<p>When her husband died of heart problems, Celina Sotomayor was left to raise her children on her own in a Bronx housing project. By age 10, her daughter, Sonia, decided that she wanted to go to college and become an attorney. This forward thinking isn’t so surprising, given her mother’s tremendous emphasis on <a href="https://esme.com/resources/c/education" target="_blank" class="wordlink">education</a>; Celina Sotomayor invested in the <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica </em>for her children. Celina returned to school to become a registered nurse, hoping to free her children to pursue their own lives: Sonia as a judge, her brother, Juan, as a doctor. Long before Sonia Sotomayor became the first Hispanic member of the Supreme Court, she described in a 1999 speech at Lehman College how her mother, orphaned in rural Puerto Rico at age nine, memorized her lessons by pretending to teach the trees. “My brother and I grew up in the projects,” Sotomayor said. “But through my mother’s emphasis on education, we are living wonderful, full lives, liberated from the shackles of poverty.”<br></p><hr><p><span style="font-size: 11px;">Photo Credit: Part of a WhiteHouse.gov slide show, "Sotomayor Bio: Picutures from Throughout Judge Sotomayor's Life [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons</span><span style="font-size: 11px;"></span><br></p>
<p>Growing up poor in a small town near Naples, Italy, wasn’t easy for Sofia Villani Scicolone, who eventually became famous as actress Sophia Loren. Raised by <a href="https://esme.com/voices/perspectives/whats-a-solo-mom" target="_blank" class="wordlink">Solo Mom</a> Romilda Villani, Loren has vivid memories of her childhood during World War II, when her mother sometimes had to siphon water from the car radiator for her two daughters to share. After the war, Loren and her mother went to Rome to try to make their living as actresses. Loren eventually delivered a breakthrough performance as the title character in the movie <em>Aida</em>, then went on to international film stardom; in 1961, she won the Best Actress Academy Award for the film <em>Two Women</em>—a movie with parallels to her own war-ravaged childhood—and an Academy Honorary Award in 1991. In 2010, the then-75-year-old Loren played her mother in a television biopic about her own life called <em>My House Is Full of Mirrors</em>. Loren has described her life as “a wonderful fairytale (but also) a story of war, hunger, and begging,” according to the <em>Telegraph</em>. “That’s what my mother did for us: she fought to give her daughters a name and a future that would not be poor.”</p>
<p>The concubine of a noble warrior, Yan Zhengzai was left to raise her son Confucius in poverty following his father’s death. As a young man, Confucius devoted himself to his studies during the traditional three-year mourning period following the death of his mother. Known for his pithy sayings and belief in the power of family loyalty, he grew up to become one of the world’s great philosophers and teachers. “Forget injuries; never forget kindness,” Confucius once said.</p>
