Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom From Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans by Sheinelle Jones - 13

It’s Never Too Late for a New Beginning

Lucille O’Neal, Shaquille O’Neal’s mom

When you have children, there comes a time when you realize that, as much as you try to control everything to make sure their little lives are as perfect as can be, you just can’t control it all. (I’m told that the bigger the “littles” get, the truer this is.) In some ways I was prepared for that reality thanks to my mom-tribe with older children.

Early on, they lovingly let me know that motherhood means embracing change (and changing diapers and soiled clothes, including yours); expecting the unexpected (for better or worse); accepting that we can’t keep our children in “cocoons” forever; and keeping a sense of humor. Oh—and learning how to function well on too little sleep, which is something I thought I had mastered pre-motherhood, thanks to my job.

But you know what I didn’t anticipate? The feeling of being totally overwhelmed. Not your average I-have-too-dang-much-to-do-today overwhelmed. I mean feeling like I was on a runaway treadmill, and I couldn’t slow it down to catch my breath. I felt like the path I was on, to control not just my kids’ lives but my own, was not sustainable. Little did I know I was headed for a secret-sudden-onset-full-fledged-meltdown kind of anxiety—and utter exhaustion.

That is how I was feeling when, one day, I pulled my car over and just cried. Here’s the thing, though: by the time I pulled back onto the road, I was better.

It was like a cloud had been lifted. Really, completely lifted . What happened was simple—no lightning strikes or parting seas (so lower your bar for what I’m about to tell you) but that moment changed my life!

The day had been pretty routine. I was anchoring the morning news in Philadelphia, juggling waking up at around three a.m. on weekdays with caring for three little ones at home. My twins were babies, my oldest was a busy toddler, and my husband and I were just trying to build this life that we’d always imagined. Overall, everything was okay—more than okay, actually. I really was living my dream, and to the outside world everything looked fine. But I knew deep down that I wasn’t fine . I wanted more for myself as a mother, a wife, and at work. I wanted to be better and feel better about all of it. And there was that speeding-treadmill-I’m-not-going-to-make-it fear, although I hadn’t admitted it to myself—yet.

That day, while driving by myself on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, not too far from the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art made famous by the Rocky movie, I was flipping radio stations when a familiar song made me stop, pull over, and listen as the singer ever so gently sang about surrender .

Now, I will say, I grew up in a small Baptist church in Wichita where the older folks sang “I Surrender All” practically every Sunday. In the almost 130 years since this hymn was published, it has been covered countless times—by choirs and soulful solo artists from country’s Carrie Underwood to gospel’s CeCe Winans. The lyrics are simple (the title really says it all) and I knew it by heart, but I guess it took a few decades and having three kids for the message to fully hit me. That day, that song felt like a sermon just for me and it arrived when I needed it most.

As I sat in the car listening, I cried like a baby, and here is the affirming conversation it led me to have with myself:

Do you believe God helped you get to this moment with this job and these precious kids? Yes , I thought to myself.

Do you believe that you are living your purpose? Yes! I’ve always wanted to give a voice to people whose stories need to be told in the good times and challenging times.

And finally, do you really think the good Lord is going to help you get to this point and then just abandon you? Just drop you off here in Philly so you can handle it all on your own? No, I don’t.

Okay then…surrender, I thought to myself. Remember that your job is not about you, it’s about shining your light for others. And, by the way, the magic of bringing children into the world? You didn’t control that either. They made it, they’re here—the desires of your heart were answered. So do what you can and surrender the rest.

Right there in the car, that’s what I did. I fully let go. I released it all—the worry, fear, expectations, comparisons, and need to make everything “just right” at all times. I surrendered. Completely. Then I pulled back onto the road and went on my way with a new mindset.

From that moment on, I was changed. Even my questions during interviews changed. In fact, a few days later, I interviewed Philly’s then mayor about the city budget. When we hit the topic of education, before that moment, I probably would’ve rattled off a statistic or two that I’d digested the night before. Instead, I thought of some kids at a local school that a group of us had collected books for, only to learn they didn’t have a proper library to put the books in. So, I asked about that. My question came from the heart. I discovered it was a much more powerful way to have a conversation. I was able to do that because I wasn’t thinking about asking the smart, savvy, or probing question, or impressing my producers or boss. I was thinking about those kids and being their voice. I surrendered.

