From the outside looking in, it certainly seems like Barack Obama has an amazing life. He swiftly rose through the political ranks, becoming President of the United States for two successful terms. Obama also has an amazing family, and since leaving office and making some serious bank as an author and speaker, he gets to spend as much time as he wants with them.
However, what even some of Obama’s biggest supporters don’t know is that his early childhood was rough in many ways. The future president dealt with various traumas that shaped him into one of America’s greatest leaders but at the possible cost of his soul. Don’t believe us? Keep reading to discover the saddest facts about Barack Obama’s childhood!
His father left him
By all accounts, Barack Obama is a really great dad. Certainly, he seems to have a healthier relationship with his children than political rival Donald Trump has with his. Sadly, Obama himself is likely trying to make up for one of his earliest childhood traumas: getting abandoned by his father.
In short, Barack Obama, Sr., was a man on a mission: he came from Kenya to study at the University of Hawaii, and he wanted to bring what he had learned back home to help Kenya fight for independence from the British. Those plans never changed even after he married Stanley Ann Dunham and she became pregnant with their child, Barack Obama, Jr.
Dad left when the kid was only two years old. In his own way, he thought he was saving the world. But that activist spirit came at the expense of his son having a father when it was most important.
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When dad reappeared…and disappeared for the final time
What could be worse than the trauma of losing your father? Simple: losing him a second time around. After abandoning his son years earlier, Barack Obama, Sr. came to visit America in the late 70’s. This gave him a chance to catch up with the younger Obama, who was then 10 years old.
The older man had left early enough that his son had no real memories of him. They both tried to make the most of this meeting, but the sad truth is that father and son would never see each other again after this. According to Obama, Jr., the only way he would ever get updates about his father after this was through occasional letters.
Over the years, Stanley Ann Dunham tried to ease this trauma for her son by reminding him that she was originally going to move to Kenya and start a new life there. But everything from the scary conflict to the even scarier reception from the extended Obama family was enough to convince her to stay in America.
Getting left with his grandparents
After Barack Obama’s father left when he was a child, he developed an even closer bond with his mother. While the bond itself never wavered, their relationship changed dramatically when Obama was 10. That was when his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, decided to leave her son with his grandparents.
For the previous four years, Obama had lived with his mother and new stepfather in Indonesia. She wanted him to move in with his grandparents in America so that he could have more opportunities as he grew older. Considering that he later became president, that idea was obviously a good one. But at the time, the young Obama had to deal with the emotional fallout of seemingly being dumped by his mother much as he had previously been abandoned by his father.
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A traumatizing time in Indonesia
Before coming to live with his grandparents in America, Barack Obama spent four years living in Indonesia. While there, he often felt like a man out of place because the surrounding culture was so very different from his own. And to hear him tell the story, the frequent culture shocks he experienced added up to some serious trauma.
As reported by The Guardian, Obama would later write about this shock in his book Dreams From My Father. There, he vividly described “the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food.” He also wrote about some other awful events for a young kid to experience, including when the death of a classmate’s baby brother was blamed on wind spirits and when he saw how the changing weather could devastate farmers from year to year.
Summing everything up, Obama wrote, “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel.” While he would later use these traumas to grow as a person and even push for reforms as president, the future politician had to experience much that no child should have to go through.