Politics/Community Involvement

Be yourself. Be strong. [laughs] Be ready and don’t be too hard on yourself. I think that women are coming to a point where they can feel stronger and express that. I would say also have a sense of humor; don’t expect to be perfect. Realize that most of the time life is good and do your best.

Well, I didn’t really choose, [laughs] I was forced to choose. If I had stayed on my original path, then I would be professor of law by now, teaching. But you learn to adjust, I guess. That’s a plus. You learn how to adjust to different circumstances.  Suddenly you are dropped in the middle of something—somewhere you’ve never been. And I think you just learn to adjust. And I think compromise, adjustment—that’s what it taught me.  Cons, of course, I wish [laughs] I could have stayed in Poland. But there was huge political unrest in Poland.  That was one of major reasons why I left.  I didn’t want my children to go through this. So, I don’t know how it would have been in 1980. That was solidarity movement in Poland and the whole of Europe was a lot of different movements—political movements. So, that was reason why I left and who knows what I’d be doing there if I stayed. But here, definitely that was challenge. But I think it made me stronger. I couldn’t rely on my mom anymore, which I did a lot, and my grandmother. So, now I was on my own. I had to survive and I had two small children. You learn quickly what to do, that you can survive new circumstances you don’t know much about.

I think the reason why I’ve been able to do it as long as I have is because with work people say do what you love, and what I liked about doing what I do, is once I start coding, or once I start programming, or once I start designing, I lose complete track of time. I could be doing it for eight hours straight and not even realize that eight hours went by. When I was in school doing it as an undergrad, I’d sit at the computer at eight at night and I’d realize at six in the morning—wait a second, the entire night went by. And I thought to myself this is wonderful.  People say you have to work eight hours or ten hours a day, isn't it wonderful if you go in and you do something that you don't even feel like it’s eight to ten hours it felt like it was one because you enjoyed it and that's the reason why I think I'm still a software engineer.

One of the things I didn’t mention was that after I graduated high school, I actually became homeless because my mother said, “Okay you graduated, too many mouths to feed, got to go.” [laughs]. So here I was at seventeen, which is when I graduated, trying to navigate with a two-year old, don’t have a work I.D. I really just had to volunteer and the folks at teen care really really helped support me in that and connected me to agencies.  I was in there doing dictation, filing, whatever it was to make sure my child had child care. It was tough but I look at what I do now, you know we’re not really conscious sometimes of the people around us.  We see people and we make assumptions but we don't know what people’s lives have been and so for me it’s really wanting to make sure that those people, people looked at as less than or whatever it is, I’m going back to help those folks.

I covered a ping pong table in the cellar with  these letters and started reading them and making notes. And then I had seen that the New England Historical Genealogical Society had a two-week summer camp, where you lived at Harvard [University] and so I signed up for that.  I enjoyed that and then Marcus McCorison, who was the head of the [American] Antiquarian Society at that time and was a friend of my father-in-law’s, said of course they would like to have all of that at the Antiquarian Society. That was fun and we took them over and he assumed I was going with him. I guess he knew I had been working on them so I went.  It took me five years to do that collection.  I was learning, too, and it was 50 manuscript boxes. At the end of it I stayed, so that was my unpaid work.  I’m glad to have done it that way to have been home with the kids. I saved money by being at home and later when they were off and gone I could do my volunteer stuff and have fun.