I’m recalling this story, because I can honestly tell you, that as simple as it was, I came to understand that day in the car that I had a lot to give to my career and, of course, to my family. But the drive to become “superwoman in control of it all” was just not sustainable. By keeping a tight grip on the day-to-day doing, I had lost sight of the bigger picture of where I was going. And losing track of that, even in the midst of having everything I’d ever hoped for, was keeping me from fully enjoying the journey.

To this day, here is what I continue to learn from women around me: if you feel like you’re on a path but you don’t like who you’re becoming and you don’t like how it feels inside, you can change it . There’s never any shame in seeking help if you need it. That, too, is a form of surrender. My reminder came from the car radio at the right time. Maybe this is your reminder, so let me be clear: you don’t ever have to double down on a path that doesn’t reflect the life you want to live, or the woman you want to be.

NBA basketball great Shaquille O’Neal’s mom, Lucille, is the living, breathing, “Shaq’s Easy Mac” making (yes, that’s what she really calls her son’s favorite mac-and-cheese recipe) embodiment of this notion. She recognized when she needed to change her life—and then she did it.

Her seven-foot, one-inch, 325-pound firstborn, universally known as Shaq, dominated the basketball court for years before transitioning successfully into business. Make that super successfully. In addition to his empire of franchises, he launched his own—Big Chicken—in 2022; he’s also on the board of Papa John’s Pizza and has continuously explored as many careers, business ventures, and philanthropic pursuits as seems humanly possible. Through all of it, Lucille has been his biggest champion and fan. She’s also a force in her own right, one who is as honest about all she did right as where she fell short.

Today, as the dynamic motivational speaker she dreamed of becoming as a child, she is truly inspiring when she talks about her journey and how she surrendered and changed the trajectory of her life. After two decades sober, Lucille openly acknowledges that when Shaq first came into the public eye, she was dependent on alcohol, drinking so much that she started to sense that she could embarrass him, after all he had worked for. Wanting to represent him well—and spending his money on her vice—she knew she needed to change her habits. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Alcohol is one of the toughest addictions to beat. She knew that firsthand, having already tried to do so plenty of times.

Lucille was seventeen and just out of high school when Shaq was born. Although she had tall genes, standing six feet, two inches (reportedly, an inch taller than Shaq’s biological father), she felt small inside and self-conscious, and she struggled with a lack of self-esteem.

I once read that, when Shaq was born, his grandmother told his mother, “This one is special. Watch out for this one. This one’s going to be world known. Everyone is going to know this guy’s name.” I ask Lucille about this, imagining how she must have felt hearing such a special prophecy from her mother about her child.

She says she remembers the conversation, but, at seventeen, she was struggling with her vision for her own life, much less her child’s. “I’m just a young mother, trying to make sure he’s taken care of,” she says of that time, explaining that she felt like she had no business even being a mother. “But when God allows you to bring a child into the world, pieces start to come together,” she says, smiling. “There’s something special about that. We grew up together, Shaquille and I.”

Teen mothers “essentially put our lives on hold,” she says. “You absolutely do not know what you’re doin’. So, you do the best you can with what you have to work with: common sense, a little bit of help, if you have that, and you just take it one day at a time. But it’s not the end of the world. You’re young. You have plenty of livin’ to do.”

She says she was living with her grandmother at the time, so she would take care of Shaq and light house duties, and her grandmother cooked and did the rest. She did her best, just as any of us moms must do and, before she knew it, “little” Shaquille had a basketball in his hand.

When Shaq was six years old, Lucille met the man who would become his stepfather, Phillip Harrison, a staff sergeant in the Army. Together, they had three more children—daughters Lateefah and Ayesha and her youngest son, Jamal. “The last three—stairsteps, I call ’em.” Big brother Shaq was always her “little” helper.

“When they were younger it was a lot harder because we were trying to make it,” Lucille says, recalling their life in Newark, New Jersey, where Shaq played pickup basketball at their local Boys and Girls Club. “We didn’t have enough food, we didn’t have enough clothes…we were always lacking something. It was very hard, but what helped us the most is when we banded together as a family. We left New Jersey and Phil joined the Army and he took all of us [to Germany]. We were on our own, but it brought us together as a family unit.” Having been a single mother in Shaq’s early years, she appreciated the security and comfort of having a co-parent to rely on.

“Some families have a mother [and] don’t have a father. Some have a father, and don’t have a mother. But when you have a family unit, it makes the family a lot stronger, and that’s how we did it—together.”

Shaq was always known for his size. At thirteen, he was six feet, six inches tall. Even among his fellow NBA stars, he stood out for his height. It was eventually an asset, but standing out wasn’t always easy.

