President’s mother-in-law warms to the White House

After President Obama was elected, his mother-in-law said she loved her family, but she loved her home in Chicago too.

“The White House reminds me of a museum, and it’s like, how do you sleep in a museum?” Marian Robinson had told People magazine.

One whirlwind year later -- after world travel, a state dinner, retreats at Camp David and holiday extravaganzas -- it appears the first lady’s mother is sleeping quite well.

For Robinson, 72, life in the “President’s House” has evolved from a trial run to what looks like an I’m-here-for-the-duration stay.

Early this year, Michelle Obama confessed that she’d worried about plucking her mother from familiar surroundings near two of Robinson’s sisters on Chicago’s South Side.

“She wasn’t completely kicking and screaming, but it was clear that her preference would be to remain in her old life,” the first lady said. “So I’m happy that she’s really settled in and feels like this is home for her.”

Robinson remains nanny in chief to Obama daughters Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8, though she doesn’t seem to aspire to be granny in chief to the nation.

The president has divulged a few tidbits about Robinson’s new life, revealing that she’s made friends with President Clinton’s former secretary, Betty Currie, who grew up in Waukegan, Ill. He’s said the two women enjoy performances at the Kennedy Center, where Robinson has use of the president’s box.

Robinson’s brother, Chicagoan Steve Shields, said that while in Washington, she is “primarily focusing on being there for the girls, and that’s why she keeps a low profile. It’s not about ribbon-cuttings.”

Nor is it about granting interviews, which she shuns.

Shields points to two reasons for her adjustment. One is the White House staff. “The staff there is awesome. They make it as homelike as possible.”

The other is the Obamas’ daughters. “She found out she was needed. The kids, Sasha and Malia, they really love and respect her. And it’s like having a second mom there -- and that’s good,” he said.

But glued to the first family, she’s not. Michelle Obama told Women’s Health magazine last year that Grandma doesn’t always eat dinner with the four of them so they can have a “chance to bond.”

Chicago attorney Alan S. King, a close friend to the president, said Robinson gives the Obamas “a sense of stability and normalcy, which is so important to Barack and Michelle, especially for the girls.”

Born Marian Lois Shields, Robinson was the fourth of seven children -- five girls, followed by two boys -- of a house painter and licensed practical nurse, said Steve Shields, the youngest child.

He said Robinson did secretarial work at Spiegel catalog company, the University of Chicago and a bank, but her two children -- Michelle and brother Craig Robinson, now a basketball coach at Oregon State University -- always came first. “She was one of those parents that showed up all the time at school,” he remembered.

Her husband, Fraser Robinson, a Chicago water department employee who had multiple sclerosis, died in 1991. Marian Robinson, according to Shields, has returned to Chicago several times and spent Christmas with her son and his family in Oregon.

“Young at heart,” he calls his sister, who in her early 60s collected two gold medals and two silver medals in sprinting at the Illinois Senior Olympics. And easy to please -- content with a crossword puzzle or game of whist.

But Barack Obama, talking to Atlanta radio host Tom Joyner, said Robinson had become “quite the lady about town” with her nights out with Currie at the Kennedy Center. He described more prosaic outings too, saying she “just walks out the gate and goes over to CVS and starts doing her shopping or whatever.”

Michelle Obama has said it’s been a blessing to see the world with her children and mother, who had not traveled outside the U.S.

Now, Marian Robinson has seen Russia, Ghana, Italy and England.

kskiba@tribune.com