Dear Writer/Director Letter #2
Happy Birthday, Mom.
Dear Writer/Director,
My Mom is my hero, but I don’t think she understands that yet.
In 1989, she was a woman who moved back home to her parents’ house aged 30 with a child, a newly single mom. She wasted no time. My Grandad asked her what she’d like to do for income, and without missing a beat, she said fashion. She went back to school at College of DuPage as a fashion major. From there, she apprenticed under a woman named Arli M. who was the sister of the movie star Kim Novak at her small boutique. Then she moved on to Sears Home Offices as a technical designer where she worked up the corporate ladder for twenty years. She never moved out of her parents’ house. She never found me a new Dad, but she made her dreams of working in fashion a reality. Not only that but in 2008, she was head hunted by her former colleagues at Sears for Victoria Secret. She accepted the job, and from 2008 – 2014, my mother was THE senior technical designer at Victoria Secret at their Manhattan headquarters. All of those years living in the suburbs as a white woman with a mixed race child, not owning a house, not populating her world with friends, dating, or activities, had led to the ultimate evolution.
In her late 40’s, my mom was a successful New Yorker who worked down the street from Time Square across from Random House where she took all her smoke breaks. She got to travel all over Asia, collaborating with colleagues at all of the factories directly. Watching her Virgo self be excellent at what she did every single day was all the role model I needed. From a very early age, I, too, prioritized putting work into what I really cared about, so that one day, I could put on a great outfit and go to my job too.
I am lucky to know what it’s like to be raised by an independent woman with vision.
Because my mother had dared to dream for herself, at every turn in my journey, she believed that, someday, I would grow up to be a great film director. When she used my college savings to pay for my final year of high school at Interlochen, she was investing in me, the work I had already shown her I’d done, and my future. I consider my mother my first investor for that act alone.
There were definitely times in my 20’s when she questioned what I was doing: creating all these experimental theatre productions in Chicago while working at restaurants while running all these scrappy storefront companies, but in the end, when I put myself through grad school to get my MFA in Screenwriting and secured a teaching position at DePaul Film School, her faith in me and my ability to make my dreams my lived reality restored.
When my mother left for Florida to begin her new life on her own this July, she told me I had become her hero. She told me in this next chapter, she wanted to grow up to be just like me. Of course, I cried thinking about it as she drove away. Here was this woman who had been a force of nature in front of me my entire life. I was the fruits of her labor. I am the results of her creation, and she wants to be like me!?!? My only wish for her is that, on her birthday this year, September 1st, she begins to see herself for who she really is and who she’s been this entire time: a trail blazer, an iconoclast, a role model for women and people generally everywhere; for anyone who dares to imagine more for themselves.
So Dear Writer/Director, who do you know in your life who’s like Donna Lilley? Who, growing up, showed you how to relentlessly be yourself and go after what you want in this life? Who was there imagining greater possibilities for you the way you saw them for yourself? Who invested in you? Investment is not just money: it’s time, energy, care. It’s all equally valuable. It all makes a difference.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
Make a wish. I know you are the kind of person who will make it come true, no matter how long it takes.
Love,
Olivia