Michelle Obama is loving life as an empty nester.
The former first lady shared her honest thoughts on how she feels about her and Barack Obama’s daughters Malia, 28, and Sasha, 25, no longer living at home, recalling the moment her kids moved out to go to college.
“I don’t miss ‘em,” Michelle told Jon Stewart on the Aug. 26 episode of her and her brother Craig Robinson’s IMO podcast. “I don’t. I love them. I’m going to see them tonight for dinner.”
And it seems that the 60-year-old’s thoughts on the matter differ from her husband’s. After all, Michelle shared that Barack—who served as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017—had an emotional reaction when Malia and Sasha left for college at Harvard University in 2017 and the University of Southern California in 2019, respectively.
“Barack cried when they went to college. I was like, ‘Bye!” she jokingly admitted. “Now, Friday nights aren’t wrecked with terror and fear about, ‘Where are you?’”
As Michelle emphasized, “I love their emancipation and growth.”
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Michelle Obama Details How Her Life Would Look Without Barack Obama Marriage
After Stewart—dad to son Nathan, 22, and daughter Maggie, 20, with wife Tracey McShane—asked Michelle if she missed the “job” of parenting, she bluntly responded, “No.”
“It gave meaning and pattern to my life,” Stewart added, to which Michelle candidly replied, “I’m good.”
“Looking at all this meaning,” she continued, appearing to gesture to her and her brother’s podcast studio. “I have a wonderful pattern.”
While Stewart and Robinson agreed that they enjoy their kids’ schedules, Michelle quipped, “I love my schedule.”
“I have a great schedule,” she added, “and it’s all mine.”
But the Becoming author pointed out that there’s a reason why dads may feel differently than moms about kids leaving the nest.
“I think fathers can be that way because you weren’t there from 6:00 to 9:00 at night, you missed a lot of it,” she shared. “I mean, I’ve had so much quality time with my children, so much. I know them inside and out.”
Indeed, during Barack’s two terms in office, Michelle emphasized that her role first and foremost was always their daughters, notable calling herself “Mom-in-Chief.”
And now, many years later, she couldn’t be more grateful for the young women her daughters have become despite their rather unconventional upbringing in the White House.
“You both have grown into such brilliant and beautiful young women, making your way out there in the world,” Michelle told her daughters while giving a speech at the opening of Barack’s presential center in June. “Thank you for bringing so much joy and spirit and energy to a life you had no voice in choosing, and for making us proud every step of the way.”
For a closer look at more of Michelle and Barack’s candid confessions over the years, keep reading…
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He just hadn’t thought about what came next all that much.
“For Michelle, marriage was a given—the organic next step in a relationship as serious as ours,” the former president wrote in his 2020 memoir A Promised Land. “For me, someone who’d grown up with a mother whose marriages didn’t last, the need to formalize a relationship had always felt less pressing.”
They tied the knot Oct. 3, 1992.
“‘The answer is no. I do not want you running for president,’” he recalled his wife saying in A Promised Land. “’God, Barack, when is it going to be enough?’”
On NPR’s Wild Card podcast in June 2025, Michelle called her and Barack’s accomplishments “the team ambition,” which she went along with, “arguably kicking and screaming.”
And “Michelle stayed angry at me about it,” he added. “It would flare up every so often, but she stayed mad about it through all eight years.”
“I’m flailing in the wind,” Michelle told Oprah Winfrey for Elle in 2018. “And now I’ve got two kids, and I’m trying to hold everything down while he’s traveling back and forth from Washington or Springfield.”
Subsequently, there was “work we had to do as a couple,” she said. “Counseling we had to do to work through this stuff.”
After learning that Lin was writing a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton, Barack wrote in A Promised Land, “We were politely encouraging but secretly skeptical, until he got up onstage and started dropping beats and the audience went absolutely nuts.”
“One of the major decisions I made this year was to stay put and not attend funerals and inaugurations and all the things that I’m supposed to attend,” Michelle, who also skipped the January 2025 state funeral for Jimmy Carter, said on Wild Card, acknowledging the speculation that was kicked up in her wake. “Those are my choices. Whatever the backlash was, I had to sit in it and own it. But I didn’t regret it, you know?”
She wanted “the next 10 years to go by slowly,” she explained. “Because guess what? I love life. I love my life…But what I feel is that if I’m not mindful about it, the years slip away.”
“When people ask me would I ever run, the answer is no,” she said on a March 2025 episode of Kylie Kelce’s Not Gonna Lie podcast. “If you ask me that, then you have absolutely no idea the sacrifice that your kids make when your parents are in that role.”
Even if she was interested, Michelle added, “The thought of putting my girls back into that spotlight when they are just now establishing themselves…They’ve already served their time.”
She also promised that she wouldn’t be demure about it if there was trouble in paradise.
“If I were having problems with my husband, everybody would know about it,” she shared on an April 2025 episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast. “And he would know it and everybody would know it. I’m not a martyr…And I would be problem-solving in public, and be like, ‘Let me tell you what he did.’”
Sitting in on his wife and brother-in-law’s podcast in July 2025, Barack joked that the rumors were behind them because “she took me back.”
