On Wednesday’s episode of Michelle Obama’s podcast, IMO With Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, which she co-hosts with her brother, the former first lady finally addressed her absence from President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January. Much to Megyn Kelly’s chagrin, the former POTUS didn’t fly solo because of any marital trouble. Frankly, the reason was far more amusing than I could’ve imagined.
According to Obama, she struggled so much with doing “the right thing” generally—versus doing what felt right to her personally—that she ultimately had to “trick” herself out of attending the event by not preparing anything to wear. Despite the fact that she is Michelle Obama and undoubtedly has a closet of gorgeous things to wear, I’ll just say: Relatable! I wouldn’t want to attend the inauguration of a prolific sexual predator and borderline fascist dictator either. Though I do wish she’d just say that…
“It started with not having anything to wear,” Obama said. “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.” Had her team coordinated an outfit for her, Obama said she knew her pesky “go high” impulses would’ve kicked in and she would’ve attended. Instead, she gave herself the most practical reason a woman would choose to stay at home.
Naturally, rumors still flew—fueled in part by conservative talking heads like Kelly.
“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 about her husband’s appearances without her. “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 to Obama, attending events alone (and making her husband go to all the shitty ones alone, too) is all part of her late-in-life attempts at mastering the “art of saying no.” She went on to liken doing her own thing, regardless of any moral, ethical, or socially-imposed constructs, to a “muscle” one has to “build.” At 61 years old, she’s only just starting to exercise the right to sit some stuff out. But she hopes that won’t be the case for any other woman.
“I want our daughters, I want the young women out there… I want my girls to start practicing different strategies for saying no,” Obama said. “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.”
I don’t know about you, but the next time I agree to plans that I no longer want to adhere to and decide to deploy old faithful (the “I have nothing to wear!” excuse), I will smile. For I know I will be breaking the generational curse of saying yes.
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