The Woman I Wanted to Be by Diane von Furstenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

off on various adventures like glacier skiing and sailing, but Tatiana preferred staying with her grandmothers. She learned French from my mother and Italian and cooking from Clara. Her second husband, Giovanni Nuvoletti, was the president of the culinary academy of Italy and Clara wrote several cookbooks. Tatiana became an excellent cook and often cooks for us now. She also had long philosophical discussions with both of her grandmothers about love and the meaning of life. Clara would make her laugh with the gossip of her very privileged life and my mother would remind her of the challenges of adversity.
    Unlike me, the grandmothers had nothing but time, which was wonderful for the children and wonderful for me. They had such a strong and very important influence: They were teachers, role models, active participants, and, above all, loving family members. Both hadmemories to share, both had great senses of humor, and both were great storytellers.
    I n a house with three women—my mother, Tatiana, and me—Alexandre was always considered the man of the house. He was the one we trained to be counted on. Now that he is a grown man, he has become all the things I had wished him to be. He watches over our assets and has become very valuable to the growth of DVF. Tatiana also became an important protector of the family: a specialist in diagnosing illnesses and best at giving advice. Now they both watch over Barry and me. We all sit on the board of DVF and we share the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation. My children are the bookends that support me. We talk on the phone every day, sometimes more than once. “I love you,” “I love you, too,” we end each conversation.
    If I have one regret in my life, it is that I didn’t pay more attention to Tatiana when, in fact, she was the one who needed it more. In contrast to Alexandre, who was quite a wild boy and reduced me to pleading tears when he became a very fast teenage driver, Tatiana was such a good girl and caused so few problems that I took her for granted. This was a mistake. I didn’t realize until much later that because she so rarely did anything to draw attention to herself, she felt I cared less about her than I did her brother. That brought an ache to my heart because I love them both with equal intensity, but I could see how she felt that way. Alexandre did get more of my attention because Tatiana didn’t seem to need it. I was completely wrong.
    From the time she could walk, Tatiana’s legs seemed quite stiff. She could certainly get around all right, but she was never able to run. Her condition grew more noticeable when she began school and had difficulty with sports. I took her to several orthopedists, who checkedher bones and looked to see if she had scoliosis, but they said there was nothing the matter with her, that her muscles were just stiffer than others and she would probably grow out of it. She didn’t. Instead she hid her suffering from all of us for years until one day in her early twenties when she tried to run across Park Avenue and collapsed on the pavement. What a wrenching sight she was with two black eyes and a hugely swollen lip because she couldn’t raise her arms in time to block her fall. Tatiana had just completed her master’s degree in psychology at the time and remembered a reference to neuromuscular disorders. A neurologist at Columbia Presbyterian finally gave her a diagnosis: myotonia, a genetic muscular disorder that delays the muscles from relaxing after any exercise, especially in cold weather.
    “Why didn’t your mother know this before?” the doctor asked in wonderment, a question that stabbed my heart. We’d been going to orthopedists, who were concerned only with her bones.
    I felt awful for her and angry at myself. When we’d first tried to address her condition she was at Spence School in New York, where she and the other girls in the Lower School had to walk up and down nine flights of stairs several times a