For the first time in her adult life, Michelle Obama is about to be unemployed.

She never aspired to be a stay-at-home wife or mother. For years, she wrestled with the issues that many professional women with families face, chiefly whether to quit. Now, that is what Obama, 43, has decided to do. She admits to being conflicted.

"It is very odd," she said recently during one of her first interviews since her husband, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, said he is running for president.

After she ends her duties as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals in the days ahead, a position she was promoted to at roughly the same time her husband joined the Senate, she said, it "will be the first time that I haven't gotten up and gone to a job."

"It's a bit disconcerting," she said. "But it's not like I'll be bored."

Identity issues are something Obama has confronted all of her life, first as a black student at Princeton, where she based her senior thesis on surveys of black alumni, then as a professional black woman surrounded by white men, and now as the wife of a man who could become the first black president of the United States. She is no less thoughtful about labels she chooses to apply to herself - and those she rejects - than her husband, who has made his half-African, half-Kansan lineage and his part-Hawaiian upbringing a focal point of his narrative. On the campaign trail, she calls herself a mother, a citizen and a "professional," a term that has not always been an asset for candidates' wives.

Yet some 15 years after Hillary Clinton stumbled into the culture wars with comments about pursuing a career rather than staying home "baking cookies," Obama is unfazed by questions about her choices.

"Yeah, you know, cooking isn't one of my huge things," she admitted, laughing when asked for a favorite recipe. "My view on this stuff is I'm just trying to be myself, trying to be as authentic as I can be. I can't pretend to be somebody else."

Rarely have political spouses played as dynamic a role as in the current presidential campaign, in which a former president (Bill Clinton), a stage IV breast cancer patient (Elizabeth Edwards) and a person with multiple sclerosis (Ann Romney) could have a measurable effect as voters assess the candidates. The Obama campaign has introduced the family - Michelle and the couple's two daughters, 5 and 8 - in relatively small dosess.

In talks with friends, Obama has expressed some ambivalence about shedding her independent life, if never about her reason for doing so.

"It's a sacrifice for her to give that up," said Valerie Jarrett, a friend of the Obama's and chair of the University of Chicago Medical Center Board, who said she and Obama discussed the decision last weekend during a dinner at a neighbor's house.

"On the other hand," Jarrett said, laughing, "the opportunities she will have as first lady are great, too."

Obama does not let herself go that far. She has no ready answer to the question of what she would do as first lady - whether she would, for example, decide to start working again.

"Barack and I have lived very separate professional lives," she said. "He's done his thing, I do my thing. And my focus is on figuring out what's the right thing for me to do given where I am in my life, where my kids are. And I won't know what that looks like in '08 - it changes."

Only half-joking, she adds, "I might be so tired I won't want to talk to anybody after 2008."

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