A Woman's View: The gift of an educated mother

To go to college and, once there, to finish.

A decision I owe to my mother.

There were 14 children in my mother’s family, six of them girls. She was the first girl to go to college, Florida State University.

I can still picture her in her Florida State tennis dress, racket held in a back swing. She did not have the benefit of her own mother’s encouragement to get her to that moment. My mother was ignored by her parents for the whole of her childhood, sent first to one relative’s and then another’s, each with the promise that she would be of some service when she got there. But she always knew that the only chance she had to escape her condition was education.

My mother was a beautiful woman, beautiful like a Hollywood film star in the '50s. But her beauty was not her greatest legacy to me. It was her education.

My mother gave me the gift of an educated woman — a gift I now give to my children.