The Woman I Wanted to Be Read Online Free PDF Page B

find a different path to a solution, which so satisfies me that I forget what the problem was in the first place. Of all the lessons my mother drummed into me, that was perhaps the most important. How could you possibly better yourself if you didn’t face your challenges up front or if you laid your problems off on someone or something else and didn’t learn from them? I offer that lesson often in my talks to young women. “Don’t blame your parents, don’t blame your boyfriend, don’t blame the weather. Accept the reality, embrace the challenge, and deal with it. Be in charge of your own life. Turn negatives into positives and be proud to be a woman.”
    It doesn’t happen overnight, of course, and I never stopped learning from my mother. Over and over, she reinforced the lessons she’d taught me as a child.
    When I was in my thirties, I suddenly developed a fear of flying, but when I told her I was afraid, she looked at me, smiling, and said, “Tell me, what does it mean to be afraid?” When once I was conflicted about starting a new business, she said, “Don’t be ridiculous. You know how to do it.” When I was diagnosed with cancer at forty-seven,predictably she told me not to worry, that I had nothing to fear. I wanted to believe her, but I had my doubts. Because she never showed any sign even in private that she was afraid, I wasn’t either. When my treatment was all done, she collapsed, and I realized that she had, in fact, been afraid for me, but by never showing it to me, she had made me strong and trusting that I would be fine.
    After Egon and I married in 1969, she spent several months each year living with us in New York and formed close, loving relationships with my children, Alexandre and Tatiana. Her relationship with them was very different from the relationship she had had with me. She had never been very affectionate to me and there had always been a distance between us. As a result, I was reserved around her and never told her my intimate thoughts, except in letters. It was much easier for me to open up in letters, and I think easier for her, too. In her letters to me at boarding school in Switzerland and then in England, she would often call me her “pride,” but actually she never told me that to my face until much, much later when she was about to die.
    She was much more open with my daughter as a grandmother and my daughter was more open with her than with me. They had an amazing complicity and spent hours together on her bed, telling each other stories. Tatiana became an excellent storyteller and filmmaker.
    My mother was superb at handling money. She had taken half my father’s assets with her when she left him and invested them so well that she was, in her later years, able to feel secure and buy herself a beautiful house on the beach in Harbour Island, Bahamas. Had she been born at a different time and under different circumstances, she would have made a sought-after investment banker.
    My son, Alexandre, benefited greatly from her financial skills. She taught him what stocks and bonds were, what kinds of companies were good investments, and about yields and dividends. Everyafternoon when he came home from school, the two of them studied the stock market pages in the afternoon edition of the New York Post so he could see which stocks were going up and which down. When he was six or seven, my new boyfriend, Barry Diller, wanted to give him one share of stock for his birthday and told him he could choose which one. “Choose the most expensive,” my mother advised him. Alexandre chose IBM.
    There is no doubt the financial education she gave him turned him into the financier he is today. He manages the family money, sits on prestigious boards, and has proven to be a superb adviser to all of us.
    My mother was my rock. For all that I thought I’d conquered my fear of flying, I remember a very scary, bumpy flight to Harbour Island with her and Alexandre when she had just gotten out of