Author Archives: Samantha

Virtues from Motherhood: Family is key

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When I say family naturally I mean those who are related to you, parents siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins, but I also mean people who although absent of biological connection still feel like a family member. The people who’ve known you your entire life, helped raise you or even silently routed for you from the sidelines are the people who see the best in you. People who see the best in you bring out the best in you.

Over the past decade I’ve learned that family really is everything. Though I pushed them away and alienated them in my teen years they’ve still been a constant in my life. At every holiday, birthday party and get together and through every family crisis or hard time they offered a helping hand and a year ago as I walked across the stage to get my first college degree I realized that all the people that I chose over my family were notably absent from my graduation, my family was there. So as my 26th birthday approached I thought more and more about how I wanted to celebrate it. At first to be honest I didn’t really want to celebrate it at all I just wanted to relax after a really long 6 months of working and going to school. After some more thought though and the warm summer sun peaking put I decided I’d throw myself a BBQ and have my family and just handful of friends over to celebrate, laugh and just relax. I could have planned a night on the town and gotten dressed up but I truly did not feel like doing it because not only had I done it for every birthday since I turned 21 I was just lazy.

So I bought some BBQ food, some snacks, a few drinks and got to work. It was the first event I had planned for myself that every person I invited RSVP’d and showed up, it was also the first family gathering where I invited more than one friend and didn’t cringe when everyone co-mingled. It was truly a great experience and so worth the time and money that went into it because instead of a fancy dinner in a room of mostly strangers I was at my house, with my family and friends, enjoying the weather and one another and after I had cleaned up the yard, put away the tables and closed the lights I realized I felt light, happy and I was thankful.

As I’ve gotten older I have learned countless things, sometimes the hard way, but mostly I’ve learned that family is forever and some people despite not being related are family and are stronger forces in your life regardless of how long they’ve been there. Life weaves together this tremendous basket for us, one that keep store our keepsakes in; life lessons, memories, fears and ambitions. In the fabric of that basket, woven deep within the stitches lie the people who’ve helped create the basket, both past and present. However some people weave stronger stitches in our basket than others and are part of our main stays. These are the people I want to celebrate birthdays with and these are the people that make me smile and drag me out of the house when I least feel like it. Though I am far from perfect, no human being is really, I can say that I’m happy with a low key celebration as I age because memories like that will live on for me for years to come. Family is constant, supportive friends are crucial and I am lucky enough to say I have both and for that I’m tremendously thankful.

Virtues from Motherhood: Learning to be a leader

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A few years ago I read a fortune from a fortune cookie that said “ Leadership is the ability to hide your panic from others” and I thought, this is the strangest thing ever. You’d assume a leader is a leader because they have it all ironed out and have no need to panic, boy was I wrong. Aside from the very obvious form of leadership, motherhood, I had to develop and fine tune my professional leadership, which is very different from my role as a mom. As a mom my leadership is tiered and drawn out over Ava’s entire life, but professional and peer leadership is very “at the moment” focused.

My cultivation of professional leadership was thrust upon me at 23, when I became the office manager for an H&R Block location. I had recently become a certified tax pro and my district manager felt I was ready to lead an office, I was flattered but also nervous. I was the youngest employee in the office, and now I was the boss? I had to manage people twice and nearly three times my age and that alone seemed intimidating. The other component was meeting all these goals, deadlines and expectations where there was little or no room for error and sometimes that meant thinking on my feet. Spoiler alert, I still have my job so clearly I did something right but at times it felt like I was just winging it and that’s when that fortune cookie saying made sense to me, panic but don’t show it.

I didn’t really grow into myself or feel comfortable speaking to people until I hit my mid twenties, before that I would grin and bear it but I would turn really red, stumble over my words and rush through whatever it was I was saying. This job role, as well as my time at City Tech, helped me groom and polish my speaking and leadership skills because it showed me that when you have something to say people will listen, they will regard your words.

Leadership doesn’t come easy though, I have classes with peers who are deathly afraid of speaking to the class and during group projects they hide behind the podium and happily let me speak. As I’ve taken senior courses though, more and more professors stop me and call them out, because I have this skill and rather than do it for my peers I should teach them or encourage them to be able to do the same. At first this annoyed me (because I hate group work and my doing the whole project is just easier to me) but then I realized that at one time it was me who was hiding beside the podium and being a wallflower. I had a math professor who made us present algebraic equations in a group project and I am awful at math so I took a back seat, but this professor wouldn’t leave me alone she made me read and do more than half the work when we presented, and I though I’d die. Clearly I didn’t die because I wrote this blog post but I do recall the fear and anxiety that moment gave me and I realize why my professors now ask me to not just do the project for them but show them how.

