Michelle Obama is finally speaking out about why she skipped out on Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year!
As Perezcious readers may know, the former first lady has been a no-show to several events over the past few months, including when Trump was sworn into office for his second term on January 20. Her hubby-in-chief Barack Obama attended, but she was nowhere to be found. Many strangely took her absences as a sign of the couple heading for divorce. Wild rumors even started circulating that the former president cheated on her with Jennifer Aniston! The actress shot down the accusations on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, saying she only met Barack once. Wild how people have to stretch so hard to find a scandal with one president, and with the other there are so many that no individual ones make enough of an impact…
Sources claimed Michelle missing the inauguration had nothing to do with a breakup or affair scandal. They said she refused “to plaster on a pleasant face and pretend for protocol’s sake” that she is OK with Trump’s re-election. Hey, valid! This isn’t business as usual! Now, the 61-year-old author is opening up about her decision to step back from public events, like the inauguration, on a new episode of the IMO With Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson podcast on Wednesday.
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Again, it had nothing to do with any supposed issues in her marriage with Barack! So get that narrative out of your heads! LOLz! As Michelle puts it, it was simply “the choice that was right for me.” She told guest Taraji P. Hensen:
“People couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason, they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart. It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was perceived as right, but do the things that was right for me, that was a hard thing for me to do.”
If she was told going and clapping for Trump was “the thing that was perceived as right” then she needs some new advisers. But seriously, we’re glad she put herself first. Can you blame her for not wanting to attend the inauguration and fake niceties with a guy who has become a massive threat to our democracy? Michelle already did it once, and we imagine she didn’t want to do it again.
The activist is also a grown woman who can make decisions for herself — ones that have nothing to do with her husband. Not to mention, husbands and wives got to functions by themselves all the time! How often do you see Melania Trump anywhere near Donald these days?? Yeah, it can signal trouble in paradise in a relationship at times. However, that’s not always the case — and it wasn’t here. She just had to do what was “right” for her at this moment.
Michelle did everything she could to stick with her decision, too! The momma said she made sure she had nothing to wear for the event. If she didn’t have a back-up outfit ready, then she knew she wouldn’t have been tempted to give in to the pressure and attend:
“It started with not having anything to wear. I was like, if I’m not going to do this thing, I got to tell my team, I don’t even want to have a dress ready, right? Because it’s so easy to just say let me do the right thing.”
The perfect plan! According to Michelle, her absence from public events is also part of a larger change she has made in her life since leaving the White House years ago. Lately, she has been practicing the “art of saying no” more:
“It’s a muscle that you have to build. And I think we suffered, because it’s almost like we started training late in life to build that muscle, right? I am just now starting to build it.”
It’s such a hard skill to master! That’s why she’s encouraging other women to start working on this sooner than she did. Michelle explained:
“I want our daughters, I want the young women out there… I want my girls to start practicing different strategies for saying no. After all that I’ve done in this world, if I am still showing them that I have to keep- I still have to show people that I love my country, that I’m doing the right thing, that I am always setting, going high all the time, even in the face of a lot of hypocrisy and contradiction, all I’m doing is keeping that crazy bar that our mothers and grandmothers set for us.”
A lot of the progress she’s made with setting boundaries for herself now has to do with going to therapy. She continued:
“I’m at this stage in life where I have to define my life on my terms for the first time. So what are those terms? And going to therapy, just to work all that out, like, what happened that eight years that we were in the White House? What did that do to me internally? My soul. We made it through. We got out alive. I hope we made the country proud. My girls, thank God, are whole. But what happened to me? Going through therapy is getting me to look at the fact that maybe, maybe finally I’m good enough.”
You are! And don’t you forget it, Michelle! Watch the honest conversation between Michelle and Taraji (below):
Good for Michelle for setting and sticking with her boundaries! We applaud her! Reactions, Perezcious readers? Did you believe the Barack divorce rumors? Let us know in the comments!
[Image via Michelle Obama/YouTube, MEGA/WENN]
