Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of interviews. One conversation that will always stand out in my mind is an interview I did with Phyllis Diller. I was doing a special on Bob Hope, and Phyllis had traveled with Bob on USO tours around the country, so she had wonderful stories and really a unique perspective on this true American icon. We showed up at her home in Los Angeles, and sure enough, she loved Bob Hope. She had a huge picture of him hanging in her living room.
I sat down with her to do the interview there in her living room. And I asked my first question, “Do you remember the first time you met Bob Hope?”
Well, in classic Phyllis Diller fashion, she let out a huge cackle of a laugh. And then she looked down at my feet and she said, “My dear, what size shoe do you wear?”
And I said, “Seven and a half, double A.”
And she said, “Perfect.” She stands up, she rips the microphone off her lapel, grabs my hand, and leads me down the hallway, through her bedroom, and into her closet.
There were gowns of every era lined up. There were hats on shelves up near the ceiling, and then there were the shoes. There must have been about two hundred pairs of shoes. I was spinning around taking everything in, and my eyes all of a sudden fell on Phyllis, who was on her hands and knees emptying those shelves of shoes until there was a huge heap of shoes in the middle of the floor.
She looked up at me and she said, “Will you sit down? I’ve been waiting for someone who would listen to the story of my shoes.” Every shoe had a story from a different piece of Phyllis Diller’s life. She showed me shoes that she’d worn with Bob Hope on those USO tours. She loved the hot pink pumps that she wore as a mystery guest on the popular show What’s My Line? She wore flat brown sandals on humanitarian trips around the world to help poor children. She showed me some shoes that reminded her of her kids. For the better part of an hour, Phyllis and I sat in her closet and we tried on her shoes. After the last story and the last shoe, we went back to work, we finished the interview, and I went home to New York. A couple of days later, there came a knock at my door, and a delivery man handed me a big black suitcase.
I smiled as I opened it up. Shoes toppled out: twenty-five pairs of Phyllis Diller’s favorite shoes.
I think of that story often because like Phyllis Diller, we all wear different shoes. Maybe you’re wearing shoes that are perfect for your feet, that are shoes you’d always dreamed of. But I bet there are some of you that aren’t wearing the shoes you expected to be wearing at this point of your life. Perhaps the shoes that your neighbor is wearing look more comfortable or more stylish than the ones you have on. Maybe you’re feeling a little lopsided, like you’ve got one shoe on one foot and a different shoe on the other foot. Maybe your shoes are just flat worn out. And maybe, if you’re wearing shoes you don’t really want to be wearing, are you accepting this particular point in your life and the shoes that you’re wearing as what the Lord would have you be doing at this particular season of your life?
I’d like to address embracing your season—embracing the season that you’re in, finding peace and happiness in whatever shoes you strap on or lace up every day. At the core of my testimony is a belief that God knows me, and He knows you, and He loves me, and He loves you. There is an individual path and a very specific plan for each one of us to follow. And I believe we have to have the faith to find out what that plan is, where it leads, and to have the faith to allow the Lord to guide us there and to guide us through it. Sometimes the plan that we have in our minds isn’t the path that He would have us follow, the plan that He’s mapped out for us. But I believe as we walk toward Him in whatever pair of shoes we’re wearing, we will always find peace and happiness and love.
I remember the day I arrived at Brigham Young University in 1985, on the doorstep of Tingey Hall at Heritage Halls. I was so happy to be there and to start living the life that I had planned for myself. I had a very specific timeline mapped out for me and for the Lord. I had my wedding colors picked out. I had my baby names all chosen. I’d graduate in April, get married in August, have a baby a year from December. It would be perfect, and on and on it would go. “Okay,” I informed the Lord, “I’m ready to go.”
You can imagine my shock and sense of disappointment when things didn’t quite go as planned. I remember feeling some sadness, and a great deal of fear, as friends went off and started living the life that I had planned for myself. I remember after graduation, it hit me like a brick: What am I going to do now? So almost by default, I laced up those work shoes and started on a path in television news, a path that I didn’t ever expect to be walking and, frankly, didn’t want to be walking.
A pivotal moment later in my life changed me profoundly; it changed my perspective. And it changed my life.
In 1999 I went to work at CBS in New York, hosting a morning program called The Early Show with Bryant Gumbel. I was in Los Angeles one afternoon, scurrying around my little studio apartment, getting ready to go off to the Big Apple when the phone rang. My jaw dropped to the floor when the voice on the other end of the line said, “Hello, this is Elder Neal Maxwell’s office in Salt Lake City. Elder Maxwell would like to speak with you. Do you have a moment that I may put him on the line?”
Yes, I have a moment or two or three.
In his capacity overseeing Church public affairs, Elder Maxwell said that he had felt impressed to offer me a blessing. And if it wasn’t too inconvenient, perhaps I could pass through Salt Lake City on my way to New York.