Leadership is a learning curve and sometimes I am absolutely winging the sh*t out of whatever it is I’m doing, but I know if I don’t get it right there’s a lesson in there, be it don’t wait till 3 days before or how to better use a computer program, there is a take away. Leading is always going to be a give and take because a good leader knows sometimes the best form of leadership is stepping aside and taking notes, we can’t all be good at everything and a good leader knows that they don’t work above the team they work with them.

 

 

Virtues from Motherhood: A reminder about love

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Too often we find ourselves in toxic relationships, both men and women, and question how we let ourselves fall into this unhealthy pattern when we know better. Sometimes we’re able to tell other people the things they need to hear to be strong and pick up and move on but we cannot seem to grasp it in our own lives. In my own life and even that of the people close to me I’ve found such amazing people in some unfair situations but rather than write a traditional blog post about it I’m going to write an open ended list of what love is and I hope my readers will add to it. Also, always remember love starts with YOU, love yourself, love your body, love your strengths and weaknesses and love every day you wake up with the chance to shine!

LOVE IS,

Compassion

Understanding

Learning

Trust

Excitement

Sharing

Lazy Sundays with take out and TV

Enjoying one another without words

Forgiving imperfections

Helping one another grow

Good Morning notes

Bringing home their favorite snack after a bad day

Cuddles

Forehead kisses

Understanding their past without prejudice

Letting go of fear

Experiencing new things together

LOVE IS NOT,

Condescending

Judgmental

Controlling

Painful

One sided

Abusive

Ultimatums

Conditional

Stressful

 

Remember that no matter what you’re going through or what you’ve been through you deserve love. Love takes work, commitment and a desire to build with each other and most of all it takes time. Nevertheless there is never ever an excuse for love to consume you life in negative ways or to break you to the point of losing who you are. Love should be the harmony of two lives living side by side it is not a force that rules your life. Love is happy.

 

So tell me, what is love to you?

 

 

If you or someone you know is struggling visit halfofus.org for ways to help.

Virtues from Motherhood: My work with the FYLC and OpenLab

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On March 3rd I attended the second of three workshops with the FYLC, this one about using the OpenLab as a tool in the classroom. The discussion ranged from technical to academic concerns, all while trying to bridge the gap between high school and college. At the last workshop the focus was the struggles incoming college students deal with but this time the focus shifted to how to get them involved and engaged in the classrooms. With me at this workshop were the some of the masterminds here at The Buzz, Jill Belli and Phil Kreniske, who helped the audience of professors and faculty, understand the benefits and best practices surrounding the OpenLab.

My portion of this workshop was centered around my use of the OpenLab, how it’s benefited me as a student and peer mentor and how professors can better use the OL to get students excited and engaged with the work. I use the OL for many tasks on campus, like right now as a blogger, but I also use it as a peer mentor to orchestrate and update the FYLC page and of course in my own courses. I love the OL and I love the uniqueness and open concept it represents, versus blackboard which is gray in more than one sense of the word. The OpenLab gives students control, a say in essence, that they don’t otherwise have with academic websites and that makes a world of difference for a student.

As a college student I’ve seen multiple websites and hosts for academia but the OL has got to be my favorite because it in a sense reminds me of a social media platform. It’s colorful and it’s easy to access and connect to my other go to apps. Students are already online, on their phones, so why not make a platform that works seamlessly with a students lifestyle because don’t forget the millennial era student has a much larger digital footprint than previous generations.

Virtues from Motherhood: A learning curve

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Early one morning as I was getting Ava ready for school she saw me wearing a new pair of flats and told me I looked pretty and that she hoped my friends at work would like them too. I thanked her but then I decided to follow it up with a reminder; it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes my shoes, I like them and that’s all that matters. She paused for a moment and then echoed what I said, so I took the opportunity to clarify with her that she should never worry about other people liking what she’s wearing, what music she likes or how she wears her hair. If she loves herself that is all that matter, because if you can’t love yourself and be sure of who you are then relationships with other people will fail by default.

Self love is a message we are constantly trying to teach young children, we want them to celebrate their diversity and everything that makes them unique but that message starts at home. I am raising a daughter in a somewhat chaotic time in the world, women’s rights have a tumultuous relationship with the justice system and self identity is highly scrutinized. Nevertheless I want her to know and understand that it is okay to be happy with who she is even if there’s a politician on a soapbox telling her no. Learning to self moderate and be sure in your ways takes time, takes trial and error and takes the will power to know and understand your limits and when it’s time to test them. Sometimes I can see Ava struggle with the conflict of separating individuality and testing authority, and I see myself.

