by M G Vassanji

“Who do you most admire?”

Without hesitation, I knew my answer would be my mother. When I was asked to talk a little about my mom and why I chose her, I found that expanding on it was a bit more difficult to put into words.

My mother didn't have to overcome impossible obstacles, nor does she have an astonishing success story. Despite that, she is still my hero.

Because of my mother, I became one of the first people in my family to attend college. I learned the value of the dollar at an early age. My mother instilled practical life skills within me. She never sugar-coated life, but she always believed in me.

From an early age, I knew my family was different than most.

First off, It was an accident. My mother and father had both been married and divorced before they met each other.

My father, who was more than 20 years older than my mom, had five kids from his first marriage. My mother had one other child, my brother, who is 12 years older than me.

My parents found out my mom was pregnant with me before they got married. In fact, I was the only guest at their wedding. I'm told I was just learning to walk and kept falling on the church's hardwood floors.

My family never had very much money. As a child, I never knew quite how poor we wereAll I knew was I never upgraded from a Super Nintendo. even though most of my friends were getting Nintendo 64s and PlayStations. I knew most of my clothes came from garage sales and Walmart.I didn't know until adulthood that, when I was young, it had gotten so bad we'd lost electricity at one point.

When I was a baby, we even lived with my adult half-sister and her family for a time.

Our money problems stemmed from my father's inability to keep a steady job. My father was an excellent handyman and a great mechanic.

He had the type of mind that could figure out how to fix pretty much anything.

For most of my childhood, he worked for himself by purchasing wrecked cars and fixing them up to sell at a profit.