Your mother is so tall…
that as a young girl she was frequently teased by other children at school. They’d engage wantonly in every cruel impulse, calling her names and manufacturing any pretense to ostracize her. In the afternoons, she’d walk home alone, eyes cast downward, and disappear into her bedroom to read until your grandmother called her down to supper. But let’s also admit that she was indeed exceptionally tall. By the time she started 7th grade she was almost 6 feet tall, and she towered over all the other students in her small, Midwestern middle school—boys included. She politely declined when the girls’ basketball coach, Coach Pedersen, begged her to play varsity ball, preferring instead to gracefully bear the insults of her classmates and spend her afternoons reading in solitude. Her remarkable height was compounded by her rail-thin frame and lack of any noticeable breasts. Your grandparents worried themselves sick that the teasing she was enduring would wreak emotional havoc on her, but deep down your mother was uneffected. Three weeks before the start of 10th grade, eight days after her 15th birthday, your mother was out shopping with her parents when a modeling scout approached her and asked if she would mind posing for a photo. Your mother demurely complied and two months later she and your grandmother were flown to Chicago in order to take test shots. A week after that, she was cast in a fashion shoot for Halston in Vogue. This being the mid-1970s, tall and thin models were just coming into style and your mother’s unique looks made her an instant hit in magazines and on runways, and in short order she became one of the world’s highest paid fashion models. Never one to rely solely on her looks, though, your mother insisted on obtaining a college degree and in only three years she graduated from NYU with honors with a BA in comparative literature. She continued to model for several years, but gracefully bowed out of the profession once she entered her early 30s. With the money she’d saved, your mother returned to school and earned a masters degree and eventually a pHD. Today, she’s a distinguished professor of humanities at a small liberal arts college in New England. She’s widely esteemed by her colleagues and publishes regularly.
You respect her very much and want only to make her proud of you.
