Former US first Lady Michelle Obama has shared her frustrations about being married to Barack Obama, revealing new insights into their life together.
Obama sat down with her brother Craig Robinson for an episode of their IMO podcast, bringing on as their guest Dr. Sharon Malone, who is married to former Attorney General Eric Holder.
Obama recalled that the women first met at a Congressional Black Caucus event when Barack Obama was a U.S. senator.
‘They put us together because we were both reluctant spouses attending one of these huge dinners,’ the former first lady recalled. ‘And what, where were they? Was Barack a U.S. senator?’
President Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 after becoming a nationally recognised political figure for the stirring keynote he delivered at the Democratic National Convention earlier that year. He remained a senator until 2008, resigning after he was elected president of the United States.
‘There was a line of people waiting to shake hands with our respective husbands,’ Obama recalled of the Senate-era affair. ‘You know, people, like reaching over our heads and spilling water on us, trying to get to these two, you know, illustrious men.’
Obama made eye contact with Malone and realised they needed to be friends.
‘She had the same look on her face as I did, like, “Here we go,”‘ Obama recalled. ‘And I looked over at this beautiful woman … But I just saw the look on her face, which expressed the sentiments that I felt, which was.’
‘P***ed off,’ Robinson offered. Obama rejected that. She said it was more like, ‘You see this? Like, this is crazy, isn’t it, girl?’ the former first lady said.
This comes after Obama addressed divorce rumours between herself and her husband during a taping of actress Sophia Bush’s podcast last month
‘That’s the thing that we as women, I think we struggle with disappointing people. I mean, so much so that this year people were, you know, they couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing,’ Obama said.
‘That this couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right?’ she continued.
Obama added: ‘That’s what society does to us.’
‘We start actually, finally going, “What am I doing? Who am I doing this for?” And if it doesn’t fit into the sort of stereotype of what people think we should do, then it gets labeled as something negative and horrible.’