On a recent appearance of Sophia Bush’s podcast Work In Progress, former first Lady Michelle Obama finally addressed the divorce rumors that have followed the former first couple for a few months now. Chatter intensified after she skipped Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.
Talking about what her life is like now after so many years of being in the public eye and under intense scrutiny, Michelle answered simply, “It’s whatever I want.” She says that her newfound independence has led to people speculating some crazy things about her marriage, but it’s all about her right now. “I feel like it’s time for me to make some big girl decisions about my life and to own it fully, right, because if not now, when what am I waiting for?” she says. “[People] couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself. They had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing, that this couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions herself.”
Seemingly referencing her skipping out on the current president’s inauguration, Michelle says: “[That was] a real big example of me myself looking at something that I was supposed to do, without naming names, and I chose to do what was best for me, not what I had to do, not what I thought other people wanted me to do. That was an important test for me just as a woman, as an independent person.”
Michelle and Sophia Bush also discussed the Becoming author’s “Michelle Obama confidence” and her strategies as a mom. Michelle delved into the recent loss of her mother, Marian Robinson, who passed away in May 2024 and who she says is almost solely responsible for her current attitude: “If I were to pinpoint, it started with those small decisions that my mom made to give me my life and watched me succeed at it and be okay when I failed.”
And what’s coming up for the former First Lady? She talked about the podcast that she and her brother, Craig, are working on and how much their parents influenced that and what they hope to accomplish by sharing a microphone. “The notion that me and my brother would capture audiences and that our back and forth banter, and the lessons that we learned under the roof of Marion and Fraser Robinson, that those would provide a base of wisdom for other people. I wouldn’t have imagined in that,” she confesses. “[My parents] were not college educated, but my parents majored in common sense.”
