Life Stories – Maria Espino

The Death of My Mother

There is one truth universally accepted. A mother has the most profound effect of anyone on your life; be it positive or negative. So let me share with you just how true that fact is for me.

I had just turned 17 when my mother died. She was diagnosed and dead in less than six months from ovarian cancer. That’s why the fight against ovarian cancer is so dear to me and I’m hugely involved in prevention and early detection of this absolutely deadly silent killer.

There is no one is my life, besides maybe my father and we’ll get to him later, that I have learned more from. My mother, Reina Isabel, was as close to a saint as the world will ever get. Her compassion, her emotion, her selflessness, her devotion to God, her courage, her sense of humanity, her unbiased look at the world, her ability for forgiveness, her openness, and her capacity for love are all traits that reside in me that came from her. In the very short 17 years that I had her that’s the impression she undoubtedly left on me. But she was not infallible.
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My Sister’s Abandonment

It is with great sadness that I tackle this issue and I open it up with this caveat: these words are written from my memory and they are my point of view. I do not claim them to be neither true or false, they are my memories and memories can very often be skewed or fuzzy. But please respect that they are my memories none-the-less.

Abandonment is such a common theme in my life but its never been more unresolved for me than it is with my own sister; my full blooded sister that shares both my mother and my father.
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South Florida Living

When I was 6 years old, my family made the move from Venezuela to the United States of America; more specifically Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Fort Lauderdale was an amazing, vibrant place to live. With its golden sands and aqua-colored seas, it was the place to be and for my father it was the place for him to retire.

He had every intentions of running his business from a more separated manner and had friends that were willing to take that over and let him spend more time with us, his family. At first, that’s what happened. All of the sudden my father was around more and for my sister that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It was very different than what she had been used to and that alone caused even more of a problem between them. My father wanted my sister to be everything that he had intended my eldest brother would be — a younger version of him. Interested in business and finances and all that good stuff that my father was so proficient in. He was adamant about this.
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My Venezuela

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela on September 21st, 1974. My parents had moved there from Puerto Rico, where they had spent 7 years, to Venezuela to pursue new business ventures. My father was an entrepreneur and my mother was his backbone; the woman behind the man.

They came to form a new company, MagnuVen Chemicals, that would later transform into MagnuVen Holdings. Since my father’s time in Zoilax, a Puerto-Rican company in where he had worked as General Manager, he had had a long interest in chemistry. It was one of his loves. Venezuela’s industrial sector was a perfect playground for building a business that catered to industrial chemicals. Through his chemistry, my father parlayed his business into oil refinement and all that that entails. Venezuela sits on top of the one world’s most abundant oil reserves on the planet. It is the only one of its kind in the Western world.
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