Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul Page 8

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.

  Mary Silver Johnson remained with George B. Buck & Company for 38 years, rising to a position of great respect in the company. I remember she had a corner office—no mean feat in downtown Manhattan. After she’d been there 10 years, she was able to buy us a house in suburban New Jersey, half a block from a bus to the city.

  These days, every second household seems to be headed by a working single mother, and it is easy to forget that there was once a time that such a life was almost unthinkable. I am both humbled to reflect on my mother’s accomplishments and proud enough to bust my buttons! If I’ve come a long way, baby, it’s because I was carried a large part of that way by the efforts of many, many other women before me—with this remarkable woman, my mother, leading the way.

  Pat Bonney Shepherd

  And Justice Has Been Served

  Life was not easy when little Sandra was a child on the lazy B Ranch. She grew up in the 1930s in a little adobe house on the Texas New Mexico border, with no electricity and no running water. With such limited resources, anyone would have thought that Sandra’s future was not bright. But her parents had a dream for her—a dream that she would one day go to college, something neither of them had gotten the opportunity to do.

  This would not be an easy dream for her parents to realize. First, there wasn’t even a school within driving distance. So Sandra’s mom, Ada Mae, began home schooling her at age four. They would read together hour after hour, day after day. And then there was the question of money. Sandra’s father, Harry, had to work very hard on the family ranch to make the money they needed to be able to send her to college.

  Eventually, Sandra not only went to college, but then on to law school. And in 1952 she graduated near the top of her class from Stanford University Law School. Her parents’ dream had come true.

  The world was now her oyster, and Sandra set out confidently to get her first job as a lawyer. But this was 1952, and Sandra was a woman. The only offers that came her way were for jobs as a legal secretary. Though she was disappointed, she persisted and finally got her first job as a lawyer—as the assistant county attorney for San Mateo, California. Over the years, she continued to work hard, and ultimately she built a prominent law practice in Arizona.

  It was 29 years after her graduation from Stanford Law School that she got the call from Attorney General William French Smith. Many years earlier, Mr. Smith had been one of the partners at a big Los Angeles law firm that had turned her down for a job as an attorney. But on that day, he was not calling to offer her a job as a legal secretary. Instead, he was calling to tell her that President Reagan had just nominated her—Sandra Day O’Connor— to be the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Adapted from Bits & Pieces

  No Hair Day

  If you are turning 16, you stand in front of the mirror scrutinizing every inch of your face. You agonize that your nose is too big and you’re getting another pimple— on top of which you are feeling dumb, your hair isn’t blonde and that boy in your English class has not noticed you yet.

  Alison never had those problems. Two years ago, she was a beautiful, popular and smart eleventh-grader, not to mention a varsity lacrosse goalie and an ocean lifeguard. With her tall slender body, pool-blue eyes and thick blonde hair, she looked more like a swimsuit model than a high school student. But during that summer, something changed.

  After a day of lifeguarding, Alison couldn’t wait to get home, rinse the saltwater out of her hair and comb through the tangles. She flipped her sun-bleached mane forward. “Ali!” her mother cried. “What did you do?” She had discovered a bare patch of skin on the top of her daughter’s scalp. “Did you shave it? Could someone else have done it when you were sleeping?” Quickly, they solved the mystery—Alison must have wrapped the elastic band too tightly around her pony tail. The incident was soon forgotten.

  Three months later, another bald spot was found, then another. Soon, Alison’s scalp was dotted with peculiar quarter-sized bare patches. After diagnoses of “It’s just stress” to remedies of topical ointments, a specialist began to administer injections of cortisone, 50 in each spot to be exact, every two weeks. To mask her scalp, bloody from the shots, Alison was granted permission to wear a baseball hat to school, normally a violation of the strict uniform code. Little strands of hair would push through the scabs, only to fall out two weeks later. She was suffering from a condition of hair loss known as alopecia, and nothing would stop it.

  Alison’s sunny spirit and supportive friends kept her going, but there were some low points. Like the time when her little sister came into her bedroom with a towel wrapped around her head to have her hair combed. When her mother untwisted the towel, Alison watched the tousled thick hair bounce around her sister’s shoulders. Gripping all of her limp hair between two fingers, she burst into tears. It was the first time she had cried since the whole experience began.

  As time went on, a bandanna replaced the hat, which could no longer conceal her balding scalp. With only a handful of wispy strands left, the time had come to buy a wig. Instead of trying to resurrect her once long blonde hair, pretending like nothing was ever lost, she opted for an auburn shoulder-length one. Why not? People cut and dye their hair all the time. With her new look, Alison’s confidence strengthened. Even when the wig blew off from an open window of her friend’s car, they could all share in the humor.

  As summer approached, Alison began to worry. If she couldn’t wear a wig in the water, how could she lifeguard again? “Why, did you forget how to swim?” her father asked. She got the message.

  And after wearing an uncomfortable bathing cap for only one day, she mustered up the courage to go completely bald. Despite the stares and occasional comments from less than polite beachcombers—”Why do you crazy punk kids shave your heads?”—Alison adjusted to her new look.

  She arrived back at school that fall, no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, with her wig tucked away somewhere at the back of her closet. As she had always planned, she would run for school president—changing her campaign speech only slightly. Presenting a slide show on famous bald leaders from Gandhi to Mr. Clean, Alison had the students and faculty rolling in the aisles.

  In her first speech as the elected president, Alison addressed her condition, quite comfortable answering questions. Dressed in a tee shirt with the words “Bad Hair Day” printed across the front, she pointed to her shirt and said, “When most of you wake up in the morning and don�
��t like how you look, you may put on this tee shirt.” Putting on another tee shirt over the other, she continued. “When I wake up in the morning, I put on this one.” It read, “No Hair Day.” Everybody cheered and applauded. And Alison, beautiful, popular and smart, not to mention varsity goalie, ocean lifeguard and now school president with the pool-blue eyes, smiled back from the podium.

  Alison Lambert with Jennifer Rosenfeld

  Just Like You

  By the time I was a junior in high school, two very important things had happened in my life. The first was that I’d fallen in love with a young man named Charlie. He was a senior, he was a football player, he was great! I knew that this was the young man I wanted to marry and have children with. Unfortunately, there was a serious problem: Charlie didn’t know I existed. Nor did he know that we had plans!

  The second important thing was that I decided I did not want any more surgeries on my hands. I was born with six fingers on each hand and no knuckles. I had started having surgery on my hands when I was six months old, and had 27 surgeries by the time I was 16. The surgeons had taken away the extra fingers, shortened some fingers and created knuckles. I had been a young specimen paraded at times in front of up to 500 hand surgeons. While my hands were still not “normal,” I was done.

  At 16, I figured I had the right to say, “Leave my body alone!” My family supported my decision, telling me I could have more surgeries as an adult. But I thought, Nope. I don’t need any more. This is how my hands will be. And that was that.

  Growing up, I had a friend named Don. We had gone to school together since first grade, and we were really good buddies. One afternoon, Don came over to my house and we started talking about the junior-senior prom that was coming up, and our plans to stay out all night on prom night. We had no idea what we were going to do all night, but we were very excited about staying out.