Work-Life Balance Campaign,” parents with children under the age of six have the right to file a written request with employers for a change in their schedule. Employers aren’t required to grant the request, but they are required to meet with the employee to consider it; so far, one-quarter of all eligible British parents have successfully negotiated more family-friendly hours without a drop in productivity. With a combination of such innovative policy making, technical assistance, and greater public awareness, government can help businesses to do right by their employees at nominal expense.

Of course, none of these policies need discourage families from deciding to keep a parent at home, regardless of the financial sacrifices. For some families, that may mean doing without certain material comforts. For others, it may mean home schooling or a move to a community where the cost of living is lower. For some families, it may be the father who stays at home—although for most families it will still be the mother who serves as the primary caregiver.

Whatever the case may be, such decisions should be honored. If there’s one thing that social conservatives have been right about, it’s that our modern culture sometimes fails to fully appreciate the extraordinary emotional and financial contributions—the sacrifices and just plain hard work—of the stay-at-home mom. Where social conservatives have been wrong is in insisting that this traditional role is innate—the best or only model of motherhood. I want my daughters to have a choice as to what’s best for them and their families. Whether they will have such choices will depend not just on their own efforts and attitudes. As Michelle has taught me, it will also depend on men—and American society—respecting and accommodating the choices they make.

“HI, DADDY.”

“Hey, sweetie-pie.”

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m home early to look after the girls while Michelle goes to the hairdresser. I gather up Malia in a hug and notice a blond girl in our kitchen, peering at me through a pair of oversized glasses.

“Who’s this?” I ask, setting Malia back on the floor.

“This is Sam. She’s over for a playdate.”

“Hi, Sam.” I offer Sam my hand, and she considers it for a moment before shaking it loosely. Malia rolls her eyes.

“Listen, Daddy…you don’t shake hands with kids.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” Malia says. “Not even teenagers shake hands. You may not have noticed, but this is the twenty-first century.” Malia looks at Sam, who represses a smirk.

“So what do you do in the twenty-first century?”

“You just say ‘hey.’ Sometimes you wave. That’s pretty much it.”

“I see. I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”

Malia smiles. “That’s okay, Daddy. You didn’t know, because you’re used to shaking hands with grown-ups.”

“That’s true. Where’s your sister?”

“She’s upstairs.”

I walk upstairs to find Sasha standing in her underwear and a pink top. She pulls me down for a hug and then tells me she can’t find any shorts. I check in the closet and find a pair of blue shorts sitting right on top of her chest of drawers.

“What are these?”

Sasha frowns but reluctantly takes the shorts from me and pulls them on. After a few minutes, she climbs into my lap.

“These shorts aren’t comfortable, Daddy.”

We go back into Sasha’s closet, open the drawer again, and find another pair of shorts, also blue. “How about these?” I ask.

Sasha frowns again. Standing there, she looks like a three-foot version of her mother. Malia and Sam walk in to observe the stand-off.

“Sasha doesn’t like either of those shorts,” Malia explains.

I turn to Sasha and ask her why. She looks up at me warily, taking my measure.

“Pink and blue don’t go together,” she says finally.

Malia and Sam giggle. I try to look as stern as Michelle might look in such circumstances and tell Sasha to put on the shorts. She does what I say, but I realize she’s just indulging me.

When it comes to my daughters, no one is buying my tough-guy routine.

Like many men today, I grew up without a father in the house. My mother and father divorced when I was only two years old, and for most of my life I knew him only through the letters he sent and the stories my mother and grandparents told. There were men in my life—a stepfather with whom we lived for four years, and my grandfather, who along with my grandmother helped raise me the rest of the time—and both were good men who treated me with affection. But my relationships with them were necessarily partial, incomplete. In the case of my stepfather, this was a result of limited duration and his natural reserve. And as close as I was to my grandfather, he was both too old and too troubled to provide me with much direction.

It was women, then, who provided the ballast in my life—my grandmother, whose dogged practicality kept the family afloat, and my mother, whose love and clarity of spirit kept my sister’s and my world centered. Because of them I never wanted for anything important. From them I would absorb the values that guide me to this day.

Still, as I got older I came to recognize how hard it had been for my mother and grandmother to raise us without a strong male presence in the house. I felt as well the mark that a father’s absence can leave on a child. I determined that my father’s irresponsibility toward his children, my stepfather’s remoteness, and my grandfather’s failures would all become object lessons for me, and that my own children would have a father they could count on.

In the most basic sense, I’ve succeeded. My marriage is intact and my family is provided for. I attend parent-teacher conferences and dance recitals, and my daughters bask in my adoration. And yet, of all the areas of my life, it is in my capacities as a husband and father that I entertain the most doubt.

