BY THE START of my second year in the Senate, my life had settled into amanageable 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 andthe rare lunch or dinner with a friend, the next three days would be consumed by apredictable series of tasks—committee markups, votes, caucus lunches, floorstatements, 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 ofmeetings. On Thursday afternoon, we would get word from the cloakroom as to whenthe last vote would be, and at the appointed hour I’d line up in the well of the Senatealongside my colleagues to cast my vote, before trotting down the Capitol steps in hopesof 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 aroll-call vote on the Senate floor every year, and almost none of those are sponsored bya member of the minority party. As a result, most of my major initiatives—theformation of public school innovation districts, a plan to help U.S. automakers pay fortheir retiree health-care costs in exchange for increased fuel economy standards, anexpansion of the Pell Grant program to help low-income students meet rising collegetuition costs—languished in committee.

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

　　One day in February I found myself in particularly good spirits, having just completed ahearing on legislation that Dick Lugar and I were sponsoring aimed at restrictingweapons proliferation and the black-market arms trade. Because Dick was not only theSenate’s leading expert on proliferation issues but also the chairman of the SenateForeign Relations Committee, prospects for the bill seemed promising. Wanting toshare the good news, I called Michelle from my D.C. office and started explaining thesignificance of the bill—how shoulder-to-air missiles could threaten commercial airtravel if they fell into the wrong hands, how small-arms stockpiles left over from theCold 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 thatfor me?”

　　“Right. Ant traps.”

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

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

　　MOST PEOPLE WHO meet my wife quickly conclude that she is remarkable. They areright about this—she is smart, funny, and thoroughly charming. She is also verybeautiful, although not in a way that men find intimidating or women find off-putting; itis the lived-in beauty of the mother and busy professional rather than the touched-upimage we see on the cover of glossy magazines. Often, after hearing her speak at somefunction or working with her on a project, people will approach me and say somethingto the effect of “You know I think the world of you, Barack, but your wife…wow!” Inod, knowing that if I ever had to run against her for public office, she would beat mewithout 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 thanme, Michelle was already a practicing lawyer, having attended Harvard Law straight outof college. I had just finished my first year at law school and had been hired as asummer associate.

　　It was a difficult, transitional period in my life. I had enrolled in law school after threeyears of work as a community organizer, and although I enjoyed my studies, I stillharbored doubts about my decision. Privately, I worried that it represented theabandonment of my youthful ideals, a concession to the hard realities of money andpower—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 thepoor 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 threemonths of salary Sidley was offering. And so, having sublet the cheapest apartment Icould find, having purchased the first three suits ever to appear in my closet and a newpair of shoes that turned out to be a half size too small and would absolutely cripple mefor the next nine weeks, I arrived at the firm one drizzly morning in early June and wasdirected to the office of the young attorney who’d been assigned to serve as my summeradvisor.

　　I don’t remember the details of that first conversation with Michelle. I remember thatshe was tall—almost my height in heels—and lovely, with a friendly, professionalmanner that matched her tailored suit and blouse. She explained how work was assignedat 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 toone 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 intoher office; the drugstore snapshot that I’d sent in for the firm directory made my noselook a little big (even more enormous than usual, she might say), and she had beenskeptical 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.” Butif Michelle was impressed, she certainly didn’t tip her hand when we went to lunch. Idid learn that she had grown up on the South Side, in a small bungalow just north of theneighborhoods where I had organized. Her father was a pump operator for the city; hermother had been a housewife until the kids were grown, and now worked as a secretaryat a bank. She had attended Bryn Mawr Public Elementary School, gotten into WhitneyYoung Magnet School, and followed her brother to Princeton, where he had been a staron the basketball team. At Sidley she was part of the intellectual property group andspecialized in entertainment law; at some point, she said, she might have to considermoving 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, fordistractions—especially men. But she knew how to laugh, brightly and easily, and Inoticed she didn’t seem in too much of a hurry to get back to the office. And there wassomething else, a glimmer that danced across her round, dark eyes whenever I looked ather, the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile thingsreally were, and that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quicklyunravel. That touched me somehow, that trace of vulnerability. I wanted to know thatpart of her.

