Make a Difference


Home|Your Comments|Booklist|Contact Us|Speaking Engagements|Inspirations|Links|About the Founder

About the Founder



After reading the story "One At a Time" that talks about a man walking on a beach at sunset and watching another man picking up starfish who have been washed ashore and throwing them back into the sea to save them, my perspective on life was changed. The man watching challenges the man throwing the starfish back and says; "Don't you know you can't possibly make a difference to all of them?" The man throwing back one more starfish to save it replies, "Made a difference to that one!" How simple. We can't all save the world but we can all make a difference and little by little that is how the world is saved.

I was born at about the same time the U.S.S. Arizona was being sunk at Pearl Harbor to a socialite mother and a father who was called into service in the Navy soon after my birth. The memories of my early years are mostly about not ever having enough of anything from food to love.

I married my childhood sweetheart right out of high school at seventeen and had a daughter by the time I was eighteen. When my son was born shortly after my 20th birthday I knew this would have to stop. I wanted more from life then a child a year. My life was not as I had dreamed, but I started a career in the medical field and moved along. My husband worked two and three jobs to make our lives better. We bought a house and a new car. We were also losing sight of our real dreams. In the summer of our sixth year of marriage my husband died from complications following unnecessary surgery. I buried him and a part of me on our seventh wedding anniversary.

The years after are a blur of personal illness, losses, and turmoil laid over a time of tremendous social change. The roles of women were changing and none too soon for me as I struggled with the issues of single parenting in a time before the term.

In the early seventies I came to California, following another marriage as a navy wife. The marriage had been an escape from family and health problems on the East Coast where I had lived all of my life. I spent the next five years battling depression and prescription drug addictions while trying to save my children and money from an abusive husband.

Once free of him but suffering severe financial hardship, I met and fell in love with a man I believed to be my soul mate. We married and a year from the June when we had met I had his son. My next youngest was sixteen. By Christmas "my soulmate" was gone. He did not want children. I had wrongly believed when we met that I could no longer have any. I was once again a single parent.

Vowing not to leave this baby the way I had my others when their father died I returned to school, taking the baby with me to campus childcare and we went through college together. Once I graduated, I began teaching in the catholic school system and ultimately in the community colleges where I had received my degree. (That baby just turned twenty-one and is in the college where he was a daycare recipient so many years ago.) Some of his same teachers are still there.

I have done many jobs and overcome many obstacles, not the least of which have been my own shortcomings. I have loved, lost and learned, but most importantly I have grown. I have much to share and even though I have been blessed as a teacher doing that, I hope now to take it to a new level with a broader audience. I have been asked for years by students and others attending my lectures to do what I am now beginning. To offer advice and my version of wisdom to more people.

I have been married now for almost ten years to a kind and understanding man and yet we have had no easy life together. In the past year alone I have buried both my parents within the same month, my husband lost his job and our benefits. I struggled at a new job in a very hostile environment only to be terminated after taking stress-related leave. Within one week of that termination I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The good news is that battle has been won but not without aggressive surgical intervention. The message is I have survived.

I have learned lessons and I need to share and validate them. If I can make a difference, if I can light a candle for someone, let me do it now because sometimes tomorrow never comes.