The lesson I learned when I walked away from modeling that I hope I can teach my kids

A 'Jesus, take the wheel' moment in Manhattan, and what to tell my girls

I left the modeling industry after being discovered at one of the largest modeling agencies in the world.

I was living in Manhattan for the summer before my sophomore year of college in a tiny model’s apartment next to the Trump Tower. My relationship with the current modeling agency had been going downhill for a while, and I was hoping to find a new agency to represent me so I could stay in New York.

I found an open casting call at the New York office of one of the largest modeling agencies in the world, and thought to myself, “Why not?”

I walked into a waiting room full of beautiful girls and took a seat. Maybe five minutes after I sat down, a casting agent passed by in the hallway and did a double-take. He came over and asked me to follow him to a large glass conference room, where he brought in several other casting agents. The little group began to make something of a fuss over me. They asked for my portfolio, the name of my current agency, my measurements. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a real commercial look?” “Have you done any runway work?” “Are you sure these measurements are accurate?”

Then the whole group stepped outside the glass doors for a few minutes to talk privately (about me). Finally, they sent a female casting agent back in. She cheerfully asked me to follow her to the nearby women’s bathroom, where I figured she’d want me to try on some clothes or something—I don’t know what I was thinking. I definitely wasn’t thinking she’d ask me to step onto the handy scale installed on the wall.

“Hmm. So we’d really love to work with you,” she said apologetically, “if you could work on getting to about right here. What do you think? Maybe come back in a week?” She was pointing a little further to the left on the scale.

I was confused and self-conscious and motivated with excitement all at the same time. Ten pounds couldn’t be that hard to lose. I had been that thin before.

I told her that I’d see them in a week, and I swept out with a business card and my head held high through that waiting room full of beautiful girls all looking wistfully at the Discovered One.

As I stepped down onto the sidewalk, I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I’d been discovered. It was thrilling, flattering, exciting. I began to think of ways to cut my food intake in half so I could quickly drop the weight I needed to lose.

I wasn’t half a block away before tears started streaming down my face.

All at once, I was able to be honest with myself for the first time in a long time. I didn’t want to model. I didn’t want to pursue a life where everything was conditional, where my brain was not needed, where—and I remember this one thought so clearly—I would be doing nothing to make the world a better place. I wanted my life to matter, to do great things, to create beauty.

And what would my mother say if she ever found out what I’d had to do to sign with this new agency? I knew she had taught me to honor myself better than that…and hoped better for me than that.

And then, I heard Him. He had this kind, firm, everything-all-at-once voice that I have heard a handful of precious times in my life.

He spoke straight to my soul: “I know you. I love you, and I made you to do more than this.”

I felt destroyed and remade in the same moment, then filled with relief and determination and clarity and trust in God.

And that is grace, folks.

I decided then and there that I would quit modeling. I would find another job to finish out the summer. I’d call my parents and let them know. And maybe they would understand and maybe they wouldn’t. And maybe my friends would understand and maybe they wouldn’t. But God was leading me, and I knew I was doing His will, and that He was steering me out of the modeling industry for good.

This was a ‘Jesus, take the wheel’ turning point in my life that I’ll be forever grateful for.

I wonder if my kids will give their lives to the Lord on a similar street in their own lives. It’s a scary thought, but a hopeful one. If I’d never left south Louisiana for the Big City to give modeling a try, would I have given my life to God so fully? If I had never experienced that darkness, would I have run back to His arms so whole-heartedly?

We all have such unique journeys. I really pray for the future trust to watch my kids have their own Manhattans, if they need them.

What I hope I can teach my kids

Twenty years later, here I am. My arms and my life is full of beauty and mess and trust and gratitude for Jesus wrapping up all my little efforts, all these years, in the indescribable gift of Divine Mercy.

Only five years from now, I will be celebrating my third-oldest child’s high school graduation, God-willing.

All I can think is, My turn is coming, Lord. Prepare my heart to trust you in a new way as a mother. Please help me to give them all You meant me to give them, while I have them.

I want my children to seek God’s will in their own lives one day, as adults who know and love and serve Him.

I want my children to know truth, goodness, and beauty when they see it, and to reject what is evil when they see it, hear it, or read it. To walk with peace and confidence in their inherent dignity as children of God. To seek and pursue the will of God. To know and trust and rejoice in His mercy. To suffer with hope when it comes, and not to be surprised when it does.

I want to show them what it looks like to work on themselves, first and always. To know what a healthy friendship looks and feels like. To be a good friend. To have a healthy, intentional, God-centered marriage. To care for and honor their bodies. To see themselves as an integrated mind, body, and soul. To have self-discipline with technology. To know how to make friends, know a good friend from a bad one, and be a good friend.

And I want to teach them how to use the right fork at a nice restaurant and how to manage their money and how to boil an egg and dress well for their body type and have crucial conversations and call people on the phone and fold a fitted sheet and be a gracious hostess and speak in front of people and meal plan and apologize well.

There are a thousand other things.

But what they will learn from me and what God means them to learn from me and what they’ll learn from others and what they’ll learn the hard way…I have to give that to God over and over.

I know it’s not all on me. But the self-reliance vs. God-reliance thing may always be an ahhh-this-one-again lesson for me.

“What do I tell my girls?”

At 12 and 13, my two daughters are still so little. I feel them teetering on the threshhold, though, of seeing more of what this world is, both the good and the bad. As girls, I want so much to prepare them well for life and womanhood in a world that can be unkind to women from so many directions. My girls will be up against a lot.

I think my modeling experiences have given me an extra sensitivity to what women face in our day.

So many times I have thought to myself: What do I tell my girls?!

Satan has a special hatred for women. It’s Biblical, it’s all over history, it’s all around us. It’s why I gave up scrolling social media a few years ago. It’s the truth.

Maybe one day I will go back to school and I’ll be able to write about and understand what’s going on as clearly and powerfully as Emily Stimpson Chapman, but for now, I will write what I know.

For my girls, for my boys, for myself.

Nobody gets to tell you who you are or how you should live your life—except for the Person who made you.

God breathed your unrepeatable and irreplaceable soul into existence for a purpose that stretches into eternity. You have gifts and talents and a mission that our world needs; you were made for such a time as this.

He gave you a Church to shepherd you with Scripture, Sacred Tradition, the Sacraments, and with ongoing teachings in every time to help you know and love Him, and to help you form your conscience to live in a way that honors yourself and all human beings.

He knows the plans He has for you, and they are plans for good and not for woe.

My place—your place—a woman’s place—a man’s place—is wherever God wills.

So trust His goodness and mercy. Buckle up. Bring Romans 12:2 with you everywhere. And let Jesus take the wheel.

Painting by Vicki Wade: https://1-vickie-wade.pixels.com/featured/mother-two-daughters-vickie-wade.html

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

-Romans 12:2

Mother’s Day 2025 - Grateful for these six beautiful children on earth and two little ones in Heaven.

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”

―St. Pope John Paul II