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.

每个人都是一个矛盾的结合体，我们不能绝对的把自己归为某一类人。而奥巴马的母亲，至少可以同时属于十几类人。奥巴马的母亲S·安·索多洛曾是一个少女妈妈，但后来却获得了人类学博士学位；她出生于富裕的美国中西部，却在印度尼西亚生活得一样舒适自在；她是一个天生的母亲，却又是一个工作狂人；她浪漫，却又现实——如果可能的话。

最近，奥巴马这样对记者说：“每当我想到我的母亲，我都觉得她是一个矛盾的结合体。她很清楚地知道她是什么样的人，对事情有着自己的观点；但同时，她又有一点草率冲动。我觉得她总是在探寻什么——如果她的生活被限制在一个小空间里，她就会觉得不舒服。”

奥巴马的母亲是一个梦想家。她会冒着不能次次都赢的风险投出青春的赌注，会做出一些极具风险的选择——这些选择，对她孩子的生活影响巨大。她曾经两次与来自偏远国家的同学相爱并结婚，甚至恋爱时对他们还一无所知。这两次婚姻都以失败告终，最后她只能依靠父母和朋友的帮助，来抚养她的两个孩子。

她的女儿玛雅·索多洛·恩格说，“她经常会哭。当她在新闻中或者悲情电影中看到小动物或是孩子被虐待的情景，或者当她感觉到在谈话中自己被误会的时候，都会流起泪来。”然而，索多洛·恩格却说她的母亲无所畏惧。“她的能力很强。现场调查工作是很艰苦的，可是她骑上摩托车就去。对于她的研究，她很负责，也很有见地。她可以一眼看到问题的核心所在，并且知道谁应该对这个问题负责。”

如今的奥巴马与他的母亲并不完全相同。他的母亲曾把孩子们带到一片陌生的土地，甚至在儿子还是少年时就与他分居两地；而奥巴马则尽量把自己的孩子安置在美国中西部。“我们尽量给孩子以稳定的生活，这是我的母亲不曾给我们的，”他这样说，“我之所以选择在芝加哥定居，并和一个安土重迁的女子结婚，也许正是表露着我对于从小缺乏的稳定生活的渴望。”

令人惊讶的是，对于奥巴马最重要的人却是我们了解最少的一个人——也许，在美国，一个人只要有一部分非洲血统，就会被人认为是黑人，肤色仍然是一个先入为主的因素。至于这个人其他的故事，别人也就不会更多地去讨论了。

但是奥巴马确实是他母亲的儿子。在他关于将来而不是关于过去的演说中，你可以看到一丝和他母亲一样的梦想家气质。奥巴马从很多从不相信政治的人那里得到了捐款，而这些人，也正是对奥巴马口才的一种响应——他和他的母亲一样，不需要依靠任何哲学体系就可以文雅却又强有力地陈述自己的观点。在合适的时候，他会计划怎样来鼓动成千上万和他完全不同的人，这也许与他有一个特别的母亲有关，与他母亲曾经像研究珍宝一样钻研不同文化有关。

事实证明，奥巴马刚刚起步的职业生涯与他的家庭息息相关。甚至可以说，这是他从他母亲身上继承到的。确实，他没有经历过太多世事沧桑的考验，但是，他却是被一个经历过考验的人抚养大的。

在大多数大选中，一初选个候选人已故的母亲并不是报刊杂志追踪的热点，但是安·索多洛却与众不同。