　　For the next several weeks, we saw each other every day, in the law library or thecafeteria or at one of the many outings that law firms organize for their summerassociates to convince them that their life in the law will not be endless hours of poringthrough documents. She took me to one or two parties, tactfully overlooking my limitedwardrobe, and even tried to set me up with a couple of her friends. Still, she refused togo 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’reshowing me how the copy machine works. You’re telling me what restaurants to try. Idon’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. Wesat on the curb and ate our cones in the sticky afternoon heat, and I told her aboutworking at Baskin-Robbins when I was a teenager and how it was hard to look cool in abrown apron and cap. She told me that for a span of two or three years as a child, shehad refused to eat anything except peanut butter and jelly. I said that I’d like to meet herfamily. 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 inIndonesia, 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 outthat visiting the Robinson household was like dropping in on the set of Leave It toBeaver. There was Frasier, the kindly, good-humored father, who never missed a day ofwork or any of his son’s ball games. There was Marian, the pretty, sensible mother whobaked birthday cakes, kept order in the house, and had volunteered at school to makesure her children were behaving and that the teachers were doing what they weresupposed to be doing. There was Craig, the basketball-star brother, tall and friendly andcourteous and funny, working as an investment banker but dreaming of going intocoaching someday. And there were uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, stoppingby to sit around the kitchen table and eat until they burst and tell wild stories and listento 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 theRobinsons had had to overcome hardships that one rarely saw on prime-time TV. Therewere the usual issues of race, of course: the limited opportunities available to Michelle’sparents growing up in Chicago during the fifties and sixties; the racial steering andpanic peddling that had driven white families away from their neighborhood; the extraenergy required from black parents to compensate for smaller incomes and more violentstreets and underfunded playgrounds and indifferent schools.

　　But there was a more specific tragedy at the center of the Robinson household. At theage of thirty, in the prime of his life, Michelle’s father had been diagnosed with multiplesclerosis. For the next twenty-five years, as his condition steadily deteriorated, he hadcarried out his responsibilities to his family without a trace of self-pity, giving himselfan extra hour every morning to get to work, struggling with every physical act fromdriving a car to buttoning his shirt, smiling and joking as he labored—at first with alimp 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 herfather’s illness had taken on her family; how heavy a burden Michelle’s mother hadbeen forced to carry; how carefully circumscribed their lives together had been, witheven the smallest outing carefully planned to avoid problems or awkwardness; howterrifyingly 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 hadbarely 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 Robinsonhad built for themselves and their children stirred a longing for stability and a sense ofplace that I had not realized was there. Just as Michelle perhaps saw in me a life ofadventure, risk, travel to exotic lands—a wider horizon than she had previously allowedherself.

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

　　THERE’S A LOT of talk these days about the decline of the American family. Socialconservatives claim that the traditional family is under assault from Hollywood moviesand gay pride parades. Liberals point to the economic factors—from stagnating wagesto inadequate day care—that have put families under increasing duress. Our popularculture feeds the alarm, with tales of women consigned to permanent singlehood, menunwilling 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 forgrabs.

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

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

　　These trends are particularly acute in the African American community, where it’s fairto say that the nuclear family is on the verge of collapse. Since 1950, the marriage ratefor black women has plummeted from 62 percent to 36 percent. Between 1960 and1995, the number of African American children living with two married parentsdropped by more than half; today 54 percent of all African American children live insingle-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 onaverage, married couples live healthier, wealthier, and happier lives, but no one claimsthat men and women benefit from being trapped in bad or abusive marriages. Certainlythe decision of increasing numbers of Americans to delay marriage makes sense; notonly does today’s information economy demand more time in school, but studies showthat couples who wait until their late twenties or thirties to get married are more likelyto stay married than those who marry young.

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

　　In light of these facts, policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and thatdiscourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue. Forexample, most people agree that neither federal welfare programs nor the tax codeshould penalize married couples; those aspects of welfare reform enacted under Clintonand those elements of the Bush tax plan that reduced the marriage penalty enjoy strongbipartisan support.

