Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul (11 page)

“Why, the Powers Modeling Agency has the most famous models in the world,” she continued dramatically to her rapt audience. “All of their models are required to be at least six feet tall.” A little gasp from the class, including me. A few pairs of eyes glanced at me appraisingly, but this time, instead of slouching at their gaze, I stood straighter, wishing for the first time in my life that I was even taller.

Mrs. Peterson’s voice went on. “Do you know why these models have to be so tall?” she asked. Another slow shake of the corporate head. “Why, it’s because tall women are statuesque, which makes clothing hang more beautifully.”
Statuesque!
What a word. Mrs. Peterson smiled fondly around the group, melting the spell that had held us. She touched popular (but pitifully undersized) Annelle Crabtree’s arm and said, “Are you ready to show me your outline now, Annelle?” and turned away.

I walked regally to my desk. The kids in the aisle, even John Rosse, hastily squeezed aside to clear a path. I had a lot of thinking to do, sketches to compile and decisions to make. Should I be a Powers Model
before
becoming a forest ranger and a veterinarian, or after? Would being world famous interfere with my living high atop a fire tower on some great mountain? I sat down in the scarred wood seat, savoring new hope for myself—statuesque! Fiery horses rared and cavorted in my mind’s eye. Statuesque horses! What a magnificent mural it would be!

Linda Jessup

3
OVERCOMING
OBSTACLES

T
he richness of the human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome.

Helen Keller

If There’s a Will

Regis Philbin and I celebrate Mother’s Day on our television program,
LIVE with Regis & Kathie Lee,
by asking our viewers to write and tell us about a special mom. Each year we receive thousands of letters.

People who would never write about themselves open their hearts about the mother they love. Here is one of those extraordinary and inspiring stories. This story is by Stacey Nasalroad.

I am my mother’s third child, born when she was 20. When I was delivered, nurses took me from the room before she could see me. Her doctor gently explained that my left arm was missing, below the elbow. Then he gave her some advice: “Don’t treat her any differently than the other girls. Demand more.” And she did!

Even before my father left us, my mother had to go back to work to support our family. There were five of us girls in our Modesto, California, home, and we all had to help out. Once when I was about seven, I came out of the kitchen, whining, “Mom, I can’t peel potatoes. I only have one hand.”

Mom never looked up from sewing. “You get yourself into that kitchen and peel those potatoes,” she told me. “And don’t ever use that as an excuse for anything again!”

Of course I could peel potatoes—with my good hand, while holding them down with my other arm. There was always a way, and Mom knew it. “If you try hard enough,” she’d say, “you can do anything.”

In second grade, our teacher lined up my class on the playground and had each of us race across the monkey bars, swinging from one high steel rod to the next. When it was my turn, I shook my head. Some kids behind me laughed. I went home crying.

That night I told Mom about it. She hugged me, and I saw her “we’ll see about that” look. When she got off work the next afternoon, she took me back to school. At the deserted playground, Mom looked carefully at the bars.

“Now, pull up with your right arm,” she advised. She stood by as I struggled to lift myself with my right hand until I could hook the bar with my other elbow. Day after day we practiced, and she praised me for every rung I reached.

I’ll never forget the next time my class lined up at the monkey bars. Crossing the rungs, I looked down at the kids who’d made fun of me. Now they were standing with their mouths open.

It was that way with everything: instead of doing things for me, or excusing me, my mother insisted I find a way to do them myself. At times I resented her.
She does-n’t know what it’s like,
I thought.
She doesn’t care how hard it is.
But one night, after a dance at my new junior high, I lay in bed sobbing. I could hear Mom come into my room.

“What’s the matter?” she asked gently.

“Mom,” I answered, weeping, “none of the boys would dance with me because of my arm.”

For a long time I didn’t hear anything. Then she said, “Oh, honey, someday you’ll be beating those boys off with a bat. You’ll see.” Her voice was faint and cracking. I peeked out from my covers to see tears running down her cheeks. Then I knew how much she suffered on my behalf. She had never let me see her tears, though, because she didn’t want me to feel sorry for myself.

Later, I married the first guy I thought accepted me. But he turned out to be immature and irresponsible. When my daughter Jessica was born, I wanted to protect her from my unhappy marriage, and I broke free.

During the five years I was a single mother, Mom was my rock. If I needed to cry, she’d hold me. If I complained about chasing a toddler around after working and going to school, she’d laugh. But if I ever started feeling sorry for myself, I’d look at her and then remember,
She did it with five!

I remarried, and my husband Tim and I have a loving family that includes four children. Perhaps because Mom missed so much time with her own kids, she made it up with her grandchildren. Many times I watched her rock Jessica, stroking her hair. “I’m going to spoil her rotten and then give her back to her mama for some discipline,” she’d tell me. “That’s my privilege now.” She didn’t, though. She just gave the children infinite patience and love.

In 1991, Mom was found to have lung cancer and given six months to a year to live. She was still with us more than three years later. Doctors said it was a miracle; I think it was her love for her grandchildren that kept her fighting right up to the last. Mom died five days after her 53rd birthday. Even now, it hurts me to think that someone who had so much hardship in life should have suffered so at the end.

But she taught me the answer to that, too. As a child, I wondered why I had to struggle so. Now I know—it’s hardship that makes us the people we become. I feel Mom with me always. Sometimes, when I fear I can’t handle things, I see her radiant smile again. She had the heart to face anything. And she taught me I could, too.

Kathie Lee Gifford and Stacey Nasalroad

We’ve Come a Long Way

A
woman is like a tea bag: You never know her strength until you drop her in hot water.

