Washington, Apr 24 (UNI) In a rare and candid revelation, former First Lady Michelle Obama has addressed the speculation surrounding her absence from former President Donald Trump's second inauguration earlier this year, saying it took everything in her power to do the thing that she thought was right for her.
Speaking with her brother Craig Robinson and actress Taraji P. Henson on the April 23 episode of her podcast 'IMO', Obama revealed the quiet but powerful reasoning behind her absence; a conscious decision to honour her own boundaries. “People couldn't believe that I was saying no for any other reason, they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart,” Obama said of the headlines surrounding the inauguration and her husband's solo outings. “It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was perceived as right, but do the things that was right for me, that was a hard thing for me to do”, according a report by PEOPLE.
Obama candidly explained that in order to resist last-minute pressure to attend, she instructed her team not to prepare an outfit. "It started with not having anything to wear," Obama said of the moment she finalised her decision. "I was like, if I'm not going to do this thing, I got to tell my team, I don't even want to have a dress ready, right? Because it's so easy to just say let me do the right thing."
Joined by actress and mental health advocate Taraji P. Henson, the conversation blossomed into a reflective meditation on the burdens shouldered by Black women in the public eye. Attending events without her husband, or vice versa, all tie into Obama's efforts to practice the “art of saying no” when it feels like the right decision.
“It's a muscle that you have to build,” she explained of her philosophy. “And I think we suffered, because it's almost like we started training late in life to build that muscle, right? I am just now starting to build it.”
She shared that ongoing therapy has been a transformative journey, to which Henson praised her. "You've had to be a shock absorber for your husband, for your children, for your mom, for family, your loved ones, because of where you were sitting in the public eye. That's not fair to you,” the actress noted. “I applaud you. I'm happy that you are taking care of yourself in the way that you need to.”
Obama, now several years removed from her White House years, added “We made it through. We got out alive,” she shared. “I hope we made the country proud. My girls, thank God, are whole. But what happened to me?”
She also addressed the relentless scrutiny she endured during President Obama's campaigns. "He's a great man, but he's not perfect, you know? He's got his foibles and his flaws,’ ” Obama continued. “The first thing that some female journalist said is that I was bitter. I was emasculating him just by sort of trying to tell the truth about what life is, right?”
She underscored the double standards Black women navigate, noting that any expression of passion is often misread as aggression. “And then you get labelled as angry, you know, because you talk forcefully or passionately about something, even if it's in the context of great joy and pride, that the first label they put on us as black women is that we are angry.”
“I want our daughters, I want the young women out there… I want my girls to start practising different strategies for saying no,” she continued. “After all that I've done in this world, if I am still showing them that I have to keep- I still have to show people that I love my country, that I'm doing the right thing, that I am always setting, going high all the time, even in the face of a lot of hypocrisy and contradiction, all I'm doing is keeping that crazy bar that our mothers and grandmothers set for us.”
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