　　The same goes for teen pregnancy prevention. Everyone agrees that teen pregnanciesplace both mother and child at risk for all sorts of problems. Since 1990, the teenpregnancy rate has dropped by 28 percent, an unadulterated piece of good news. Butteens still account for almost a quarter of out-of-wedlock births, and teen mothers aremore 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 realdifference in helping married couples stay together and in encouraging unmarriedcouples who are living together to form a more lasting bond. Expanding access to suchservices to low-income couples, perhaps in concert with job training and placement,medical coverage, and other services already available, should be something everybodycan 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 subjectto both punishment and shame, obtaining a divorce was far more difficult, and marriageoffered not merely personal fulfillment but also well-defined social roles for men andfor women. In their view, any government policy that appears to reward or even expressneutrality toward what they consider to be immoral behavior—whether providing birthcontrol to young people, abortion services to women, welfare support for unwedmothers, 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 whichgender 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 theyconsider unwholesome; it’s a feeling I often share when I listen to the lyrics of songs onthe radio.

　　But all in all, I have little sympathy for those who would enlist the government in thetask 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 oursystem of individual liberty. Where such personal decisions raise the prospect ofsignificant harm to others—as is true with child abuse, incest, bigamy, domesticviolence, or failure to pay child support—society has a right and duty to step in. (Thosewho believe in the personhood of the fetus would put abortion in this category.) Beyondthat, I have no interest in seeing the president, Congress, or a government bureaucracyregulating what goes on in America’s bedrooms.

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

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

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

　　Today those numbers are reversed. Seventy percent of families with children are headedby two working parents or a single working parent. The result has been what my policydirector and work-family expert Karen Kornbluh calls “the juggler family,” in whichparents struggle to pay the bills, look after their children, maintain a household, andmaintain 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 NewAmerica Foundation and testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Children andFamilies:

　　Americans today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than they did in1969. Millions of children are left in unlicensed day care every day—or at home alonewith the TV as a babysitter. Employed mothers lose almost an hour of sleep a day intheir attempt to make it all add up. Recent data show that parents with school agechildren show high signs of stress—stress that has an impact on their productivity andwork—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 intothe workplace is a direct consequence of feminist ideology, and hence can be reversed ifwomen 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 thetransformation of the workplace; in the minds of most Americans, the opportunity forwomen to pursue careers, achieve economic independence, and realize their talents onan 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 ofchanging attitudes. It’s a matter of making ends meet.

　　Consider the facts. Over the last thirty years, the average earnings of American menhave grown less than 1 percent after being adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the cost ofeverything, from housing to health care to education, has steadily risen. What has kept alarge swath of American families from falling out of the middle class has been Mom’spaycheck. In their book The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagipoint 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 theirchildren’s future—preschool education, college tuition, and most of all, homes in safeneighborhoods with good public schools. In fact, between these fixed costs and theadded expenses of a working mother (particularly day care and a second car), theaverage two-income family has less discretionary income—and is less financiallysecure—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 whenevery other family on the block is earning two incomes and bidding up the prices ofhomes, 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 percentless 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 theirchildren in a less-competitive school.

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

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

　　For the first few years of our marriage, Michelle and I went through the usualadjustments all couples go through: learning to read each other’s moods, accepting thequirks and habits of a stranger underfoot. Michelle liked to wake up early and couldbarely 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. Partlybecause I was still working on my first book, and perhaps because I had lived much ofmy life as an only child, I would often spend the evening holed up in my office in theback of our railroad apartment; what I considered normal often left Michelle feelinglonely. I invariably left the butter out after breakfast and forgot to twist the little tiearound 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 workinghard: I was practicing law at a small civil rights firm and had started teaching at theUniversity of Chicago Law School, while Michelle had decided to leave her lawpractice, first to work in Chicago’s Department of Planning and then to run the Chicagoarm of a national service program called Public Allies. Our time together got squeezedeven more when I ran for the state legislature, but despite my lengthy absences and hergeneral dislike of politics, Michelle supported the decision; “I know it’s something thatyou want to do,” she would tell me. On the............