Celebrating Hard-Won Success

WorldPulse is a blessing to all who want to celebrate hard-won success.

I am in Atlanta, Georgia this week-end, visiting with three of the most powerful women I have the pleasure of knowing. One is my baby sister who overcame all odds to become a professional with a master's degree in business and is almost finished her coursework to complete a master's degree in nursing. She has persevered through the poverty and abuse of our family of origin, an unplanned pregnancy, a tumultuous marriage, and the sudden death of her second child. She continues to use her personal pain to fuel her passion and professional success.

One is a friend that I made when I moved my family to Georgia in an effort to escape the repressive environment of my hometown and my family of origin and the family of my children's father. She is a professional chef who was offered many opportunities by her family of origin, and has used her blessings to positively impact others. In her position, she trains prisoners who are eligible for parole in obtaining employment skills. She was successful in her own right before she married, and helped her husband build his own business. Widowed three years ago, she continues to expand her ways of positively impacting the earth through her work promoting the agricultural efforts of the poor rural areas of Georgia.

The third is my own daughter who is an award winning teacher of third graders, mostly illegal immigrants and other disadvantaged children living in our country. She has succeeded in applying her pain of living between her divorced parents into responsible compassion for under-privileged children. This, in addition to raising her own two daughters to strive for success for themselves and others with the gifts they are given, and despite her diagnosis of leukemia four years ago.

Many of my friends refuse to allow me to use their real names in my writing for fear of reprisals from those who say they support them. I often feel that the greatest obstacle we face in the effort to equality is the envy of others who don't want to work as hard as we are willing to work. I surround myself, whenever possible with women who will celebrate who we are with me.