I was at the round kitchen table in my grandmother’s condo in Pittsburgh where she still lives at 90-something years old, and she was writing me another check. This one to replace the rent check that had been stolen from my mailbox and somehow cashed.
“I want you to talk to your manager and ask him for more responsibility. Tell him that you are there to grow and ask what steps you need to take.”
Another time, I remember her yelling at me when I gave her some sass back.
“You need to be independent! I have never had to depend on anyone.”
I didn’t get it at the time because I was on my own path. A college dropout who was quite frankly a mess, I could not imagine a life where I could even afford my rent, let alone learn independence. Never one to date for money, I had found myself supporting a boyfriend who knew I had a family that was easy to turn to when I needed a bailout.
But I took each piece of my grandmother’s advice and I tucked it away. What I didn’t know was that her anecdotes about her career and her offhand, scolding advice would be the force that pushed me forward many years later.
The queen of Pittsburgh
I grew up with very big shoes to fill. My grandmother, Cecile Springer, built her own path to success. A chemist, her photo is on the wall of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh as part of the Charles “Teenie” Harris collection. I happened across the photo online one day (and I keep promising myself to buy a print) and was struck by how serene she looks in her lab—and she wears the same knowing smile I saw throughout my childhood.
She had big ambitions from the start. When we would talk about my career, she would often tell me about her career.
“I wasn’t making enough money. So I went to my boss’s boss and I told him that, and I asked him what he was going to do about it.”
This attitude took her all the way to her role as the president of the Westinghouse Foundation, the first Black woman to head a major foundation in western Pennsylvania.
When I was growing up, her name was beside my grandfather’s name as major donors to every theater in town. And when she retired from Westinghouse, she created her consulting firm, Springer Associates (my LLC, Springer Creative Associates, was named with a nod to her business), and was known for her own philanthropy and for her ability to convince major donors to open their pockets for the causes she championed. If you needed to raise a lot of money for your organization, you went to Mrs. Springer.
She’s the person who taught me that you always put out brie when you have company. And she would use her parties to teach me how to network. She would place me on one side of the room and instruct me to introduce myself to everybody and ask them what they did, and then we would meet in the middle and compare notes.
We would go to benefits: the Dress for Success gala, the NAACP banquet and whatever else was going on at the time, and we would see jazz performances and sopranos and the ballet. And as a child, I never knew how hard she had to work to be able to afford to take me to any of this stuff.
After my grandfather’s funeral, we sat together on the couch in her condo, and she told me about how much she missed going out.
“I was the queen of Pittsburgh,” she said. And she was right.
Life on hard mode
Despite having every opportunity in the world, I chose to live life on hard mode. After suffering two life-threatening blood clots (a clot in my brain and a pulmonary embolism), I ended up dropping out of college. Instead, I learned how to tip at bars and push people back into the pit at punk shows.
After spending most of my 22nd year unemployed, one of my mother’s friends politely suggested that I might want to consider applying at the call center for a local bank. So I did, and I got the job.
It was a retail banking call center job, nothing fancy, no education required. But my grandmother was so proud of me. I would spend the next 10 years working in retail banking.
Once, we were having dinner at her second home in North Carolina with the former ambassador to South Africa and she told him that I worked “in banking” with a big smile on her face. And because she was proud of me, I was able to be proud of myself.
My life choices eventually took me to California, and then to Illinois with my ex-husband who grew up there. And soon, I was pregnant.
Making meaning with freedom and learning independence
It was 2020, and I was a stay-at-home mom to three children, each a year apart. I was also freshly sober. I was contemplating the fact that I was going to need to get a divorce—and that I didn’t have the means to support myself and my children.
Our children were temporarily living with their grandparents, and I had a lot of time on my hands. I began to write.
I published an essay about myself, and then another. Then I found the joy of journalism. The first reported story that I wrote was for the nonprofit solutions journalism newsroom Next City, and I would write many more stories for them and eventually for several other publications. That same year, I completed my bachelor’s degree. In 2021, I left my husband and moved into an apartment of my own to start a fully funded MA program in communication studies.
As I made each tiny step, I reminded myself that my grandmother was always independent. She and my granddad were married for 60 years, but each held their own financially though they clearly loved each other deeply.
I could find the same independence within myself. And that’s what I did. I pushed through my MA, supporting myself and the kids on my tiny teaching assistantship stipend and whatever writing work I could drum up. I was very busy with school, so I stopped chasing work, but I had a few editors that I had built rapport with who would occasionally send me an assignment.
When I completed my master’s I was earning enough money to buy a house of my own. My first job out of grad school was a flop, but now I work half time as a marketer (at a consulting firm and independently by referral only) and the rest of the time for myself, doing what I do best: writing.
I will likely never be the president of any foundation or have my name on any major donor lists. But I have learned independence, and when I speak to my grandmother, I remind her that it was her advice I once shrugged off that brought me to a fulfilling life doing what I love.
Photo courtesy U__Photo/shutterstock.com
