Look First to Self—An Ode to My Mother

There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it. ~Amanda Gorman 

We are a reflection of our life experiences. But it doesn’t matter if those experiences are good or bad. What matters is how we interpret and use those experiences to shape our future actions. For me, growing up in the backcountry of Arkansas and the Panhandle of Texas wasn’t exactly easy. I grew up in poverty, surrounded by drug and alcohol addiction. My young mother, who experienced a far harder life than me, divorced my father shortly after I was born. She never finished high school, and from her late teens, she wrestled with raising two girls and then two boys before she was 25 years old. When I reflect on Mom’s experience, I think about how hard it is to raise one stubborn, brilliant nine-year-old girl, my Madi. I’m educated and employed. I have a loving, supportive partner in my husband, Brian. And without reservation, I will admit to you that I struggle on a daily. But my mom, Phyllis, without a high school education and always searching for work, had to figure out how to manage four of us. She was a force.

My mom would work long hours in factories and convenience stores, sometimes working two or even three jobs at once. We lived in a never-ending string of rundown trailers. I have visceral memories of these trailers. The thing that always comes back to vivid memory is the empty refrigerator. For some reason, I can only ever remember eating macaroni and cheese and Vienna sausages. Even though we were eligible to receive food stamps and commodities, my mom had too much pride to go stand in line at the church parking lot to get our rations of milk, cheese, and bread. We were hungry—all the time. I was skin and bones. It's funny how food insecurity follows you your entire life, even when food is at your fingertips. Once you’ve been hungry… really hungry… you never stop feeling hungry. I don’t blame my mom. She did everything she knew how to do. I know she gave us everything she had. She wanted so desperately to be a great mother to her babies. But she was just a baby.

Unfortunately, in her early thirties, she experienced several setbacks. Her beloved mother, my grandma Ruby, died from complications related to diabetes. Her husband, my stepdad, Joe, left mom only a few days after grandma Ruby's funeral. Even though it left us in a lurch, I welcomed the separation. My mom and stepdad had a complicated, emotionally, and sometimes physically abusive relationship. Despite that, she loved him deeply, and I know it rocked her to her core. Mom was devastated by these two losses, and I had a front-row seat to her spiral into depression and addiction.

A few weeks later, we heard from my aunt that she was moving back to Texas. She told my mom about an available job there if she wanted it. Looking back at how our lives unfolded from that decision, I know Mom buried every last bit of hope she had left into that job offer. It promised a new start away from the pain she didn’t know how to manage. We packed up a few of our belongings and moved to the tiniest town I’ve ever known, Booker, Texas. The day after we arrived, mom left the trailer to walk to her new job. It was the first time I’d seen her smile in months.  She arrived only to discover that the job was tied to the sale of the business that had fallen through while we were driving to Texas.

At the time, I was 14 years old, the same age as my mom when she dropped out of school. Soon after, she got pregnant with my sister, Cynthia. By 17, she was pregnant with me. As an inexperienced, uneducated, and unsupported young woman with a desire to be a great mom and provider, it shattered mom when she fell short. This last setback was too much—the straw that broke the camel’s back. In tiny Booker, where the 1,214 people knew everyone and everything that happened, mom felt her failures magnified for the world to see.

She started using hard drugs and abusing alcohol. As her depression deepened, she faded further and further into a dark place I couldn’t travel with her. The mother I deeply loved became unrecognizable to me. In her early thirties, my mom’s addictions took hold of her. This was the most difficult period of my young life. My mom would leave for days… sometimes weeks at a time. My sister and I did what we’d watched our mom do for years. We got jobs to feed ourselves and care for our two younger brothers, Brandon and David. And then, one day, ten weeks before the end of my sophomore year of high school, she packed up my little brothers and left for good. This is when my forever family, Beth, Harry, and Cody, took me in and gave me a chance for a different kind of life.

Sometimes when I share this story, I think about how many young people go through the very thing we did. I think about how they succumb to the pressure and fall victim to their environments. They get sucked into the vicious cycle of poverty, addiction, and even crime. Unfortunately, this was the case for my brothers, David and Brandon. But for some reason, my sister and I found ways to pull ourselves out of it. For me, the lessons my mom engrained in me from the early days of my young life took root.

While we were dirt poor, even before things devolved, mom would use every spare moment she had between working hours to support us. She would always tell me how smart I was. She gushed about it to everyone she’d met. Mom took such pride in my success at school. I look back now, and I know that my success started with her putting words in front of me. She would save her coins and buy me tattered books from yard sales. By the time I was in second grade, I was reading 4- and 500-page novels. She’d never question me when I asked to walk to the library. I’d stay for hours, sitting in the rows surrounded by knowledge. I still love the smell of books, and I am overcome with nostalgia when I walk into a library. Mom came to every spelling bee and would stay up late at night learning new words with me. Once, she tried to secure funds from a benefactor to send me to a fancy private school because she knew I was not challenged in my classroom. I never got the chance to go to that school, but also never forgot that she fought to give me the chance.

While I didn’t know it then, I was developing my strong work ethic and resilience from her. Even after she was gone, making mom proud became a somewhat subconscious driver of my success. Years later, while I was completing my master’s degree and working for Eaton Corporation in Houston, my mom came back into our lives. She had taken my brothers back to the place that was the source of much of her pain. Within a couple of years, she hit rock bottom and was arrested with a group found manufacturing drugs. She spent two years in prison paying for her decision of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. It gave her all the time she needed to find herself again. She got clean, and the mom I remember from our early childhood came back to us.

Even though it took some time for us to mend what was broken, we did. Mom resumed her role as my biggest cheerleader and encouraged me to apply to a doctoral program. I was four months pregnant with Madi and two chapters away from completing my dissertation when mom became suddenly ill. She called me out of the blue on a Friday. I remember the call like it was yesterday. It was the day after Thanksgiving—November 23, 2012. We had ventured into the mountains with some dear friends and were standing in the middle of a self-cut Christmas Tree farm. The reception was terrible. All I can remember from the call were these words, “The doctor has given me three to six months.” And my head couldn’t help but do the math. Madi was still five months away.

36 days later, December 28, 2012, she lost her fight. Today, ten years later, I still remember those last days with her vividly. In the hospital before she fell into a coma, mom never stopped apologizing for the pain she’d caused us and for the experiences of our childhoods. It was in one of these last conversations that I had the chance to change the narrative of our history. I finally found the words to tell her what she’d really meant to me. I had the chance to tell her that I got my grit from her… that I learned from her how to work hard and be resilient. I told her that she’s the one who taught me to always look to myself first before blaming others for my situation or asking someone else to fix it.

There were some other important lessons weaved in there as well. I learned that while we must first look to ourselves, I also learned that we can’t always do hard things alone. We need to connect and engage with people. We need to extend trust, even when it’s scary and even when it requires us to tap into our vulnerability or pushes us to take risks that take us out of our comfort zones. Sometimes the most uncomfortable space is where our greatest growth happens.

Those experiences from my adolescence—the good and the bad ones—planted the seeds of my leadership philosophy. Throughout my career, experiences working for and with businesses and nonprofit organizations have cultivated that philosophy. But it was my mom’s simple yet poignant message—look first to yourself—that has become the maxim of my life and led me to where I am today. Leader-first leadership is an ode to my mother’s unconditional tough love and priceless lessons that have shaped me across a lifetime.

Thanks, mom.