The New York Times is running a series called The Long Run A Mother’s Influence which is a part of a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Presidential Election.

I was intrigued by the story of Barack Obama’s mother, A Free Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path. I thought, here is a woman who lived her life and although she may not have been the conventional mother to her children, she left them a legacy that is just as important. I thought this may be a fitting background to Mr. Obama’s story. As this week, he is fielding a lot of media regarding the effect of his minister’s incendiary remarks which are considered to divisive. Mr. Obama is among the many bi-racial citizens in this country who must balance walking in the world of black and white. I wish that wasn’t an issue, but the truth is, in this day and age, it is an issue. Maybe someday it will be a non-issue and we can just assess people according to their abilities and not the make up of their DNA. I hope that dream will be my children’s reality someday. It makes me wonder, if his mother is still alive, what she would think of her son and his balancing act.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.

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.

Read the full article here.