People assume that money protects you from humiliation.
It does not.
It only changes the furniture in the room where it happens.
My mother has always been the one honest thing in my life.
When I was twenty-three and broke, she worked double shifts at a dry cleaner and still pretended she wasn’t tired when I came home discouraged.
When my first investor backed out and I thought everything was over, she sold two gold bracelets my father had given her and told me she had “just cleaned out an old drawer.”
She lied only to spare my pride.
When my name began appearing in magazines and interviews, when strangers suddenly wanted to be my friends and distant cousins remembered my birthday, she remained exactly the same.
She still called me if she found a better sale on oranges.
She still told me not to skip breakfast.
