A single mother who became homeless at 18 after having her first child lived in a Volkswagen for two weeks, then spent decades building a 24/7 business while raising three kids alone. She talks about the hustle, faith, and what it took to get out.
Can you expand a little bit on your bio? You were talking about the fact that you were homeless and single and kind of stuck somewhere. How did you get out of that?
Well, I got in it by having a child at 18 and not having the support or the guidance and ended up with— I actually lived in my Volkswagen for 2 weeks. I had a Volkswagen Bug. Everybody wants a Volkswagen Bug. And it did save us from the winter snow in March for 2 weeks. My son was the reason why I was successful in coming out of that. I, it was cold. I had 50 cents. I had to decide whether to heat the car up or to feed me. As a new mother, of course I would heat the car up. And I looked down at my son and said, we're not doing this anymore. We're just not doing this anymore. And I have been hustling for 40 years.
Yeah.
So that's how we came out of it. Um, I just took on one task after another, uh, when I lost my my husband. I just decided people are asking me to do these things part-time here and there. I will just let everybody know. And I actually had business during the middle of the night, like 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. Somebody would call me and say, I need a PowerPoint presentation in the morning. Can you do it? And that was before the internet.
Wow. I don't know that I would have answered the phone.
I had put out the shingle.
Yeah.
My mother, my mother had told everyone about the business. She introduced me to networking. So people knew I was, I was around and I had a desktop on wheels that I could scoot over to the bed and put my headphones on and answer the phone in the middle of the night. And so I had a business 24 hours, 7 days a week. And it was, it was challenging, but it left time for me to still support my children when they were not in school and put food on the table.
Yep. Yep. So it gave you the freedom of choosing when you wanted to work, it sounds like.
Well, it gave me the ability to still be a mother. Now I had to work tirelessly. Because I didn't know what else to do. I really didn't— had no idea. Um, some of our best ideas come out of being desperate, just, you know, and there's always provisions. Uh, you know, I believe in God. I don't know what other people believe in, but I can't imagine that I'm doing this alone. I don't I can't believe that I actually raised 3 teenagers by myself. There's no way.
And they've all turned out to be fabulous people, have they not?
Believe it or not, they're all still alive. I didn't kill any of them. They— yeah, there's no fingerprints around the neck.
That's always a good thing.
And they are wonderful, wonderful human beings. They really are.
