A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path-His Mom

[babylonsister]

A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path


By JANNY SCOTT
Published: March 14, 2008



In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.

She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.

“She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister. “That was very much her philosophy of life — to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.”

Ms. Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Mr. Obama, the Illinois senator running for the Democratic presidential nomination. He barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/politics/14obama.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[Kittycat]

1. Great Article. And what an incredible woman.

[babylonsister]

2. Yes, I think this article helps to explain where Obama's worldview

came from. His mom sounded like a force!

[Bruce McAuley]

3. She graduated from my high school...

Mercer Island High School in the class of 1960, her parents had moved there because it was a new school and would have the most modern teaching at the time. I graduated in 1965, so I never knew her, but some friends I still have graduated with her and mentioned how she hated her name, being named for her father. She was very smart though, at the top of her class evidently, and then went to Hawaii after graduation.
She mentions getting to change "Barry's" diapers when she came to visit Mercer Island after having the baby.
Small world after all.

Bruce

[FrenchieCat]

4. Reading the entire article made me cry a little.......

I'm not sure why, but it did.

[Scurrilous]

5. K & R

:thumbsup: