Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (40 page)

The life of a pro athlete is hectic. Often traveling and maintaining a crazy schedule, Sheryl took Jordan on the road with her and managed to breastfeed him for the first seven months. Swoopes credits the breast pump with her
success, calling it the “second best thing ever invented.” We’re not sure what she thinks the first is.

Since little Jordan’s birth, Sheryl has continued to be honored for all of her athletic achievements. She won the 2001 ESPY for Women’s Pro Basketball Player of the Year and was voted the WNBA’s Most Valuable Player in 2000 and 2002. She won another gold medal with the American women in the 2000 Olympic games as well.

Now, in addition to being an award-winning athlete, Swoopes is a single divorced mom facing the challenges of juggling motherhood and a professional basketball career. The WNBA does not provide childcare, so Swoopes must balance her parenting duties with the pressures of travel and night games. She credits her own mother, Louise, as her inspiration and role model. Louise worked three jobs and raised Sheryl and her brothers alone.

Swoopes, like any mom, is proud of her son’s accomplishments, but feels no need to pressure him into sports. “If he wants to play sports, then that’s fine. If he doesn’t want to play sports, that’s fine too. I just want him to be happy,” she says. He is involved with karate, ice-skating, gymnastics, and his favorite sport, basketball, of course.

Are they or aren’t they?

T
hey are female movers and shakers. Are they powerhouses too?

In Ohio, Phoebe Anne Oakley Moses took up hunting to help out her financially strapped mother. She was such a good shot that she sold game and used the money to pay off the mortgage on the family’s farm. An admiring friend entered her in a contest against noted sharpshooter Frank Butler. Butler lost the match but won Annie; he became her manager and her husband. In 1885 Annie was the big star attraction in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. A famous part of the act included her shooting a cigarette out of Frank’s mouth. What a trusting husband! It’s no wonder they stayed married for more than 50 years.

Did Frank and Annie have any little sharpshooters?

At one time, Jane Addams considered a medical career, but eventually decided to work on social rather than medical ills. In 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, she helped to found Hull House, one of the first social settlements in
North America. Jane and her friends turned Hull House from an old mansion into a community center that delivered educational and social services to Chicago’s immigrant poor. Jane wrote books on social reform and helped pass legislation banning child labor. But it was Jane’s attempts to establish international efforts for peace that brought her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Did Jane hear the patter of little feet in her famous Hull House?

Sandra Day O’Connor studied law at Stanford University, where she ranked third in her class. But when she applied for her first job with a California law firm, they turned her down because she was a woman. Sandra persevered with her own practice in Arizona, and by 1979 she was a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals. President Reagan was impressed by her conservative credentials and nominated her to the Supreme Court. A Supreme Court Justice since 1981, O’Connor shaped many of the court’s decisions as a crucial “swing” vote.

What was Sandra Day O’Connor’s verdict on motherhood?

Whitman was head of Hasbro’s Playskool division (with 600 employees and $600 million annual sales of toys) when she made a very risky move. She accepted an offer in 1998 to head an unknown start-up called Auction Web, whose top-selling category was Beanie Babies. Her gamble paid off. Today Whitman is still President and CEO of the company—now better known as eBay—that hosts more
than $20 billion in gross annual sales. More than seven million people visit eBay every day. In 2002
Fortune
ranked Whitman as the third most powerful woman in business,
Worth
magazine ranked her numero uno on its list of best CEOs in 2003, and
CBS Market Watch
named her CEO of the Year.

Does Whitman have any children who trade Beanie
Babies on eBay?

Answers on
page 301
.

The true story of Maria von Trapp, the world’s beloved singing stepmom.

I
f you’ve never seen
The Sound of Music
, one of the world’s most famous musicals—maybe you were locked in a cellar for the past few decades—here goes: It takes place in Austria as Hitler is coming to power. A sweet, impulsive nun-in-training named Maria leaves the convent to temporarily become a governess to seven motherless children and brightens their lives by teaching them to sing. She also falls for their stern widower father and retired naval captain, Baron Georg von Trapp, and gives up convent life to marry him. If all this isn’t dramatic enough, the movie ends as the von Trapps leave everything behind to hike over the Alps to escape the Nazis, singing bravely all the way.

Thanks to a rousing score and stirring lyrics from Rodgers and Hammerstein, the stage version became a classic. After the creation of a film version starring Julie Andrews, Maria became one of the most familiar stepmothers around. But this tale was based on a true story. Maria actually existed and did become stepmother to the von Trapp children. But how closely does the musical resemble the facts?

False.
(Did you really think this could be true?) Maria von Trapp, as she freely admitted, did not burst into song when hardship arose. She may have been as lively and impulsive as her movie character, but she also struggled with a scarred past. Her mother died when she was two, her father left her with an elderly cousin in Vienna for most of her childhood, and after her father’s death she went to live with an abusive male relative. Despite her hardships, Maria was a strong woman who overcame much to support her beloved new family.

False.
In the musical, we’re led to believe that as a child, Maria was drawn to the church by the nuns’ singing as they worked in the garden. In reality, Maria was actually raised to be a socialist and atheist. She became interested in Catholicism while she attended college. The story goes that she had ducked into a church hoping to hear a Bach concert but instead she heard and was moved by a sermon from a priest who sparked a new devotion in Maria. She would later join the convent.

False.
Maria only had to look after one of the baron’s daughters who had rheumatic fever, and only for ten months, since the child was too ill to attend school. Still determined to be a nun, Maria was conflicted when she found herself falling in love—with the von Trapp children.
Maria had grown up a lonely child, shuttled between different family members and had invented an imaginary family for herself, the Paultraxls, to keep herself company. Perhaps this von Trapp children reminded her of her imaginary playmates from childhood?

True.
When Baron von Trapp’s fortune was wiped out in the 1930s, Maria convinced him that there was no shame in singing for money. Maria organized her family into a choir and hustled the von Trapp Family Singers off on a well-paying tour. Maria’s management solved more than financial problems. Baron von Trapp detested the Nazis, and a booking in America provided a chance for them to leave when Hitler took over Austria. After the von Trapps reached America, they continued to sing for their supper. They eventually settled down in Stowe, Vermont, and opened up the Trapp Family Lodge, which is still run by the von Trapp family today.