Barack Obama with His Mother

Name of Obama's mother is S.Ann Soetoro. 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

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.Barack Obama's
MotherThough she has signed this sophomore yearbook photograph of herself "Stanley" — her parents named her Stanley Ann at birth — Obama's mother was known as Ann for most of her life. After attending Mercer Island High School in Washington, she enrolled at the University of Hawaii, where she met Barack Obama, Sr.

"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."