Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul (12 page)

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.

Out of the blue, Don looked at me and said, “You really like Charlie a lot, don’t you?”

I answered, “Yeah, I really do.”

“But you know, Carol, there’s a problem—Charlie is never going to want you,” Don continued.

“Why not?” I asked.
I know—I’ll dye my hair blond,
I thought to myself.
I know how that works. No, I know— I’ll become a cheerleader. Everybody wants cheerleaders.

But Don said, “Carol, you really don’t understand. Charlie is never going to want you because you are deformed.”

I heard it. I believed it. I lived it.

His words struck me. I became a first-grade teacher because I thought that would be a good place for someone with a deformity.

My first year teaching, I had a little girl in my classroom named Felicia. She was the most gorgeous little girl I’d ever seen in my life. One afternoon, we were all working on learning to write our A’s. To a first-grader that means a big fat red pencil, lined green paper and a concentrated effort to move the pencil “all-the-way-around–and-pull-down.” The classroom was very quiet as everyone worked diligently.

I looked over at Felicia as I did so often, and I saw that she was writing with her fingers crossed. I tiptoed over to her, bent down and whispered, “Felicia, why are you writing with your fingers crossed?” This little girl looked up at me with her enormous, beautiful eyes, and she said, “Because, Mrs. Price, I want to be
just like you.

” Felicia never saw a deformity, only a specialness she wanted for herself. Every one of us has something we consider to be
not okay
—to be a deformity. We can consider ourselves deformed or we can see ourselves as special. And that choice will determine how we live our lives.

Carol Price

Little Red Wagons

To be perfectly honest, the first month was blissful. When Jeanne, Julia, Michael—ages six, four and three— and I moved from Missouri to my hometown in northern Illinois the very day of my divorce, I was just happy to find a place where there was no fighting or abuse.

But after the first month, I started missing my old friends and neighbors. I missed our lovely, modern, ranch-style brick home in the suburbs of St. Louis, especially after we’d settled into the 98-year-old white wood-frame house we’d rented, which was all my “post-divorce” income could afford.

In St. Louis we’d had all the comforts: a washer, dryer, dishwasher, TV and car. Now we had none of these. After the first month in our new home, it seemed to me that we’d gone from middle-class comfort to poverty-level panic.

The bedrooms upstairs in our ancient house weren’t even heated, but somehow the children didn’t seem to notice. The linoleum floors, cold on their little feet, simply encouraged them to dress faster in the mornings and to hop into bed quicker in the evenings.

I complained about the cold as the December wind whistled under every window and door in that old frame house. But the children giggled about “the funny air places” and simply snuggled under the heavy quilts Aunt Bernadine brought over the day we moved in.

I was frantic without a TV. “What will we do in the evenings without our favorite shows?” I asked. I felt cheated that the children would miss out on all the Christmas specials. But my three little children were more optimistic and much more creative than I. They pulled out their games and begged me to play Candyl and and Old Maid with them.

We cuddled together on the tattered gray sofa the landlord provided and read picture book after picture book from the public library. At their insistence we played records, sang songs, popped popcorn, created magnificent Tinkertoy towers and played hide-and-go-seek in our rambling old house. The children taught me how to have fun without a TV.

One shivering December day just a week before Christmas, after walking the two miles home from my temporary part-time job at a catalog store, I remembered that the week’s laundry had to be done that evening. I was dead tired from lifting and sorting other people’s Christmas presents and somewhat bitter, knowing that I could barely afford any gifts for my own children.

As soon as I picked up the children from the babysitter’s, I piled four large laundry baskets full of dirty clothes into their little red wagon, and the four of us headed toward the Laundromat three blocks away.

Inside, we had to wait for washing machines and then for people to vacate the folding tables. The sorting, washing, drying and folding took longer than usual.

Jeanne asked, “Did you bring any raisins or crackers, Mommy?”

“No. We’ll have supper as soon as we get home,” I snapped.

Michael’s nose was pressed against the steamy glass window. “Look, Mommy! It’s snowing! Big flakes!”

Julia added, “The street’s all wet. It’s snowing in the air but not on the ground!”

Their excitement only upset me more. As if the cold wasn’t bad enough, now we had snow and slush to contend with. I hadn’t even unpacked the box with their boots and mittens yet.