I hung up the phone and I changed our flight plans. And within a couple of days, my parents and I had come in from California and were sitting in Elder Maxwell’s living room. He and Sister Maxwell welcomed us so warmly as if we’d known them for years. We talked for a few minutes, and then he administered the blessing.
He said many things that were very profound, and he was so eloquent. But there was one thing that stood out in my mind that I think of often to this day, and I believe it applies to all sisters in this gospel. He said, “You must allow the Lord to use you. Sometimes you will not understand what He is doing, or why He is doing it. But do not question. You must allow Him to guide you and direct you.”
In that singular moment, I realized so clearly that I needed to give my life to the Lord, no matter what the season, no matter what the circumstance, no matter what pair of shoes I happened to be wearing. In the most difficult moments of my life, I think back on the words of Elder Maxwell’s blessing: “Do not question, just allow Him to use you, and guide you, and direct you.”
I visualize in my mind putting everything that I have on the altar of God: my pride, my fears, my hopes, my desires, everything that I wish for, that I yearn for, that I hope for, everything on the altar of God, and willingly walking away, giving everything to Him. That has not been easy. But the rewards have been exquisite. Sometimes the pressure is great, but the Spirit of the Lord is greater. And the ability to turn away bad things brings peace and comfort.
At one point, I left my job in New York City to be married and to have a family, to be a mother. When I traded in stylish pumps for sturdy running shoes, a lot of people told me I was nuts. They wanted me to continue wearing the shoes they thought best fit my feet. I explained to one colleague that I was not going to take that other job offer, but that I was going to go to Boston and stay home with my family.
He told me he was stunned. He said that I was making the worst decision of my life, that I would regret it for years to come. “What will you be without your job?” He said, “If you leave television now, you’re done.” He quoted an old CBS newsman’s saying: “Without work, there is no meaning to life.” And then finally, knowing of my faith, he asked, “What are you going to do, move up there and teach Sunday school?”
Well, as it turns out, that first Sunday in my new ward, I was called to teach Sunday school.
I shared my decision with one female colleague, who smugly joked, “Why don’t you just get a nanny?”
Another network executive asked me what I was going to do once I got to Boston. I said, “Well, I have the opportunity and the privilege to be a mother.” And she said, “Well, I know that, but what are you going to do?” As if that weren’t enough.
The experiences of my life have taught me an important and profound lesson that I feel impressed to share often. There are seasons in life. Don’t ever let anyone deny you the blessing and the joy of one season because they believe you should be in or stay in another season. And never, never be afraid to aspire to be a mother.
Motherhood is a noble calling. We need to value it more in our society and in ourselves. Nurturing for, caring for, and connecting with people all falls under the category of motherhood. And as women, we all have the capacity to nurture and to love, whether we physically bear children or not. We all have the ability to feel that sense of fulfillment. How do we do it? I believe we do it by turning our lives over to the Lord and tapping into that part of us that instinctively and innately knows how to nurture and mother.
I’ll never forget the woman I met several years ago who did just that. She was an incredible example of this. I was in Shantou, China. We were doing a documentary on some young doctors and nurses who travel around the world operating on children with facial deformities. Many of these children were orphans. Those with parents traveled extraordinary distances to find these American doctors just for the opportunity to receive this life-changing charity care.
What I saw when we arrived at this hospital, this dirty, rundown place, took my breath away. Hundreds of mothers with their little babies lined up waiting in front of this makeshift unit that the doctors had set up for their operation. Nearly a thousand children came. Only about two hundred would receive the surgery. I’ll never forget the sacrifice of one sixty-five-year-old woman who caught my eye as we were walking through the hospital gates for the first time. Her belongings were stuffed in a big black plastic bag, and she had a little baby strapped around her chest. That baby had a huge cleft lip and palate that pretty much engulfed her face.
Every morning, this woman would go to the Buddhist temple to pray. One morning she was walking up the steps of that temple when she literally stumbled upon this newborn baby with cloth and paper stuffed in her mouth. That baby had been left to die because of the deformity on her face. This woman already lived a very humble life. She had a grown child and a grandchild that lived far, far away. And she certainly thought that her mothering days were over. But she believed there was a plan for her, and she believed that there was a plan for this little baby. So she scooped up that little baby off the steps of the Buddhist temple and vowed at that moment she would take care of her.
She’d heard about the American doctors and so began her journey to find them. She traveled for three days by train and on foot almost three hundred miles. The doctors took her baby, and within a few days, that child was reborn. That sweet woman revered her role as a mother and a nurturer.
