Lessons from my Mom

My Mom's name was Dawn Simonson and Friday, November 9th would have been her 67th birthday. Unfortunately, she got lung cancer in 2012 and we lost her in the summer of 2016, so she isn't here to celebrate. But as I was pondering what I wanted to write this week about our evolution toward poverty informed practice, it made me think about her and the lessons she imparted, many of which she wasn't probably aware of. Like many parents her impact was more in what I observed, than what she told me, but we had spirited discussions as well. I was able to make a presentation Friday on Poverty Informed Practice and I closed by calling this my "life's work." Thinking about Mom over the last couple days has made that even clearer. Let me try to explain.


me (right) with my brother and Mom circa 1976



 

One of the basic tenets of our poverty informed approach is the fact that people bring their entire selves to the educational enterprise. That means they are complicated and lead rich full lives that may support or hinder their pursuit of their dreams. My mom was a very complex individual. She was a bride and mother at age 18 (2 kids and divorced by her early 20's, there we are to the right) who eventually worked her way through multiple college degrees to have a couple of high impact careers. She was a well-respected non-profit executive who struggled with addiction most of her adult life. She ran a side business counseling people convicted of domestic abuse after escaping a pretty nasty second marriage. Poverty informed practice requires a belief in people regardless of their background. When my parents divorced, we went from poor to really poor for a few years. It would have been easy to give up on my mom and write her off, but she wouldn't let that happen. Our version of poverty informed practice says we don't give up on people, and we don't require mom's heroism to get what you need. That last part drives some people nuts by the way... it is amazing how virtuous we require people in poverty to be to "deserve" help.

Graduation celebration

We also believe help must be normalized and de-stigmatized. I learned this from my mom too, but in a circuitous way. About the same time as the picture above of my Mom, brother, and me was taken, mom made the decision to go back to school. She was working at the non-profit she had helped found and would eventually become Senior VP at (after coming and going a couple times), but after dropping out of college to help my dad finish (he didn't that time, but that's another story), she knew her options would be limited without a college degree. So, she went back, in the 1970's, in a world that didn't really understand non-traditional, single moms, and certainly wasn't set up to accommodate them. My Mom was an original #RealCollege student I realize now as I type this. Anyway, she needed help and she got some. Although she continued to work, money was short, and I could draw you a picture of the food stamps we used for a year or so. To the day she died, Mom denied that we ever used government assistance to get by, even though I know what government cheese is and can distinctly remember the brightly colored stamps we took to the grocery store. That's the power of shame. One of the reasons we provide food for ANYONE in my department is I cannot abide the kind of shame that would cause my own mother to not remember the help that worked so well for us. She was a role model for how helping programs work, and the stigma wouldn't allow her to even remember that they did. Mom and her big brothers are pictured above on the day she got that Bachelor's degree that she worked so hard for, with help. I think I was 10.

Success is not required to be linear and in fact, we expect that it won't be. While Mom had great successes, I've alluded to the great troubles she had too. A couple of failed marriages that required starting over financially at least twice (although I'm not sure the first one required too much starting over, since she and dad had next to nothing anyway), struggles with alcoholism, and leading as a woman in an era where that was only beginning to be accepted were just a few of the things she dealt with. Later in life, she had one of her two sons struggling with a serious case of "failure to launch" (still feel bad about that), and at age 60 she was diagnosed with lung cancer. If she, or the world, had made a final reckoning of her worth at one of those low moments (or one of mine for that matter), who knows where the story ends. Instead, she just kept moving forward and eventually times got better. The picture below is one of her best moments, a family trip with her sons and their families to Disney World in 2012, shortly before her diagnosis. What if we approached our students

Disney World May 2012

with the assumption that we were the beginning of an upswing and when they struggle, we know that it is temporary? What if we acknowledged that sometimes people just need more to get back on track and that is not the same as "failure" or not "wanting it" bad enough. Someday I will write more about the resistance this little movement meets. The most common objection is "why would we treat students from poverty different than any other student?" My radical answer is that it is reparations for a lifetime of getting less than others, but my simplest answer is that we try to give people what they need. One of my heroes, Dr. Donna Beegle, recently shared that without poverty informed supports, the odds of success for a student in the crisis of poverty is 11%... Our principles say that we can't live with that, people get what they need within our ability to give it to them.

We had a service for my mom on July 12th, 2016. It was a remarkable day really and though losing a parent is never easy, it was amazing to hear from people for hours about the impact my complex, formidable, flawed, and imperfectly human mother had on their lives. I got to hear about how all those things that knocked her off track inspired her to make a difference. The non-profit she helped lead served individuals with developmental disabilities and that had come from watching a little girl get mistreated on the bus when Mom was just a kid. I also had conversations and got messages from so many women who said my mom was their mentor as a leader and tried to pave the way for them in ways she probably wasn't helped. And so many people came up and told me they knew my mom from the recovery community and how much she had meant to them. I knew Mom's recovery journey had certainly been neither linear nor smooth, so that one surprised me. And when I got up to give the eulogy, I said a line I had not planned. I said that part of Mom's legacy was the idea "that if you can help, you should, and in fact maybe you are required to." That sounds suspiciously close to our poverty informed mantra "Every Barrier That Can be Removed, Should Be Removed." And her commitment to mentoring feels like the relationship building we know is crucial to helping people move from poverty. So, when I say this is my life's work, I know where it came from. Thanks Mom and Happy Birthday.