Eleanor Roosevelt

In 1996, we women are generally as solidly into networking and supporting each other as our male counterparts have been for decades. It is a much friendlier place for women than it was 40 or 50 years ago. Whenever I get complacent about that, I think about my mother—and I wonder if I could have survived what she went through back then.

By 1946, when my mother, Mary Silver, had been married to Walter Johnson for nearly seven years, she was the mother of four active, noisy children. I was the oldest, at nearly six; the others followed close behind: two boys, ages four and two, and then a girl, still just an infant. We lived in a very old house with no close neighbors.

I know little of my parents’ lives at this time, but having raised two children myself in some remote corners of the country, I can imagine what it must have been like, especially for my mother. With four small children, a husband whose sense of obligation extended to bringing home the bacon and mowing the yard, no neighbors and almost no opportunities to develop any friends of her own, she had virtually no place to vent the intense pressures that must have built up in her. For some reason, my father decided that she was “straying.” When she could possibly have found the time and whom she’d have been able to meet, let alone “stray” with, since the four of us were constantly underfoot, is a mystery to me. But my father made up his mind, and that was that.

One early spring day in 1946, my mother left the house to get milk for the baby. When she came back, my father was standing at an upstairs window with a gun. He said, “Mary, if you try to come into this house, I’ll shoot your children.” That was how he let her know that he was suing her for divorce.

That was the last time my mother ever saw that house. She was forced to walk away with only the clothes she was wearing and the money in her purse—and a quart of milk. Today, she would probably have options: a local shelter, an 800 number to call, a network of friends she had developed through a full-or part-time job. She’d have a checkbook and credit cards in her pocket. And she could turn without shame to her family for support. But in 1946, she had none of that. Married people just didn’t get divorced.

So there she was—completely alone. My father had actually managed to turn her own father against her. Now my grandfather forbade my grandmother to speak to her daughter when her daughter needed her most.

At some point before they went to court, my father contacted her and said: “Look, Mary, I don’t really want a divorce. I only did all this to teach you a lesson.” But my mother could see that bad though her situation was, it was preferable to going back to my father and letting him raise us kids. So she said in effect, “No way. I’ve come this far, there’s no going back.”

Where could she go? There was no going home. She couldn’t stay there in Amherst, first because she knew no one would take her in; second, because with the returning GIs there would be no hope of work for her; and finally, and most important, because my father was there. So she got on a bus to the only place that held any hope for her— New York City.

My mother had one thing going for her: She was well-educated, with a degree in mathematics from Mt. Holyoke College. But she had taken the usual route of women in the 1930s and ‘40s: She had gone directly from high school to college to marriage. She had no idea how to find work and support herself.

New York City had several things in its favor: It was only 200 miles away, so she could afford a bus ticket, and it was a big city, so there had to be a job hiding there somewhere. She absolutely had to find a way to support all four of us kids. Upon arriving in New York she located a YWCA where she could stay for $1.50 a night. There was a Horn & Hardart Automat nearby where she could put nickels into slots next to windows with food behind them, and for about $1 a day, feed herself egg salad sandwiches and coffee. Next she started pounding the streets.

For several days, which became several weeks, she found nothing: no jobs for math majors, male
or
female, no jobs for women at all. Each night she went back to the Y, washed out her underwear and her white blouse, hung them to dry, and in the morning used the Y’s iron and ironing board to press the wrinkles out of the blouse. These items, along with a gray flannel skirt, constituted her entire wardrobe. Caring for them took up a portion of the long evenings she faced alone at the Y. With no books, no extra nickels or dimes for a newspaper, no telephone (and no one to call if she’d had one), and no radio except downstairs (where the Y guest list was somewhat frightening), the nights must have been truly awful.

Predictably, her money dwindled, as did the list of employment agencies. It came down finally to a particular Thursday, the last employment agency in the city, and less in her pocket than the $1.50 she needed for that night’s lodging. She was trying very hard not to think about spending the night in the street.

She trudged up several flights of stairs to reach the agency, filled out the obligatory forms, and when it was her turn to be interviewed, steeled herself for the bad news. “We’re really sorry, but we don’t have anything for you. We hardly have jobs enough for the men we have to place.” For, of course, the men came first for any available jobs.

My mother felt nothing as she rose from her chair and turned to the door. Numb as she was, she was almost out the door before she realized the woman had mumbled something else.

“I’m sorry, I missed that. What did you say?” she asked.

“Well, I said there’s always George B. Buck, but nobody ever wants that job. Nobody ever stays there,” the woman repeated, nodding her head toward a box of file cards on top of a nearby cabinet.

“What is it? Tell me about it,” my mother said anxiously, sitting back down in the wooden chair. “I’ll take anything. When does it start?”

“Well, it’s a job as an actuarial clerk, which you’re qualified for, but the pay’s not good and I’m sure you wouldn’t like it,” said the agent, pulling the relevant card out of the file box. “Let’s see, it says here that you can start anytime. I suppose that means you could go down there now. The morning’s not too far gone.”

My mother says she literally snatched the card from the agent’s hand and ran down the stairs. She didn’t even stop to catch her breath as she ran the several blocks to the address listed on the card. When she presented herself to the surprised personnel manager, he decided that she could indeed start work that very morning if she wanted to—there was plenty to do. And it turned out that Thursday was payday. Back in those days most companies paid their employees out of the till for time worked up to and including payday itself—so, miraculously, when five o’clock came, she was handed cash for the five hours she had worked that very day. It wasn’t much, but it got her through to the next Thursday, and then the next, and so on.