What I have come to understand is that God’s definition of motherhood and the world’s definition of motherhood are very, very different. There’s no question that our society pays a lot of lip service to motherhood. We pat moms on the back, we give them awards on Mother’s Day, we bring them flowers occasionally. But at the end of the day, we don’t extend the same respect to a mother that we would to someone with a title: a professor, an accountant, a lawyer, or a judge. But if we as women, especially women in this gospel, do not apply the sanctity to this calling that it deserves, it’s hard to imagine why anyone else would.
I’m not “just a mom.” I am a mother. I trusted in the Lord, and I will continue to trust in the Lord as I make decisions about which shoes to wear and when to wear them.
I love this thought from President David O. McKay. He said, “She who can paint a masterpiece or write a book that will influence millions deserves the admiration and the plaudits of man. But she who raises a family of beautiful sons and daughters, whose influence will be felt through generations to come long after paintings have faded and books have been destroyed, she deserves the highest honor that man can give and the choices blessings of God. In her high duty and service to humanity, she is co-partner with the Creator Himself.”
A co-partner with the Creator Himself. I love that phrase. And I felt that in a very profound way after the birth of our second child. On a Sunday afternoon, sitting in, of all places, sacrament meeting, my water broke. Three days later, our little baby William was born, more than three months early at twenty-seven weeks gestation. At his tiniest, he was just over two and a half pounds.
I remember being wheeled on a bed into the neonatal intensive care unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to see him for the first time. I remember seeing all those incubators lined up in the room with blankets over them to cover the babies and to keep the light out of their eyes. And I remember thinking, “These look like little coffins lined up. How could these babies survive?”
Of course, some of them did not. William was in the NICU for eleven weeks. Most every day I would travel back and forth to that hospital to deliver breast milk and to hold him. Some days the nurses would not allow him to come out of the isolette, and so I would sit and look at him through the glass with all the tape and the tubes and the wires hanging from his frail little body. There was barely a place to touch his bare skin.
On the good days, I would hold William while he received his fortified feeds through a tube in his nose. I had read medical research that showed that premature babies who were consistently held and nurtured by their mothers were healthier than those who were not. The hospital recommended kangaroo care, putting the baby’s skin to skin with their mom’s. It was supposed to help with bonding. The doctors said it actually made the baby stronger. For weeks I did this, and for weeks it still seemed that William did not know I was there. He did not respond to me in any way. He did not open his eyes. He would barely move. I remember so distinctly thinking, am I really making a difference?
A very perceptive neonatologist must have sensed my sadness. One afternoon, she came over to our little corner of the unit, and she put her arm around me, and with such kindness, she said to me, “William cannot express it right now. But in his behalf, let me say, thank you for being here. These babies know their mothers. And even though it doesn’t feel like you’re making a difference, you are.”
That night, after my husband had given William a beautiful priesthood blessing, I remember standing with both arms to the portals of that incubator, and the feeling came over me so strongly that as a mother, the Lord needed me. And that as my Savior, I needed Him to make this baby whole. In a very tangible way, I realized that mothers matter. On that day, I discovered that William needed me, just my physical presence. I couldn’t physically help him. I could not change the circumstances that brought us to the NICU that day. And as much as I wanted, I could not fast forward through this very difficult period of our lives. But over and over, the Spirit told me that I was needed. I mattered to this little boy, and my love for him mattered to the Lord.
Even when our children cannot or will not express it, even when the voices of the world tell us that mothering just isn’t as important as anything else we could be doing, we are making a difference.
Not long ago, my husband and I were in Florida visiting his mom with our children. One morning after breakfast, we were all walking through the lobby of the hotel. I had our children in tow and probably looked a little frazzled, dressed in my mommy clothes, my hair pulled back, no makeup on.
Suddenly from across the room, I heard someone say, “Jane, is that you?”
I turned around to see a rather famous, well-known old friend whom I had interviewed years before on The Early Show. He was dressed and pressed perfectly. I looked quite different with a baby at arms, a diaper bag over my shoulder, three older kids corralled at my side, and clad in my fabulous new mom wardrobe.
After a round of introductions, this fellow looked at me and for as long as I live, I will never forget what he said or how he said it.
“So, what are you up to these days?” Then he paused, looked down at my kids, and said, “Just a mom?”
In a split second, I had to decide. What was I going to say? What came out of my mouth surprised me at first, but it also made me very happy. Just a mom, I thought. “No,” I proclaimed with a smile. “No, I am a mother.”
He got the message.
Just as I saw in Phyllis Diller’s closet, there are so many wonderful shoes that we wear in our lives, so many things Heavenly Father has in store for us. Whatever shoes you are wearing, whether it’s three different pairs a day, or a pair you didn’t want, or shoes that feel less comfortable than you had anticipated, trust in the Lord. Have faith that He knows you. He loves you and He will bless you. I know He will. Slip on the shoes you’ve been given, and celebrate your season. It’s your path, and you matter to the Lord and to those around you whose lives you touch.