By Melissa dela Cruz
Medium
Editor’s Note: New York based Melissa dela Cruz writes about her hyperactive mom, Monette Deinla dela Cruz, who runs a bakeshop and a consulting firm while raising her and younger sister Maegan. No other best time to run an article for a working mom on International Women’s Month.
New York – Over a decade ago, our parents began a small weekend project on a section of a shared plot of family land with prime highway frontage — a bakeshop. A few excited investors, also family, and poof, this dream came into life.
Ooh but a little context before we begin this story, we’ve come to know that we don’t come from a lineage of successful entrepreneurs. We’re known primarily for our brains…intelligence — let’s call it that. So this tiny shop was an experiment in entrepreneurship, a lab of sorts for tinkering purposes.This is the story of our mother and much like the ovens churning and hissing through the busy Christmas holiday, she is relentless and unwavering.
The woman who knows no holidays, weekends, or evenings off, and on a normal day without a drip of caffeine on most, she starts at 5 AM and turns the lights off close to 11PM.
To us, the shops were never meant to be a money-making machine. And when it comes down to it, they were and will always be Monette’s hobby. We, her ever loyal steed, just followed in tow.
Monette is a chemical engineer, by trade and craft. In her own words the course wasn’t her ideal choice, “it made my life unnecessarily difficult”. But she did like one thing about it (of which I just understood): balancing formulas.
Read full text here: https://medium.com/@meldelacruzz/a-decade-of-bread-a11f89476ca0
(Featured photo is the writer Melissa, left, with her mom Monette and sister Maegan at Union Square in Manhattan.)
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