Some of the habits she possess that drive me utterly insane are ones that I’ve struggled with, and maybe still do struggle to combat and regulate. More recently I’ve been getting told that Ava doesn’t apply herself, she’s lazy when it comes to school work and she does the bare minimum and then gets upset when she’s called on it, and in moments like that I have a flashback to my own parent teacher conferences where they told my mom the same things. My problem is though, that I don’t always know how to react or handle the issue because I immediately get frustrated with her mostly because I know these choices now lead to bigger and more detrimental choices as she gets older. I know that the bad habit of doing the minimum or not applying yourself can be the reason you get academically dismissed from your dream college, I also know it’s the reason it can take you nearly a decade to get a college degree, rather than four years.

I don’t want to see her let her bad habits be her pitfall while she’s chasing her dreams. I want her to break those habits now and not struggle and learn the hard way, like I stupidly chose to so many times in my own life. Perhaps life show’s us where we went wrong in our own children so we can raise them to do better, or maybe it’s a reality check for the things we still need to work on. Either way though, life has a funny way of making history repeat itself, often in our children.

Virtues from Motherhood: You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be

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Have you ever caught your reflection in a passing car or store window? Have you ever gotten lost in thought and wondered how you got where you stand today and think back to those pivotal moments you’re sure changed the course of events in your life? Yeah, me too. It’s crazy to think how quickly we made those choices in the heat of the moment and how big they impacted our lives and I often wonder why I’ve ended up here, am I doing this right? I spent a lot of time micro managing what I did that I forgot to stop and breathe, stop and realize we are exactly where we’re supposed to be at this moment. Sometimes years later we can look back and see why a friendship ended or why we were laid off from a job, because those things ending made room in our lives for bigger and better things.

Too often human beings spend so much of their time banging on closed doors, or weeping outside of them, that they lose the ability to see the colors on the road ahead and life becomes gray. In that gray corridor we tend to lose ourselves in a flurry of “what ifs” and “why me’s” and as hard as it is to do, we have to shut those little voices of doubt down. It isn’t easy, in fact the hardest thing we as human beings have to do is learn to mourn the loss of someone who is still alive, without loosing ourselves in the process. We have to make peace with the fact that everyone we love may not be for us and in the ever revolving sphere that is life, people sometimes go and do not return, and that is okay. When you catch sight of yourself in a store window, instead of noticing what’s missing, I challenge you to notice what’s gained.

Instead of looking down, look up and count the good, instead of saying something has taken you too long to finish credit yourself for finishing at all. Everyone’s clock is different, your 25 is not the same as your moms, your siblings or your best friend’s and to compare and contrast the lives and progress of totally different human beings is counter productive. Count things on a scale that makes sense to your life, you cannot weigh grains of rice on a scale meant to weigh an elephant. Understand that time moves at a pace that is right for you and nobody can tell you that it’s taking you too long to reach a goal or heal a wound, it is your life and as long as you’re trying, you’re progressing.

Virtues from Motherhood: What happens to the people society fails?

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I wonder this often when I ride the train, I see people that society is just not designed to benefit and I imagine how hard everyday life must be in their shoes. One of the first things that comes to mind when you hear about the NYC subway system are the people who call it home, the homeless population that seeks refuge on the iron horse. I’m sure I’m not the only person who wonders when their life went left and they ended up homeless? Where are their family members? Didn’t they have any friends? Was it drugs or just hardship? The questions are endless and I’m sure in some cases it’s a result of poor choices and bad judgment but what about the people who are just failed by society? What about the guy who’s on the spectrum but grew up in a time where it wasn’t recognized and can’t hold a job because he was never given the tools to do so. What about the child who was born to drug addicted parents and thrown into the system at 2 years old and aged out at 18 with no idea how to navigate society, higher education or make stable life choices?

Society, while it’s slowly becoming more inclusive, has a longer more harsh history of excluding those who need guidance the most. Instead of just tossing these people who need more time, more space, or more guidance, into rooms, jobs and settings where they’re competing with the mainstream we should develop ways to help these people, give them tools, not pink slips. In most NYC public schools classrooms are inclusion classes where kids of all levels are expected to learn the same material at the same rate. While the argument is pitched to say kids learn better off their peers, this sentiment ends when the school year does and they fall behind.

We need to recognize that not every person learns the same, comprehends and functions the same and we can’t skew the system to support kids until their 18th birthday and then expect them to figure it out on their own when the training wheels are abruptly yanked. A few months ago I read a post on a blog from a photographer who photographs the homeless across the country and tells their story. One of his posts though, from a 19 year old homeless kid, really struck a cord. This poor kid had been raised by his grandparents, didn’t know where his parents were, and when his grandmother passed away he found himself homeless when the bank took the house he grew up in. His job couldn’t support rent and life expenses and so he took refuge in city muni stations.

How do we call people adults when we’ve never provided them the proper tools to function as one? How many high school students learn about taxes, IRA’s or retirement? We teach students to pass, not to know and we then have adults who relied on being told what to do and how to do it and when that structure is gone they fall through the cracks. Society fails them.

