I randomly typed in ‘obama’s mother’ in google while at work just now, and stumbled across this article. So much of this resonated with me that I had to keep it.
How do you achieve your dreams? Where do you find the most happiness? And what are your biggest regrets?
“I regret not having spent more time with my mother,” Obama candidly told the students when asked about his life regrets. “Because she died early – she got cancer right around when she was my age, actually, she was just a year older than I am now – she died. It happened very fast, in about six months.”
Ann Dunham died from ovarian cancer in 1995 just 22 days shy of her 53 rd birthday.
“There was a stretch of time from when I was, let’s say, 20 until I was 30, where I was so busy with my own life that I didn’t always reach out and communicate with her and ask her how she was doing and tell her about things,” Obama said. “I was nice and I’d call and write once in a while. But this goes to what I was saying earlier about what you remember in the end I think is the people you love. I realized that I didn’t – every single day, or at least more often – just spend time with her and find out what she was thinking and what she was doing, because she had been such an important part of my life.”
The president described a rebellious youth stemming from his “complicated” family life, growing up without a father at home, and “sometimes I was enjoying life too much.”
“You have to focus more on what kind of influence and impact are you going to have on other people’s lives,” he said.
Family is the most significant source of happiness, Obama told the audience, but also “feeling as if I’ve been true to my beliefs and that I’ve lived with some integrity.”
Perhaps the toughest question for the president was what he hopes his legacy will be. In a rambling 9-minute answer, Obama cited a range of factors. He said his “most important” legacy is fathering daughters Malia and Sasha, whom he said are “turning out to be wonderful young people.”
“Being a great husband,” also matters, he added, “because if you don’t do those things well, then everything else you’re gonna have problems with.”
source: https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/04/president-obama-regrets-not-spending-more-time-with-mom/
