Michelle Obama, 58, gave readers some pretty private details about her daughters, Sasha, 21, and Malia, 24, first apartment in Los Angeles in her new book, The Light We Carry. The former first lady wrote about how proud she was and revealed how her daughters shopped on a budget. “They’d done a nice job with it [the apartment], having poked around yard sales and shopped at a nearby IKEA, watching their budget. They were sleeping on box springs and mattresses with no bed frame, but they’d found some pretty bedspreads to cover it all,” she wrote. “They’d picked up a set of quirky end tables at a flea market. They had a dining room table, though hadn’t yet found affordable chairs.”
When she and her husband, Barack Obama, 61, went out to the City of Angels to check out their kids’ new digs, Michelle made sure to note how careful Sasha and Malia were about their furniture. “Sasha attempted to fix us a couple of weak martinis—Wait, you know how to make martinis?—and served them in water glasses, first laying down a couple of newly purchased coasters so that we wouldn’t mark up their brand-new coffee table with our drinks,” the mom-of-two added. “I watched all this with some astonishment. It’s not that I’m surprised that our kids have grown up, exactly, but somehow the whole scene—the coasters, in particular—signaled a different sort of landmark, the type of thing every parent spends years scanning for, which is evidence of common sense.”
Michelle even joked that her two girls were not even that careful when they lived in the White House during Barack’s presidency. “As Sasha set down our drinks that night, I thought about all the coasters she and her sister hadn’t bothered to use when they were under our care, all the times over the years I’d tried to get water marks out of various tables, including at the White House,” the 58-year-old penned. Ultimately, seeing Sasha and Malia’s new home proved to Michelle and her husband how much their daughters have truly evolved. “But the dynamics had changed. We were at their table now. They owned it, and they were protecting it. Clearly, they had learned,” she concluded.
Elsewhere in the new memoir, the Becoming author shared that not only are her two daughters living on their own, but they are also playing the field with their love lives. “Malia and Sasha have been doing precisely what Barack and I were each doing at their age, which is dating around. (I’m told, by the way, that ‘dating around’ is no longer the sort of terminology used by people my kids’ ages.),” she wrote. “What I mean by it, in general, is that they’ve gone out with different people and tried on different styles of relationships. It’s just one part of the life-building that’s happening for them these days, a piece of the larger puzzle.”
Despite being happy for both Sasha and Malia’s choices when it comes to matters of the heart, Michelle still hopes that they will “remain fluid and youthful” when it comes to relationships. She also shared the words of wisdom that she told both of her girls. “I tell them to focus on becoming whole people, able to stand on their own. When you know your own light, you are then better prepared to share it with another person,” the Harvard alum penned. Michelle and Barack have been married for over 30 years, as they tied the knot in 1992. Malia, who is the oldest, was born on Jul. 4, 1998, while her sister, Sasha, was born on June 10, 2001.