We as a society need to make a change, we need to change the method and change the approach. You can’t expect kids to just figure it out of their peers or after having it done for them for years, you have to offer a safety net and not a hand out. Until then though I’ll hope for the best and teach my own daughter to do for herself and learn the steps and not just the outcome.

Virtues from Motherhood: What is luck anyway?

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All my life I’ve heard people tell me I was lucky but every time I heard it as a kid I was confused. Growing up I thought we were like every other family, nothing special, and that all kids lived like I did. Now we weren’t the Kennedy’s or the Kardashian’s by any means but we did have it better than most. Forgive my childhood ignorance but I could never see what luck people always told me I had, to me luck was lots of money, good looks and material things. It wasn’t until I was much older, I’m talking after having Ava that I realized luck is not something you really throw a dollar sign on.

After I started doing taxes and helping people sort out their financial woes it hit me, I’m lucky that I grew up how I had. Now I’m not saying money makes you lucky, I’m saying I’ve seen people who have nothing, they worry if they’ll be able to keep food on the table and their family has left them behind. I’ve seen women who are raising kids truly alone, with no family and no moral support break down and cry. Other people are not as lucky as I am.

Other people don’t have a family who rallies around them and helps them up when they fall, other people don’t have the mind I was gifted with to work in multiple fields. Other people aren’t as lucky to have their health and be able to do something as simple as walk up and down steps, or breathe freely. Luck is immeasurable.

The next time you wish you had a cushy job or didn’t have to work at all think of those who have to work just to keep their lights on, just to make it. The next time you roll your eyes at your mom’s umpteenth request to do something, think of those who’ve lost their mother or worse, never knew her. The idea that luck is material is secondary to the luck that keeps us alive, that means we get to see another day. People who are lucky are people who are gifted with their health, with loving family and with natural ability to do something, like athletics, math or writing and they don’t measure the luck they by the amount of money that brings in.

Luck is the ground you walk on, the eyes you see with, the voice you use to talk to people. So use that voice to do good, to spread love and positivity, spread education and spread the idea that luck is in the people that love you and not in your wallet.

Virtues from Motherhood: Your struggles might save someone else

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This past Friday I had the privilege of speaking on a panel with the First Year Programs office. The focus was around preparing high school students for college and why there is such a disconnect. City Tech faculty, as well as some high school educators were in attendance. Professor Jennifer Sears invited me to sit on the panel as the student voice after being her ENG 1101 classes peer mentor this past fall.

I was pretty nervous to join the panel not only because I was the only student but because at one time I was the student that this particular panel was discussing. My own transition to college was difficult to say the least and I wondered if things would have been different for me had there been so many people trying to fix the problem when it was me who was drowning. I was glad though, that I was able to speak up and represent those students who feel like the system fails them and that nobody really cares if they make it or not.

Being asked to speak in a room full of educators is an honor, but it is also nerve-wracking to say the least. It’s an odd space to be in because although I am a student I am also a professional, having worked in my current job for 6 years as a manager. I can identify with the student struggle with the issues I deal with as a CUNY student but I can also identify the red tape and loopholes large organizations present you with that make it hard to reach every single student.

I used to wonder why I ended up walking the path that I did, albeit some of it was my own doing, I still wondered what fate had in store for me. I think I was meant to struggle a little bit longer because I would eventually be able to advocate for others. For those who can’t or are too afraid I was able to sit on that panel and say this is what’s wrong this is what we can do better for them. Every person is not born with an enormous voice or will power, some have to be nurtured and worked with to get to that point, and if my struggles can help someone else get there, I am okay with it.

Virtues from Motherhood: Time is a slippery creature

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I talk about time often, how quickly it passes or how it doesn’t stop for any of us, but I come back to this idea because time and time again it’s proven to be so very true. When I was younger I saw my late 20s as this big gaping whole in the vortex of time that marked the end of life as I knew it. I didn’t think life happened after 30 or that you could still chase your goals that long. Well now a few years off of 30 I realize I may have missed the mark. Time is what you make of it, time is what you put into the cause and time is evasive and it hides from us even though we know its there and we feel it moving.

I think we’re all worried about running out of time and we’re not totally incorrect because time is not infinite but we need to stop watching the clock and start living the hours on it. The past decade of my life has been eventful to say the least and there are instances now where I wish I’d made better use of my time in the past, but I’m making up for that now.

Every single one of us gets the same amount of hours, the same hands on the clock, yet some of us seem to struggle with getting a handle on the days, months and years. Though we can’t touch time we can make it work for us, make it count, make it valuable. 2016 to me feels like a year of elusive and wasted hours, hours I spent preoccupied and distraught over things I knew how to overcome. So I challenge my readers this, what thing did you waste the most time on in 2016 and what will you do to fix it in 2017?