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.

My sister wanted to study music, she had always wanted to study music.  As a compromise, I think, she decided to try to go to for nursing. This created complications because it just wasn’t something she was a natural at or had any real love for. It was music that lived in her heart. And as much as my father was against that for his child, he understood that world having been a proficient violinist for the majority of his life. He knew the struggles that his daughter would face if she pursued that life and he wanted more for her. Unfortunately, my sister didn’t want more for herself. At least not that type of more.

Fights would ensue, my poor mother stuck in the middle. Wanting to support her daughter in her endeavors but also understanding where her husband was coming from, she was often left to pick up the pieces between the two.  On one hand, she’d console her daughter when she’d be in tears about how much her father “hated her” and how much her father “wanted a boy instead” and how much her father “didn’t understand”. On the other hand, she’d calm her husband’s frustrations about his eldest daughter not being able to sustain her living in a manner that wouldn’t put her in the tough, tough, tough places that him and my mother both had been when they were younger.  He certainly didn’t want his children to be poor and struggling and unhappy. I don’t know how my mother kept her sanity in this. Now that I write about it, I wonder if this was just another problem to tack on to their marriage?  Another straw… eventually a straw that would break the camel’s back, as they say.  It couldn’t have been easy on their marriage to have a daughter constantly at odds with one of her parents.

I can’t say that I agree with my father. I think children should be supported in what their hearts most desire, but I do understand that as parents we have a duty to “launch” our children into the real world. I think if I had been in his shoes, I would have asked my daughter to find a temporary vocation to sustain herself with — whatever that may be — and then I would have allowed her to study music, music theory, etc. etc. But again I am just not sure that my sister would have been receptive to that either.

I was 6-7-8 years old when I “got” that this was going to be my path eventually and that my father would eventually project all his hopes and dreams and desires for my sister on to me, and I wasn’t wrong. I prepared myself for that. Imagine someone at that age worrying about college and “sustaining a living” instead of playing with dolls or in my case Voltron and learning to ride a bicycle and ice skating (I ended up being a pro ice skater for years, but I’ll talk about that later). I know a lot of my childhood was spent worrying about my future.

I remember as early as 6th grade, my father pushing me to get good grades and asking about a program called HSPE (High School Proficiency Exam) that would allow me to skip 8th grade and go straight into 9th grade. My 6th grade was spent learning most of the 7th grade curriculum in order to prepare for the HSPE exam. My father obsessed over this called high school a waste of time, specially since I had gotten myself put into a special middle school for children with learning disabilities. He refused to accept that I had any disabilities, instead he stood his ground on the fact that I was just not challenged enough. He was right. I was bored out of my mind. I not only passed the exam, but scored high enough to put me into some AP classes in 9th grade.

High school saw a lot of troubles for me. Most came around the science and mathematics areas. I just did not excel in these topics. But that never held my dad back from pushing me through it. My 11th grade was my final year and I was in all advanced classes, except for Math. I still struggled in that subject, but with my father’s tutoring there was little room for dwelling on my failures in math. I took another HSPE exam to test out of 12th grade, but they wouldn’t allow me to take the EOC’s (End-of-Course exams) for certain classes. That’s about the time when my mother got ill. My father chose to let me take the High School Equivalency exams because I got too involved with my mother’s care. I am not proud of that, I had worked so hard to get an actual degree and then had to just take what I could because the school refused to allow me take my EOC’s in order to graduate. They didn’t even care about my circumstances with my mother. But to me, for all intents and purposes I graduated high school at age 16 and my mother died.

My father had always been very strategic in my schooling and that wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. I went straight into college. I was the youngest student in BCC (Broward Community College) at 16 ½ years old. My father had enlisted me in a community college because he knew that I was weak in science and math which would more than likely drop my overall GPA. In attending a 2-year college, your graduating GPA isn’t tabulated into your final GPA when you graduate from a 4-year college. If you go straight into a 4-year college, they include all 4 years into your final GPA. The first two years of college are your general studies — basically its high school all over again with college-level coursework. Luckily my father knew I could CLEP (College-Level Examination Program) out of some of the requirements for my 2-year degree, and so I did.  In all I CLEP’d out of 5 courses — Spanish, Conversational Spanish (for our foreign language requirements), Health and Fitness (I was professional ice skater, can’t get more fit than that there!), English Composition 101 (I really excel in writing, what can I say!), and Ancient History (go figure!).  All this… while my mother had just died. Daddy was determined to not let that get in the way. It didn’t quite work out for him, but that’s another page.

After BCC, I transferred into Florida Atlantic University. I had buckled down by then. I knew my father would want me to follow in his footsteps. But when I thought about my life and what I really wanted, I just wanted to dig in dirt. I was 10 years old when I started digging up the backyard, much to my mother’s dismay. I knew then I would want to search for buried treasure. So I definitely went through the same issues my sister did, but having seen the many ways this could go wrong for me. I decided to strike a deal with my dad. I said, “Okay, I’ll get a business degree if you promise me that you let me follow my dreams educationally past that.” He agreed. And I did end up graduating college early, I was 20 years old (just shy of 21!) when I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and a minor in Anthropology.

My dad kept his word and I enrolled in a Masters program for Archeology and later (after my father’s death which I’ll talk about later as well) a Doctorate’s program in Egyptology. There was nothing I wanted more than to figure out the history of our world. And there was no other history that could better give us this insight than the Egyptians. I fell in love with Ancient Egyptian history… only the ancient part too.  If you asked me anything about current world history I know so little, its sad. But go ahead and ask me about the New Kingdom and more specifically Ramesses II! Because my father was at this point pretty wealthy, I got to go all over the world doing digs in so many places. My love for dirt grew exponentially — my lifelong dream came true.

But… like all things, how do you turn your dream into self-sustainability? That’s a hard feat. Honestly, to be a real archaeologist, you have to have a doctorate and be published several times over and have grants and write grant proposals and establish teams of “field technicians”. This is a lot harder than I ever thought it would be. And let’s be clear, you cannot “do archaeology” from a desk in a comfy chair… it requires travel and months of it. How could a woman archaeologist really build a family with that much travel requirement? You just can’t. So I had to find another means to be “self-sustaining”.

So I took up website design as a hobby, probably around 1997 after my dad died. I bought a book – Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing With HTML 4 in 21 Days. I devoured this book every day and I self-taught myself how to use PaintShop Pro to make some graphics. And off I went, I basically did this every day. I then got into Flash and learned Shockwave along with Photoshop. Slowly but surely I became more proficient in this new hobby. And when my father’s estate was taken from me, I needed to be able to make money and be “self-sustaining”. I took this hobby of mine and turned it into a career.

And I love where its taken me. From web design I learned more about user experience and user interfaces, which took me into web application design. I then learned more about Microsoft technologies and grew very interested in SharePoint, which is what I’ve built my company on.  I started my own technology business with everything I’ve learned through the years and through many books right here in Fort Lauderdale in June 2006 and while I’ve moved it up to here to New York, its rooted in South Florida.

 

 

Photo Credits: All images are owned by their respective owners and licensed for personal use through iStock/Getty®.

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