Growing up Fast

My parents were married at 17 and 19 years old, and had their first child within a year.  I was born sixteen years later, the youngest of seven children. Needless to say, a family this size has its challenges.  But what family doesn’t?  What matters are the values I learned during those years, and how I learned them.

     Value number one, by far, was work ethic.  My father did not possess a high-paying job, so he worked several.  He tirelessly provided for our family through thick and thin while my mother had the patience to raise 7 children.  In ways it was hard to recognize while living through it, but seeing both your parents rise when they’re tired and keep going no matter what helped instill a work ethic in me that has never let me down.

     Of course, anyone attempting to raise their children correctly has mountains of courage, determination, and faith as well.  My parents were no exception.  My mom went back to school to get her GED at age 50, and kept going all the way to an Associates and then a Bachelor’s degree.  All the while she kept a job at Adelphi University, which aided in taking classes there.  Most of my childhood, my father worked two full-time jobs; one with the NY Sanitation Dept. and one at the JFK Airport.  He knew what it was to sleep in his car between shifts, and even bartend if we needed some extra money.  Yet, somehow my father still managed to get home to cook for us whenever he could.  More importantly though, both my parents made sure that all of their children knew we were loved.

Getting away

     Flash forward to 2001.  I was 30 years old, and in many ways you could say that things were going fairly well.  I was still living in NY, married, and had a solid job as a software engineer at an equities firm in the city.  Most importantly, I had the joy of my life in my 5 month old daughter, Meghan.  And then came September 11th.

     Enough can never be said about the events of that day, but I’ll only note that I was literally there in the city when it happened.  My husband at the time, Chris, was a NYC police officer, and like many people, that day changed our lives.  In short, within a few years we had moved out of New York entirely to a quiet town near Orlando, Florida (called Celebration) an attempt to start a new life.

Starting Over

     Celebration is a small town founded by the Disney company to be something of a modern homage to the peaceful towns of yesteryear.  It’s well-planned, well-managed, and extremely well-kept.  Chris, Meghan, our Emily (who was  18 months old), and I moved into a  beautiful house on a quiet street.  I was able to start up my own mortgage brokerage company with a partner, and as the economy recovered over the next couple years, we were able to thrive.

     Yet behind the white-washed railings of our home, not all was well.  Yes, financially we were growing by leaps and bounds, but emotionally we were on the verge of collapse for months.  There are many reasons for this, but in essence, my marriage simply wasn’t working at all, and I just knew there was no way I could go the rest of my life like how it was.  So in 2007, after a painful separation process, Chris and I were finally divorced. 

     So there I was in a city and state I was basically new to.  I had no family there outside of my own children, and had very few friends because I had been working so much. It wasn’t an easy time, but I did have the faith that it would all work out.