Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro will forever be known as the mother of the first African-American president of the United States. She died young, just short of her 53rd birthday, and did not see this historic event. However, she was a strong, independent woman who instilled a love of other cultures, community, and education in her children.
Like all of us, she was a person full of contradictions. Her father did not provide a stable childhood for her due to his unwillingness or inability to stay long at one job. Yet she seemed to inherit his wanderlust, spending large chunks of her life working in and researching Asian countries, particularly Indonesia, away from her own son. She and her mother were frequently at odds, yet she entrusted her parents to raise her pre-teen son in Hawaii while she stayed in Indonesia with her daughter. (Her mother had an impressive banking career and provided financial stability to the Dunham family.) She was a meticulous researcher, turning in a dissertation for her PhD of over 1,000 pages, yet she was disorganized and even uninterested in other important areas of her life.
Ann made bad choices in the men she married. Her first husband was already married with two children when they became involved but did not bother to tell Ann. Only much later, after he had abandoned her and their son, did she discover the truth. Her second husband eventually cheated on her and fell out of their daughter's life at the insistence of his second wife. The book indicates that she was in love with both of them but seemed to know when to cut her losses when the marriages fell apart.
