First Lady...continued

Since entering the White House, Michelle has sought to help working women find balance between home and career. She’s also sought to enable the poor to enter college. And most recently, she’s focused on creating awareness of child obesity through her “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign.

Healthy love
“We want to eliminate this problem of childhood obesity in a generation,” the First Lady has said. “We want our kids to face a different and more optimistic future in terms of their lifespan.”
With one in three children being overweight or obese, an annual amount of $150 billion treating obesity-related illnesses, and 38 states boasting adult obesity rates above 25 percent, Michelle is hoping to catalyze a change in America’s appetite as well as its attitude.
The campaign was inspired early this year, when her daughters’ health was brought into question by their paediatrician. “In my eyes, I thought my children were perfect,” Michelle said. “I didn’t see the changes.” The doctor “cautioned me that I had to take a look at my own children’s BMI,” or body mass index, she told The Associated Press.
“Even though I wasn’t exactly sure at that time what I was supposed to do with this information about my children’s BMI, I knew that I had to do something. I had to lead our family to a different way.”
Over the next few months she made small but significant changes, including no weekday TV, healthier portion sizes, low-fat milk, water bottles in lunch boxes, and plenty of fruit and vegetables.
“It was really very minor stuff, but these small changes resulted in some really significant improvements,” Michelle said. “It was so significant that the next time we visited our paediatrician, he was amazed. He looked over the girls’ charts and he said, ‘What on earth are you doing?’” Michelle said that this is the message she hopes to share in her anti-obesity campaign; that “small changes can lead to big results.”
Let’s Move is a nationwide campaign targeting four pillars: informing parents about nutrition and exercise; improving the quality of food in schools; making healthy foods more affordable and accessible for families and focusing more on physical education.
“Because what we’re going to be fighting for, for our kids, is what we have to fight for, for all of our kids,” Michelle told Newsweek. “They have to be center in this society and this nation. We have to put their education, their needs, their well-being, first and foremost.”

Born into love
Michelle’s role model is her own 72-year-old mother, Marian Shields Robinson, who now serves as caregiver, or “First Granny,” to the president’s two daughters. Raised in a one-bedroom apartment in the South Shore community of Chicago, 46-year-old Michelle and her brother, Craig – now the men’s basketball couch at Oregon State University – were nurtured and loved by Marian and her husband, Fraser, a city water plant employee who died in 1990.
The First Lady describes growing up in a “conventional home” with “the mother at home, the father works, you have dinner around the table. I had a very stable, conventional upbringing, and that felt very safe to me.”
Despite having multiple sclerosis, Fraser never missed a day of work, serving as a hero to his offspring. His wife stayed home with the children, filling the house with laughter and lessons and love. Both valued hard work, independence and honesty, and took pride in their jobs. “That was what they enjoyed; it [gave them] a sense of meaning,” Michelle stated.

Finding love
Having mentored Barack in 1989 while working at a downtown law firm, Sidley & Austin, Michelle was impressed by his ability to connect with people. They were married in 1992, and had their first daughter in 1998. With Barack being a political figure, Michelle was forced to re-examine her view of family. She had to learn to create a traditional family-feel in an untraditional environment.
“I had to give up some of my notions, and so did he,” said Michelle, who also gave up her six-figure job with the University of Chicago Hospital when Barack assumed presidency. “That’s part of being married; everyone makes compromises. Once I got a sense that the family we were creating was going to be good for our children, I realized that it wasn’t exactly what I had, but that our children are thriving and they feel loved. Part of my fear was: ‘Are my kids going to be O.K.? If they don’t see their dad at night, like I did, will they feel he loves them?’”

Making love work
And Barack, whose own father was absent growing up, and whose mother traveled the globe for months at a time, has reassured her that they will.
“(We’re) just continuing to make sure that our first priority is getting them into schools that make sense for them, making sure that they have activities that they care about, that we’re there for them to help them with their homework, that we go to their parent-teacher conferences, that we go to all their events,” Michelle has said.
“It’s important to continue to do that, no matter what their father’s job is. And he has to continue to make them a priority even as he’s the leader of the free world. I think that’s an important thing for him to model for others. It’s this notion that if he can do it, then we all have to really fight for it.”
In an effort to help establish this nurturing environment for 11-year-old Malia Ann and nine-year-old Natasha, Michelle has not only sought the advice of former First Ladies Laura Bush, Rosalynn Carter and Hillary Rodham Clinton, but has invited her mother, a mainstay for the family during the presidential campaign, to move in with them.
Ensuring they get to school, piano lessons and dancing lessons, as well as cooking their meals, running baths and getting them to bed on time, Marian helps to keep the girls’ life as normal as possible in spite of a house that hosts both a bowling alley and a personal cinema.
“My first priority,” Michelle says on BarackObama.com, “will always be to make sure that our girls are healthy and grounded.”

Emily Wierenga is an author, artist and freelance writer who lives with her husband and son in Neerlandia, AB. For more information, visit www.emilywierenga.com