I realize I’m not alone in this; at some level I’m just going through the same conflicting emotions that other fathers experience as they navigate an economy in flux and changing social norms. Even as it becomes less and less attainable, the image of the 1950s father—supporting his family with a nine-to-five job, sitting down for the dinner that his wife prepares every night, coaching Little League, and handling power tools—hovers over the culture no less powerfully than the image of the stay-at-home mom. For many men today, the inability to be their family’s sole breadwinner is a source of frustration and even shame; one doesn’t have to be an economic determinist to believe that high unemployment and low wages contribute to the lack of parental involvement and low marriage rates among African American men.

For working men, no less than for working women, the terms of employment have changed. Whether a high-paid professional or a worker on the assembly line, fathers are expected to put in longer hours on the job than they did in the past. And these more demanding work schedules are occurring precisely at the time when fathers are expected—and in many cases want—to be more actively involved in the lives of their children than their own fathers may have been in theirs.

But if the gap between the idea of parenthood in my head and the compromised reality that I live isn’t unique, that doesn’t relieve my sense that I’m not always giving my family all that I could. Last Father’s Day, I was invited to speak to the members of Salem Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. I didn’t have a prepared text, but I took as my theme “what it takes to be a full-grown man.” I suggested that it was time that men in general and black men in particular put away their excuses for not being there for their families. I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant more than bearing a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t have fathers in the house we have to redouble our efforts to break the cycle; and that if we want to pass on high expectations to our children, we have to have higher expectations for ourselves.

Thinking back on what I said, I ask myself sometimes how well I’m living up to my own exhortations. After all, unlike many of the men to whom I was speaking that day, I don’t have to take on two jobs or the night shift in a valiant attempt to put food on the table. I could find a job that allowed me to be home every night. Or I could find a job that paid more money, a job in which long hours might at least be justified by some measurable benefit to my family—the ability of Michelle to cut back her hours, say, or a fat trust fund for the kids.

Instead, I have chosen a life with a ridiculous schedule, a life that requires me to be gone from Michelle and the girls for long stretches of time and that exposes Michelle to all sorts of stress. I may tell myself that in some larger sense I am in politics for Malia and Sasha, that the work I do will make the world a better place for them. But such rationalizations seem feeble and painfully abstract when I’m missing one of the girls’ school potlucks because of a vote, or calling Michelle to tell her that session’s been extended and we need to postpone our vacation. Indeed, my recent success in politics does little to assuage the guilt; as Michelle told me once, only half joking, seeing your dad’s picture in the paper may be kind of neat the first time it happens, but when it happens all the time it’s probably kind of embarrassing.

And so I do my best to answer the accusation that floats around in my mind—that I am selfish, that I do what I do to feed my own ego or fill a void in my heart. When I’m not out of town, I try to be home for dinner, to hear from Malia and Sasha about their day, to read to them and tuck them into bed. I try not to schedule appearances on Sundays, and in the summers I’ll use the day to take the girls to the zoo or the pool; in the winters we might visit a museum or the aquarium. I scold my daughters gently when they misbehave, and try to limit their intake of both television and junk food. In all this I am encouraged by Michelle, although there are times when I get the sense that I’m encroaching on her space—that by my absences I may have forfeited certain rights to interfere in the world she has built.

As for the girls, they seem to be thriving despite my frequent disappearances. Mostly this is a testimony to Michelle’s parenting skills; she seems to have a perfect touch when it comes to Malia and Sasha, an ability to set firm boundaries without being stifling. She’s also made sure that my election to the Senate hasn’t altered the girls’ routines very much, although what passes for a normal middle-class childhood in America these days seems to have changed as much as has parenting. Gone are the days when parents just sent their child outside or to the park and told him or her to be back before dinner. Today, with news of abductions and an apparent suspicion of anything spontaneous or even a tiny bit slothful, the schedules of children seem to rival those of their parents. There are playdates, ballet classes, gymnastics classes, tennis lessons, piano lessons, soccer leagues, and what seem like weekly birthday parties. I told Malia once that during the entire time that I was growing up, I attended exactly two birthday parties, both of which involved five or six kids, cone hats, and a cake. She looked at me the way I used to look at my grandfather when he told stories of the Depression—with a mixture of fascination and incredulity.

It is left to Michelle to coordinate all the children’s activities, which she does with a general’s efficiency. When I can, I volunteer to help, which Michelle appreciates, although she is careful to limit my responsibilities. The day before Sasha’s birthday party this past June, I was told to procure twenty balloons, enough cheese pizza to feed twenty kids, and ice. This seemed manageable, so when Michelle told me that she was going to get goody bags to hand out at the end of the party, I suggested that I do that as well. She laughed.