“Growing up, a lot of people were lookin’ at him like he was somebody weird,” Lucille recalls. “I went through that too, being tall. I did not want to be tall at all. When you’re taller than the average person, it gives you a complex. Low self-esteem. You don’t feel like you really belong. So, we had conversations about that. All of my other children except Ayesha are tall as well. We encouraged them to know that you’re something special, you are unique, a designer original. If they have to look up to you, give them something to look up to you for.”

She shows me a picture in one of her own mother’s scrapbooks, of Shaq standing head and shoulders above the rest of the children in an elementary school play. “He was the tallest one in the class, so they made him the tree!” She laughs. But there were tough moments too—even when it came to the sport in which he would eventually dominate.

In Germany, Shaq thrived in multiple youth activities, but the competition was a bit more intense when the family returned to the United States and Shaq played for his high school basketball team as a six-foot, ten-inch sophomore in San Antonio, Texas.

“I remember an article, I remember it well,” Lucille says. “The coach saw him and said, ‘I don’t know if he can walk and chew gum at the same time.’ ” Not surprisingly, Shaq was devastated, and, with his mom’s encouragement, “He did a lotta practicing.” Then he practiced some more.

“I said, ‘Shaquille, let your game talk for you. You perfect your game so you can be in those rankings.’ ” That’s exactly what he did.

Lucille says she and her husband raised Shaq to be the best student athlete he could be, without thinking too far ahead. Meanwhile, Shaq was vocal about his dreams for his life.

“Shaquille said for a long time, ‘One of these days I’m going to be a professional basketball player.’ So, we said, ‘Okay, we’re gonna do what we can to help you get there. Go to college, perhaps you’ll get drafted by the NBA.’ ” In preparation for that—or whatever life might bring—she was very strict with him, and all of her kids, about academics.

“No pass, no play, period,” she recalls, as if she just said it yesterday. “We really enforced that rule in our house: no extracurriculars if you don’t get your grades. All of my children are athletes to the bone. We nurtured those gifts. When we were involved in youth activities, Phil and I went. We didn’t send them, we went together. And we played sports with them as a family. We loved it, we still love it. Now we have grandchildren. We’re still keepin’ up with them. It’s in all of us.”

However, she says, parents can only do so much. “It’s a process,” she says. “You have to put in the work [as a parent], but the work is always going to start with that child.”

When Shaq was sixteen—nearly the age Lucille was when she had him—there came a specific moment when those years of work earned Shaq a spotlight and she realized their lives could change. A televised McDonald’s All-American game offered an opportunity that she thought could give her son the type of exposure that might help him get a college scholarship. She was right. Shaq stood out and went on to play at Louisiana State University where, after three years, he was drafted by the NBA.

“A lot of people don’t know he was a great student athlete,” Lucille says, her voice brimming with you-better-ask-somebody pride. “They look at him and all of that ability to play ball. You have to be a student first and get through college, and then you’re in a good position to get drafted.”

Drafted before finishing college, Shaq chose to go for his NBA before his BA. “I wanted him to stay in school and finish,” says Lucille, who accepted his decision—along with a pledge. “He said, ‘Mommy, it’s time for me to go. I gotta take it to the next level. The time is now.’ ” But he gave her his solemn promise that he would one day go back and get his college degree—and LSU erected a bronze statue of its Hall of Famer in front of its basketball practice facility.

The rest, as they often say in sports, is history. Shaq played for six teams over his nineteen-year pro-basketball career and is a four-time NBA champion. He is regarded as one of the greatest players, and centers, of all time. And, having kept his promise to his mom, he is also a college grad. In 2000, he earned his BA degree in general studies, and has received several degrees since then, including an MBA.

It’s a great story! But what we all know as mothers, is that there is a lot that goes on behind our kids’ highlight reels, and our own. In this family, there was Lucille’s battle with alcoholism.

While, in many ways, she kept it together, there were also times when, as the old folks say, her slip would show. Lucille can remember her years of defensiveness and denial, and how she would tell herself that it didn’t matter what other people thought. But, eventually, it got to the point where even she realized that enough was enough. Ultimately, she says, she grew tired of the hangovers, the anxiety, the shame. As Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, she grew sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. And a huge motivator to get well: she wanted Shaq to be able to look up at the stands and feel proud of her.

Isn’t that a universal mom’s wish? As much as we want to raise children we’re proud of, we also want our children to be proud of who we are, and how we’re living our lives. I had never thought about that before Lucille said it.

