My mother was a luddite...

My mom avoided almost every new technology that came out for most of my memory. Considering that my father started working on computers for the Navy back in the 70's this is quite an accomplishment. We had a 5 foot computer in my home when I was 4 that had 30 switches and ran giant white tape disks that you put into drawers. My mother didn't start e-mailing until after the year 2000. We forced her into the cell phone age by getting her one for Christmas years ago and slowly watched her tackle the issues of checking voice mail, and just this year she crossed the chasm into the world of text messaging.

I tell you all this to relay how much of a role model my mother is to me. In the spirit of May being older adults month, celebration of Mother's day and more, I wanted to explain why I like to celebrate my mom. She worked a variety of job over the years. She worked for an accounting firm, she was a career mother taking care of me and then my little sister. With a 12 year gap between us that puts my mom at 30+ years of being a mom when my sister graduated high school. For a number of those years she was a para-educator in the Boulder Valley School District. Add into this her passion for arts & crafts, she owned a stuffed animal business for years when I was a child making bunnies & bears and slippers, and you have one busy woman.

Well a few years ago my mom decided to leave the education field and try her hand at something more "job like" and she found a customer service job with eQuilter.com. She's always been into quilting, so why not blend some hobby with some work? In a very short time she was managing the customer service department and a short while later she moved up to being a Buyer. My luddite mother, the woman who I had to forcibly hold in front of the computer to set up her first e-mail, is now Betty Murray Buying Department Manager for one of the largest online quilting businesses in the world.

She's leaving today, travelling to Portland with Luana Rubin, the owner of eQuilter for the Spring International Quilt Market. For the weekend she will be browsing and buying the newest fabrics on the market. Speaking with industry leaders and forming partnerships that are good for her business. This is what we should all be doing for our businesses and ourselves.

She is so happy in her job. Sure it gets stressful, like any job, but she works with fabric, and she is in a field that she has a lot of knowledge in and she ENJOYS her job. She found empowerment, confidence and success in the most unlikely place, for her, the Internet. Her days now consist of work that is primarily online and communication via e-mail. She does it well, from the response of the company, and gets to bring home beautiful material to continue doing the things she loves.
She is an inspiration to me. She is part of the reason I started my own business doing what I wanted to do in the way I wanted to do it. My mom showed me that it is possible to let work be a compliment to the other things that you do in life and I am thankful for that. Her courage to overcome her resistance to new technology is a motivator to me to let go of my own fears and roadblocks that kept me from achieving my own happiness.

Mom, thank you.