TER: It is fun, and sometimes it feels like it steals certain experiences from me. I’ve never been pregnant. As I said in my Women of the Year Summit speech, “It’s really interesting to be a woman and to get to 45, and not be married and not have kids. Especially when you have just pushed out your fifth kid on TV.” And to have spent an entire season pregnant! …On the other hand, it feels very natural: I am very mothering. Whether I end up having children or not, I will always be a very mothering person.
GLAMOUR: You recently hosted the American Music Awards, where your mom received the Lifetime Achievement Award. I loved seeing her perform on that stage at 73. What was that like for you?
TER: The Diana Ross we all know kind of doesn’t hold a candle to the mom that I have, in her extraordinary ability to love. What was most impactful about that moment to me was that my mother was receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award for her career, and the most important thing to my mom was to have her entire family onstage with her. My mom had my nieces and nephews—her grandchildren—dancing around her. Whenever we go see her show, that’s what happens. That’s the way I grew up, dancing onstage while my mom was singing. Just like walking on the stage and tapping her on the butt, and like, “Mom, Mom.” My mom holds her family and a career and nourishes both things.
GLAMOUR: That’s amazing. Your mom was raised in Detroit. She has said she came from a poor family. Meanwhile, as a kid, you were dancing onstage with her in front of fans. Those sound like different childhoods. What did she do when you were young to help ground you and connect you to her own experience?
TER: First of all, my mom is very close to her family, and so we were too. My mom is one of six. We used to spend most of my Christmases in my grandmother’s house in Detroit with all of my cousins. I don’t think my mom needed to make a concerted effort to, for example, “ground her children.” I think my mom’s moral compass and sense of priority—that family is first—and her gift has given her family the opportunity to have the life that we’ve had.
My mom always used to make funny jokes, which were not that funny to me, like, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. No, no, no, I made this money for me. I will pay for a roof over your head, your doctor’s appointments, food. Other than that? You guys need to figure that out for yourself.” [I remember], one of her best lines of my childhood—I have always been attempting to make friends with my hair, and I went through this phase where I tried every hair product in the world. My mom said to me, “Listen to me: You either need to get yourself an incredibly good job, or”—and by the way, this is generational, but she did put job first—“or a very wealthy husband to pay for your hair products alone, because they are going to break the bank. Call it quits on the hair products. I can’t deal with it.”
GLAMOUR: That’s hilarious. Did your mom ever try to dissuade you from going into modeling and then show business?
“The key is you ask yourself:What do I need right now?”
TER: No, she actually helped me do all of those things. My mom was in my first meeting with Wilhelmina, the modeling agency. She set it up. I did the Thierry Mugler fashion show because of her. Thierry Mugler had asked her to do it, and she said the only way I’ll do it is if you let my daughter walk too. So my mom never dissuaded it; although I will say, she was very big on saying things like, “You sure you don’t want to be a doctor?” Her sister is a world-renowned doctor: Dr. Barbara Ross-Lee, the first black female dean of a medical school. So we had all of those options open to us. But what I saw in my mother was a woman with a platform, who had agency in her life. I walked toward that.
