Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama's mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.

"When I think about my mother," Obama told me recently, "I think that there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box."

Obama's mother was a dreamer. She made risky bets that paid off only some of the time, choices that her children had to live with. She fell in love—twice—with fellow students from distant countries she knew nothing about. Both marriages failed, and she leaned on her parents and friends to help raise her two children.

"She cried a lot," says her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, "if she saw animals being treated cruelly or children in the news or a sad movie—or if she felt like she wasn't being understood in a conversation." And yet she was fearless, says Soetoro-Ng. "She was very capable. She went out on the back of a motorcycle and did rigorous fieldwork. Her research was responsible and penetrating. She saw the heart of a problem, and she knew whom to hold accountable."

Today Obama is partly a product of what his mother was not. Whereas she swept her children off to unfamiliar lands and even lived apart from her son when he was a teenager, Obama has tried to ground his children in the Midwest. "We've created stability for our kids in a way that my mom didn't do for us," he says. "My choosing to put down roots in Chicago and marry a woman who is very rooted in one place probably indicates a desire for stability that maybe I was missing."

Ironically, the person who mattered most in Obama's life is the one we know the least about—maybe because being partly African in America is still seen as being simply black and color is still a preoccupation above almost all else. There is not enough room in the conversation for the rest of a man's story.

But Obama is his mother's son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother's credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they're responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.

It turns out that Obama's nascent career peddling hope is a family business. He inherited it. And while it is true that he has not been profoundly tested, he was raised by someone who was.

In most elections, the deceased mother of a candidate in the primaries is not the subject of a magazine profile. But Ann Soetoro was not like most mothers.

每個人都是一個矛盾的結合體，我們不能絕對的把自己歸為某一類人。而奧巴馬的母親，至少可以同時屬于十幾類人。奧巴馬的母親S·安·索多洛曾是一個少女媽媽，但后來卻獲得了人類學博士學位；她出生于富裕的美國中西部，卻在印度尼西亞生活得一樣舒適自在；她是一個天生的母親，卻又是一個工作狂人；她浪漫，卻又現實——如果可能的話。

最近，奧巴馬這樣對記者說：“每當我想到我的母親，我都覺得她是一個矛盾的結合體。她很清楚地知道她是什么樣的人，對事情有著自己的觀點；但同時，她又有一點草率沖動。我覺得她總是在探尋什么——如果她的生活被限制在一個小空間里，她就會覺得不舒服。”

奧巴馬的母親是一個夢想家。她會冒著不能次次都贏的風險投出青春的賭注，會做出一些極具風險的選擇——這些選擇，對她孩子的生活影響巨大。她曾經兩次與來自偏遠國家的同學相愛并結婚，甚至戀愛時對他們還一無所知。這兩次婚姻都以失敗告終，最后她只能依靠父母和朋友的幫助，來撫養她的兩個孩子。

她的女兒瑪雅·索多洛·恩格說，“她經常會哭。當她在新聞中或者悲情電影中看到小動物或是孩子被虐待的情景，或者當她感覺到在談話中自己被誤會的時候，都會流起淚來。”然而，索多洛·恩格卻說她的母親無所畏懼。“她的能力很強。現場調查工作是很艱苦的，可是她騎上摩托車就去。對于她的研究，她很負責，也很有見地。她可以一眼看到問題的核心所在，并且知道誰應該對這個問題負責。”

如今的奧巴馬與他的母親并不完全相同。他的母親曾把孩子們帶到一片陌生的土地，甚至在兒子還是少年時就與他分居兩地；而奧巴馬則盡量把自己的孩子安置在美國中西部。“我們盡量給孩子以穩定的生活，這是我的母親不曾給我們的，”他這樣說，“我之所以選擇在芝加哥定居，并和一個安土重遷的女子結婚，也許正是表露著我對于從小缺乏的穩定生活的渴望。”

令人驚訝的是，對于奧巴馬最重要的人卻是我們了解最少的一個人——也許，在美國，一個人只要有一部分非洲血統，就會被人認為是黑人，膚色仍然是一個先入為主的因素。至于這個人其他的故事，別人也就不會更多地去討論了。

但是奧巴馬確實是他母親的兒子。在他關于將來而不是關于過去的演說中，你可以看到一絲和他母親一樣的夢想家氣質。奧巴馬從很多從不相信政治的人那里得到了捐款，而這些人，也正是對奧巴馬口才的一種響應——他和他的母親一樣，不需要依靠任何哲學體系就可以文雅卻又強有力地陳述自己的觀點。在合適的時候，他會計劃怎樣來鼓動成千上萬和他完全不同的人，這也許與他有一個特別的母親有關，與他母親曾經像研究珍寶一樣鉆研不同文化有關。

事實證明，奧巴馬剛剛起步的職業生涯與他的家庭息息相關。甚至可以說，這是他從他母親身上繼承到的。確實，他沒有經歷過太多世事滄桑的考驗，但是，他卻是被一個經歷過考驗的人撫養大的。

在大多數大選中，一初選個候選人已故的母親并不是報刊雜志追蹤的熱點，但是安·索多洛卻與眾不同。