Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro with son Barack. He called her the ‘‘most generous spirit I have ever known.’’

Ms. Soetoro, right, Barack Obama’s mother, in an Indonesian village during her studies there from 1988 to 1992.

By JANNY SCOTT

In the short version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas.
The phrase comes coupled to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya.
On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.
” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr.
Obama.
Kansas was merely a single stop in her childhood, wheeling westward in the tow of her furniture-salesman father.
In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Later, she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.
She had high expectations for her children.
In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart - a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.
“She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister.
“That was very much her philosophy of life - to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.
” Ms. Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the age of 53, was the parent who raised Mr. Obama .
He barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to know the exact influence of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama.
Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of love and regret.
He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her bedside when she died.
“I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book - less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life,” he wrote in the preface to his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.
” He added, “I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.
” Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, invokes his mother’s memory sparingly.
He has described her as a teenage mother, a single mother, a mother who worked, went to school and raised children at the same time.
He has credited her with giving him a great education and confidence in his ability to do the right thing.
But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Ms. Soetoro illuminate a side of her that is less well known.
“She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. “I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues, and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power.
” Her parents were from Kansas.
Stanley Ann (her father wanted a boy so he gave her his name) was born on an Army base during World War II. The family moved to California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.
In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the college’s first African student, Barack Obama.
They married and had a son in August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare in the United States.
Her parents were upset, Senator Obama learned years later from his mother, but they adapted.
“I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me,” the senator’s grandmother told an interviewer several years ago.
The marriage was brief.
In 1963, Mr. Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child.
She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student.
When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Ms. Soetoro and Barack followed.
Those choices were not entirely surprising, said several high school friends of Ms. Soetoro, whom they remembered as unusually intelligent, curious and open.
She never dated “the crewcut white boys,” said one friend, Susan Blake: “She had a world view, even as a young girl.
It was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of shunning the different.
That was where her mind took her.” Her second marriage faded, too, in the 1970s.
By 1974, Ms. Soetoro was back in Honolulu, a graduate student and raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger.
Barack was on scholarship at a prestigious prep school, Punahou.
When Ms. Soetoro decided to return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose not to go.
As a mother, Ms. Soetoro was both idealistic and exacting.
Ms. Soetoro-Ng, who has a Ph.D. in comparative education and works as a teacher, remembers conversations with her mother about philosophy or politics, books, esoteric Indonesian woodworking motifs.
“She gave us a very broad understanding of the world,” her daughter said.
“She hated bigotry. She was very determined to be remembered for a life of service and thought that service was really the true measure of a life.
”