02/27/2025
From Founder and CEO :
Dorothy Lifford is my mother and role model for everything I love about myself: empathy, tough-love-honesty, humor, and faith. She was born in 1932 in Oklahoma; though her fair-skinned mother and dark chocolate father were deeply in love, her mean, cold-eyes grandfather pointed a shotgun at my mother’s father and told him to leave and never return. Losing her dad was my mother’s first brush with a world that is full of difficulties, hard truths, and unfair circumstances.
My mother didn’t know her father. But she vividly remembered the loss of her mother a few years later, like it happened yesterday. By the time Mommy was six years old, her parents were gone. Mommy remembers riding on the hip of her grandmother as the last love of her young life worked bent over in the cotton fields.
Granny, Mommy’s last rock, died seven years after Mommy’s mother, leaving my dark-skinned mother with her grandfather, who had no love for anyone with skin darker than his own.
Hardships followed my mother throughout life: She was pregnant in the 1940s out of wedlock. Her stomach had ballooned before she knew what was happening to her or where babies came from. She would give birth to five children, bury three of them over the years, and suffer abuse at the hands of my father.
However, if you asked Mommy about her life, she would share honestly, without shame or blame. While many others might understandably feel such emotions, Mommy led with acceptance. There was no self-pity or bitterness present. Nevertheless, she regretted staying in a marriage that was not good for her. More often than not, Mommy saw beauty, remained resilient, had faith, and never closed her heart.
I could write a book on inner fitness based on the lessons my mother modeled. Here are some life lessons Dottie Lifford modeled that quickly come to mind:
✨Life is a gift. It owes us nothing.
✨Sad things will happen, but you never have to allow sadness to live in your heart.
✨Act like you know your worth.
✨It doesn’t matter who or how others are, be who you are.
✨You can be angry but never indulge in hate.
💚Continued in comments💙