“You can’t handle goody bags,” she said. “Let me explain the goody bag thing. You have to go into the party store and choose the bags. Then you have to choose what to put in the bags, and what is in the boys’ bags has to be different from what is in the girls’ bags. You’d walk in there and wander around the aisles for an hour, and then your head would explode.”

Feeling less confident, I got on the Internet. I found a place that sold balloons near the gymnastics studio where the party would be held, and a pizza place that promised delivery at 3:45 p.m. By the time the guests showed up the next day, the balloons were in place and the juice boxes were on ice. I sat with the other parents, catching up and watching twenty or so five-year-olds run and jump and bounce on the equipment like a band of merry elves. I had a slight scare when at 3:50 the pizzas had not yet arrived, but the delivery person got there ten minutes before the children were scheduled to eat. Michelle’s brother, Craig, knowing the pressure I was under, gave me a high five. Michelle looked up from putting pizza on paper plates and smiled.

As a grand finale, after all the pizza was eaten and the juice boxes drunk, after we had sung “Happy Birthday” and eaten some cake, the gymnastics instructor gathered all the kids around an old, multicolored parachute and told Sasha to sit at its center. On the count of three, Sasha was hoisted up into the air and back down again, then up for a second time, and then for a third. And each time she rose above the billowing sail, she laughed and laughed with a look of pure joy.

I wonder if Sasha will remember that moment when she is grown. Probably not; it seems as if I can retrieve only the barest fragments of memory from when I was five. But I suspect that the happiness she felt on that parachute registers permanently in her; that such moments accumulate and embed themselves in a child’s character, becoming a part of their soul. Sometimes, when I listen to Michelle talk about her father, I hear the echo of such joy in her, the love and respect that Frasier Robinson earned not through fame or spectacular deeds but through small, daily, ordinary acts—a love he earned by being there. And I ask myself whether my daughters will be able to speak of me in that same way.

As it is, the window for making such memories rapidly closes. Already Malia seems to be moving into a different phase; she’s more curious about boys and relationships, more self-conscious about what she wears. She’s always been older than her years, uncannily wise. Once, when she was just six years old and we were taking a walk together along the lake, she asked me out of the blue if our family was rich. I told her that we weren’t really rich, but that we had a lot more than most people. I asked her why she wanted to know.

“Well…I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided I don’t want to be really, really rich. I think I want a simple life.”

Her words were so unexpected that I laughed. She looked up at me and smiled, but her eyes told me she’d meant what she said.

I often think of that conversation. I ask myself what Malia makes of my not-so-simple life. Certainly she notices that other fathers attend her team’s soccer games more often than I do. If this upsets her, she doesn’t let it show, for Malia tends to be protective of other people’s feelings, trying to see the best in every situation. Still, it gives me small comfort to think that my eight-year-old daughter loves me enough to overlook my shortcomings.

I was able to get to one of Malia’s games recently, when session ended early for the week. It was a fine summer afternoon, and the several fields were full of families when I arrived, blacks and whites and Latinos and Asians from all over the city, women sitting on lawn chairs, men practicing kicks with their sons, grandparents helping babies to stand. I spotted Michelle and sat down on the grass beside her, and Sasha came to sit in my lap. Malia was already out on the field, part of a swarm of players surrounding the ball, and although soccer’s not her natural sport—she’s a head taller than some of her friends, and her feet haven’t yet caught up to her height—she plays with an enthusiasm and competitiveness that makes us cheer loudly. At halftime, Malia came over to where we were sitting.

“How you feeling, sport?” I asked her.

“Great!” She took a swig of water. “Daddy, I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Can we get a dog?”

“What does your mother say?”

“She told me to ask you. I think I’m wearing her down.”

I looked at Michelle, who smiled and offered a shrug.

“How about we talk it over after the game?” I said.

“Okay.” Malia took another sip of water and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m glad you’re home,” she said.

Before I could answer, she had turned around and started back out onto the field. And for an instant, in the glow of the late afternoon, I thought I saw my older daughter as the woman she would become, as if with each step she were growing taller, her shape filling out, her long legs carrying her into a life of her own.

I squeezed Sasha a little tighter in my lap. Perhaps sensing what I was feeling, Michelle took my hand. And I remembered a quote Michelle had given to a reporter during the campaign, when he’d asked her what it was like being a political wife.

“It’s hard,” Michelle had said. Then, according to the reporter, she had added with a sly smile, “And that’s why Barack is such a grateful man.”

As usual, my wife is right.