I just watched Son #2 graduate from college this weekend.  Son #1 graduated from college in December.  Call me a proud mother, I am.

Yesterday, when scolling down the pictures of Obama in Oregon, I was struck by the Time Magazine cover with the picture of Barack as a child in his mother’s arms. I began to wonder, how proud would she have been, to have witnessed the throngs of people amassing, just to hear her son speak?  So I set out to find more about this woman.  Here, in a NYT article, I met a woman of great depth, intelligence and compassion.  I’d like you to meet her too: 

“She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.

She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister. “That was very much her philosophy of life — to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.”

Ms. Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Mr. Obama, the Illinois senator running for the Democratic presidential nomination. He barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama.

“to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.”

Is this not the antithesis of the very man who has been our “Commander in Cheif” for the last 7 1/2 years?

How refreshing it would be, indeed, to have a president who held this philosophy.

I think his Mother would have been pleased.