Michelle Obama Reveals the White House Didn’t “Fully Protect” Her Family

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The former First Lady opened up in a wide-ranging conversation in a new podcast interview.

• Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, appeared on the May 1 episode of Steven Barlett’s podcast The Diary of a CEO.
• In the wide-ranging conversation, Michelle spoke about boundaries, her fertility struggles, and how she felt the White House didn’t “fully protect” her or her family when they lived there from 2009 to 2017.
• Michelle also opened up about skipping Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, and how not attending was an example of her practicing boundary setting.

In a new interview, former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama shared the unexpected challenges she and her family faced in the White House, sharing that she felt that the West Wing didn’t “fully protect” her and her husband, President Barack Obama, and their kids Malia and Sasha.

Michelle and brother Craig Robinson appeared as guests on the May 1 episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast with host Steven Bartlett. In the conversation, Michelle shared what life was like behind closed doors of the White House, where she and her family—including her mother, Marian Robinson—lived from 2009 to 2017.

“I was a very different First Lady,” Michelle said. “Not terribly different from Hillary Clinton, but it was a different time. We had small kids in the White House, and that didn’t happen often. There were just accommodations and ways that the West Wing didn’t think about or work to fully protect all of us in the process as a unit.”

Michelle made history as the first Black woman to serve as First Lady, and she spoke about the challenges of Secret Service agents with her young daughters Malia—who was only 10 when her father was elected president—and Sasha, who was just 7. Michelle shared that the White House revolves around a man, not a family, and added, “If I had known what I knew now, I would have asked for different things.”

“I was trying to make sure that our kids came out of that process not crazy, and whole,” Michelle said on the episode released on Thursday.

In the wide-ranging conversation, Michelle opened up about her fertility struggles and her IVF journey, telling host Bartlett, “Imagine your life as you’re checking boxes—I’m waiting, I delayed having kids. I’ve found the love of my life, and now I’m gonna get pregnant. So you think it’s gonna be like a box, it’s gonna happen like that, and no one tells you that there really is a biological clock, that’s not false.”

“So by the time we started really trying, which worked perfectly for our careers and maturing and having everything set,” she continued, adding, “while we’re waiting for our lives to be perfect, that biological clock is ticking.”

She added of not being able to immediately conceive, “So when it happens to you, a box checker, somebody that thought life was gonna be so and so and you did all the right things to have things not work out, and to know that it was gonna be that way and nobody told you so that you’d be prepared for it—it just, it was a blow. And then as a woman, you’re walking around owning the blow as if it’s your fault.”

Malia was ultimately born in 1998, and Sasha followed in 2001. She said she is continually teaching her daughters—now 26 and 23—boundaries, admitting on the podcast that “It takes a lot of work to learn how to say no and how to not be people pleasers, which I think there are more of us out there than we’d like to admit.”

“It takes practice, and it takes decades of practice,” she added.

Michelle, now 61, told Bartlett “I think at 61, I’m finally owning my wisdom in a way that I didn’t. I think it takes women until we’re about 60 to be like, ‘I think I know a thing or two.’”

Michelle put the practice into work when she turned down the invitation to attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, which she spoke about on the show: “You know, as a box checking person who has been checking her whole life, doing the right thing, trying to always be an example, always going high—I think I just told myself, ‘I think I’ve done enough of that,’ and if I haven’t, then I never will. It’ll never be enough. So let me start now.”

Of potentially letting people down because she didn’t attend, “People can deal with a little disappointment every now and then,” Michelle said.

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