Diana Shaw
DIANA BARRETT: I had a lonely and confusing
childhood. I was an only child, and I lived with my mother in New York City. My parents
were divorced when I was very young; I never knew my father. My mother didn't want to hang
out with me much, so she hired a string of Mexican maids to take care of me-one worse than
the other. In all fairness, Mother had never had much of a family life herself; she was
sent off to boarding school at the age of four.
We went through maids like handkerchiefs. I can
remember really loving one nanny when I was about six or seven. But as soon as it was
clear to my mother that I really cared about my nanny, she fired her. I mean, it was
instantaneous. Other than that, I never bonded with any of them, and my childhood was very
catch-as-catch-can. My mother was the kind of mother who was never up in the morning. She
always slept late, and a maid would make breakfast for me. I would give Mother a
perfunctory goodbye kiss on my way to school. I don't remember seeing much of her after
school, either, and no one was interested in my homework or what I was doing in school. My
mother really didn't have a clue about my life. She used to make me a minute steak and a
sliced tomato salad for dinner. I had that about five nights a week; she would just
produce a meal and then go out.
Mother got into a relationship with my
stepfather when I was four, and they went out virtually every night. I was left
alone-literally alone-at night. Sometimes there was a maid around, but if a maid had just
been fired, the doorman was told to keep an eye on me. I remember putting out an
electrical fire in a plug when I was about nine. Being left alone like that had a huge
impact on me. I remember thinking: I will never do this to my children! I was sent to
boarding school when I was thirteen because my mother was going away. It was a disaster; I
only lasted six months. I was sent to boarding school again when I was fourteen, and that
was a disaster too; I got myself kicked out. Then I was sent to another boarding school in
Paris for a year when I was fifteen (there's a pattern here), and that I loved. I finished
high school in New York. I guess what I got out of all that were my marching orders: I was
determined that I was never going to replicate the pattern with my own children.
After a brief marriage when I was twenty, I
married Bob Vila when I was twenty-eight, and I got pregnant shortly after that. Even
before Christopher was born, I knew that I would want to go on working, and of course, I
sometimes felt guilty about that decision. I think mothers always feel guilty about
working. You have such a strong pull to these little babies that even the thought of not
taking care of them all the time is tremendously conflictual. But at the same time, I
think you know what your needs are. And I knew that while I didn't want to be away from my
child full time, there was a certain intellectual part of me which had to be dealt with.
That's just who I am, and that's who I always will be. So there was never any question
about staying home and parenting my children one hundred percent of the time. The
challenge, for me, was to try to figure out what aspects of the parenting role I was
willing to give away.
