Note: This is part of an occasional series where I’ll be discussing some of the inspiration that led me to finally go independent. I’d love to hear your stories about who has inspired you to take great risks in your life and invite you to share you experiences in the comments area.
When my mother turned 18, her mother gave her a choice: my grandparents would pay for her college education if she went to nursing school, otherwise they wouldn’t give her a dime for college. Mom had no interest in nursing school, so at 19 she moved out of her parents’ home, attended Monterey Junior College and supported herself by working for Macy’s Department Store. At Macy’s, she rose through the ranks to become the manager of the Juniors Department, but her job conflicted with college so, after a year, she dropped out.
A few years later, she met my father while he was on leave in Monterey from the Coast Guard. After a relatively short romance, they married. When Dad left the Coast Guard, he took a job as a union man driving a forklift at the Alpha Beta grocery store warehouse. They decided that Mom didn’t have to work, so she stayed at home. After about six years of marriage, they had me. Seven years later, they divorced.
My mother got full custody of me and I spent every other weekend with my dad - a standard divorce custody situation. Having not worked for almost 14 years, Mom now had to go out and get a job that would not only support herself, but her only child as well. It was easier when she was 19, but she didn’t complain.
She worked as a secretary for various companies for a number of years, attending community college at night. Her primary focus, though, was always on me. She attended college only to get a better job so that she could afford a better life for the both of us. Even when I was in high school, she discouraged me from getting a job to help with the bills, imploring me to focus instead on my studies and get good grades so that I could go to college full time when the time came. She made a lot of sacrifices, both monetarily and in her social life, to ensure that I was well taken care of.
Bernie, a co-worker of hers who eventually became her closest friend, was a mechanical engineer and an early adopter of personal computers. The early days of PCs were marked by an almost constant purchase-obsolesence-upgrade cycle. During one of these, I inherited his old TRS-80 just as it had gone obsolete. To use it, I had to learn how to program it. I was completely enamored by computers at the time so learning to program seemed like a fun way to spend my time. I was 9 years old.
As my knowledge and skills increased, my mother and Bernie determined that purchasing my own, non-obsolete computer may be a good investment. It cost somewhere around $3,000 for my first IBM clone PC with an 8088 processor. Though Bernie paid for half of it, it was $1,500 Mom could barely afford. It turned out to be the best investment ever made toward my education. As expected, I took immediately to the machine and quickly learned all of the arcane commands that made DOS tick. In the 5th grade, I began fixing the Apple IIs in my school’s nascent computer lab when the teacher ran out of options. Without Mom and Bernie’s support, I never would have had that knowledge or interest.
As I got older, Mom found ways to continue affording my hobby. I was always a couple of revisions behind everyone else - never cutting edge in any way - but I really didn’t mind. I saw it as more of a challenge to work with what I had. I wrote a handful of games, learned to program in Pascal and ran my own BBS for a while. Whenever I needed a new part or piece of software, Mom would do what she could to help me out.
As all this was happening, I was completely oblivious to our financial situation. We lived in the poorer part of town in a run down apartment. I wouldn’t say “ghetto” or “slum”, because I’ve been in real ghettoes and slums and where I lived doesn’t come close. But, compared to my Orange County friends who were living in nice houses in small, insular communities, we were definitely on the lower end of the economic scale. The apartments we lived in during that time, while less than modest, were the best my mom could afford, and she put up with a lot of hassle just to get them. Though she never went on welfare, she once told me there was a period of time when she thought we might have to.
Things got better for her when I got into high school. She had been working at State Farm Insurance for just under a decade and was rising through the ranks, eventually becoming the executive assistant for their regional manager. With higher status came higher pay and she and Bernie eventually went in together on a house. We moved in just over a year before I graduated high school. Having spent much of my childhood moving from apartment to apartment, I was less than pleased that she had found residential stability just two years before I’d have to pack up and move away for college.
But it meant that Mom would build equity, and it represented the fact that she had gone from being completely dependent on another person - something she never liked - to being completely dependent on herself. What’s more, she was also able to support me without much outside assistance, which is no small feat.
When it came time to leave for college, Mom struggled with figuring out how to afford it. Again, I was completely oblivious and had my sights set on private Boston University. At more than $25,000/year, she was liking that idea less and less and urged me to apply for UC Irvine so that I could live at home and save some money. At that time, I ran with a pretty bright, ambitious crowd in school. They were already set to go off to Stanford, Harvey Mudd, Vanderbilt and other renowned schools across the country. Settling for UC Irvine was out of the question. I was eventually convinced that UC Berkeley would be a better choice than Boston and it became my first choice. When I was accepted, I applied for financial aid and was able to get enough loans and grants to attend.
During those five years at Cal, Mom beamed with pride. Though I did work a bit while going to school, Mom continued to insist that I focus on my studies and did all she could to support me both emotionally and financially. Even after I dropped out of the College of Engineering, even after I gave up on studying Classical Latin and Greek, even when I abandoned all of my technical interests in pursuit of journalism, she supported me, driving herself deeply into debt in the process. As always, she never complained to me about it and I was, therefore, oblivious, though becoming increasingly less so.
I saw the strain supporting me was taking on her health. When I was in high school, right amidst the apex of all of the college planning, she developed hypertension. While I left for college, she didn’t feel there was any longer a need to get home on time or be around on weekends, so she took all of the overtime she could get, including working during some Christmases. She did all this to keep her debt as low as possible and keep both of us afloat. As I entered my fifth year at Cal, I too began to stress out a bit over wanting to be free of her, not because she was suffocating me or anything like that, but because I didn’t want her to have to support me any longer.
I graduated college right in the middle of the Internet boom. I took a job with Intuit to work on their Quicken.com website where I was paid far more than I ever would have been paid working for a newspaper. Before long, my technical skills were noticed and I was taken off of business writing duties (something I was never very skilled at) and put onto the web production team. With the amount I was making, I could easily afford the Menlo Park apartment I shared with an old high school buddy and have enough money to sock away. I stopped having to ask Mom for money, which was a relief to both of us.
She came up to visit as often as she could get time. She loved Northern California and thrilled in the fact that I was living here. She once told me that she envied my life and loved to live vicariously through me. I was strong, independent, intelligent and ambitious - everything she had raised me to be. Everything I was, am and shall become is because of her.
No matter how hard things were for her, no matter how much she struggled she never took her eye off of what was important, off of what she wanted to accomplish. There are those in this world who are ambitious and seek the best life they can build for themselves. Mom used her ambition to make the best life for me. And boy did she ever succeed.
I’ve used the word “independence” several times here. This was a principle she valued almost above all others - a value she strongly instilled in me. It’s a fierce sense that, so long as you keep your head about you and know what you want, you can do anything no matter what life throws at you. It is the basis for my personal philosophy and what drives my every decision and every action. It’s never been the typical pabulum, “You can be anything you want when you grow up,” that most parents feed their children. Mom showed me time and again that recognizing what’s important and never losing faith in your ability to achieve it are the greatest things you can do. It’s a guaranteed formula for success.
When she passed of a sudden heart attack last November, she had been living in her own condo, more than 50% paid for with her own money, for just about 10 months. For years she wanted to be on her own and not worry about sharing her space with anyone else. She died at the top of her game - physically and mentally sharp as ever having just attained her ultimate goals. She watched her only child attain his own independence, get married and become the man she had always hoped he would be. Though she sadly will not get to see her grandkids when they come, she attained just about everything she wanted through her perseverance and unwavering faith in herself.
If I only succeed half as well as she did, I will have done very well indeed. But she didn’t raise me to settle for half.
P.S. These won’t all be downers. Mom is just the most logical person to start with.