“My son worked very hard to get to the position that he was in, and I could not embarrass him,” she explains. “I wanted to help him. I needed to start working with him instead of working against him.”

By the time Shaq got to the NBA, he and his parents had a ritual. “Before the game, we would give him gum,” Lucille says. “He loved to chew bubblegum, so I’d make sure to give him the gum and I’d give him a kiss and say, ‘Play your game.’ ” I smile, imagining this sweet scene playing out between a still growing boy and his doting mom, but when she clarifies that this is when he was full grown and playing for the Orlando Magic, I do a little mental double take. The fact that this ritual extended into Shaq’s adulthood makes it clear that this tradition wasn’t just a comfort for Shaq, it was something his mom depended on too.

“It’s wonderful when you can be at the game and your child can look over there and see you. They don’t have to say anything. I used to wink my eyes at Shaquille.”

Sweet scenes aside, Lucille admits that when Shaq and their family arrived in Orlando for the launch of his NBA career in 1992, she wasn’t in a good place. And as the world started paying more attention to her son and his background, she wanted to give them something positive to see.

So, one day at a time (as every twelve-step recovery program advises), she changed her life, finally activating on a promise she had made to herself long ago, to live the life she had imagined. She started with getting sober, then went back to college in her forties, ultimately earning a master’s degree. Armed with the education she’d lacked, the self-esteem she built, and the sobriety she earned one day at a time, Lucille tapped into her dream of becoming a motivational speaker for young people and giving back to her community. To make it possible, she says, she just had to “get out of my own way.”

When she sees kids wearing her son’s jerseys, even now, years after his retirement, she feels nothing but gratitude. “Thank you for the blessings, God,” she says. “Thank you for the blessings, ’cause that’s what it really is.” Through the years, there have been lots of happy tears—and “ugly too,” she says, laughing.

“We lived the journey, and I tell people, our then is definitely not our now . We learned so much to get to this point. It’s not always been easy, but it’s rewarding now. So, the tears [are] of gratitude—and we look forward to helping somebody; so many people helped us along the way.”

In 2010, Lucille checked the box of another dream when she wrote a book about her life called Walk Like You Have Somewhere to Go: My Journey from Mental Welfare to Mental Wealth. She candidly reveals her struggles as a child who lacked self-confidence, a teen mom, and a divorced woman after twenty-eight years of marriage. Today, she revels in her role as a grandmother. (At the time of our interview, I counted sixteen grandkids.) She says she wrote the book to help others, but owning her journey helped her as well.

“At seventeen, you don’t know what your future is gonna hold,” she says. “I shared how I was afraid, I didn’t love myself, how it took me so many years to just realize who I was, [and] that there was good in me. After so many years [of putting] my dream on hold—which was to go to college—eventually I got there. My son paid for my college education,” she says, in what for most of us would be a major mom-brag. “I don’t call it a book anymore. I call it a testimony.”

We all have vices. Whether it’s insecurity, anxiety, or even addiction, we all have things within us that threaten to get in the way of what and who we can be, at our best. But I believe there is also a little voice inside of you—if you can still your mind enough to hear it—telling you that the path you’re on is not sustainable, and that you have within you the ability to overcome.

For me, surrendering to the fact that I am not and cannot be in control of everything took some of the pressure off my shoulders, pressure that I didn’t even realize I was carrying. That moment I had in my car made me reconsider my approach to daily challenges and how it manifested in my habits. It does take perhaps a moment of peace, to even get to a place where you can think about these things. Changing is okay. Admitting your shortcomings is okay. Evolving is even better than okay! I admire women who can do that. Lucille proves that you can, and that it’s never too late to take agency over your life and live the life you’ve imagined. It may not be easy, but what can it hurt to try?

The message Lucille gave to her children, she now models for them and her grands: “Whatever you wanna do, just do it. You know, opportunity in life—we’re on this road only once. If you don’t make the best of it, that’s on you. It’s never too late for a new beginning.”

My mom is preternaturally calm. And, believe me, when we were teens, my sister, Barbara, and I tried to rattle her and yet she never raised her voice. That calm, that grace, was the cornerstone, the bedrock, of our family. When we came to her as teenagers, with teenage-sized problems, she would always say, “Save your worries for big problems.” She calmly steadied us without dismissing us. What I’ve realized now is that everything I truly love in life my mom has passed down to me: books, cats, teaching, writing, and, yes, being a mom myself.

—Jenna Bush Hager, cohost, Today with Hoda & Jenna