Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom From Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans by Sheinelle Jones - 3

You Can’t Quit

Wanda Durant, Kevin Durant’s mom

Being a child of divorce (twice), I have a soft spot in my heart for single mothers. No journey as a parent is easy, but being a single parent offers its own unique challenges, and I admire women and men who take that on and persevere. Like a lot of single mothers—and my own mom—Wanda Durant could be the poster-mom for perseverance. After all, not only did Wanda succeed in raising two men of whom she is exceedingly proud, but their pride in her is also well documented.

In fact, her “baby,” one of the NBA’s all-time greats, Kevin Durant, famously referred to her as “the real MVP” in a moving 2014 ESPYs Awards acceptance speech that had an audience full of tough, championship-level athletes in tears. The moniker stuck and Wanda has leveraged her “real MVP” title in her work as a motivational speaker and mentor dedicated to empowering young people and parents ever since. She is especially tapped into those who, like her, are on this parenting journey solo and may need a boost of encouragement.

Wanda’s lifestyle has changed dramatically since the days when she was moving her small family from one subpar apartment to another, trying with all her might to create a sense of stability for her two sons in the midst of constant uncertainty and financial upheaval. But the changes in Wanda Durant, the woman, have been way more meaningful than trading up from rooms full of hand-me-down furniture to homes curated by a designer. As we sit in her elegant apartment and she turns back the pages of her memory, her journey feels like a living testimony that resonates with me in unexpected ways. It quickly becomes clear that, while I’ve sought Wanda out for the great parenting tips she can share, she wants me to understand that the work it took to become the woman she is now has been as important as the tireless effort she poured into raising her sons.

Wanda was only eighteen years old when she had Kevin’s older brother, Anthony. “I was pregnant when I graduated high school,” she explains. “Then I had Kevin when I was twenty-one.” Images of myself at eighteen and twenty-one flashed through my mind, but I didn’t even pause to think, What if… because I know I wasn’t in any way ready for motherhood back then. I was still too much in need of my own mom to be anybody else’s.

As Wanda shared that she and her boys’ father split soon after Kevin was born, it occurred to me that she was probably no more ready than I was. But she had to get there—fast.

Suddenly single, with two sons under the age of four who had no one to fully depend on but her, Wanda quickly decided that her needs and wants would come after theirs. Obviously, that’s a sacrifice, but Wanda says she never thought of it that way. “It was easy to put myself on the back burner because I was still hiding, because I didn’t have the confidence I needed as a young woman at that time.”

I had never heard anyone admit that they were “hiding” behind their children, but when I heard that phrase come out of Wanda’s mouth something in me clicked. I know lots of mothers who seem to focus almost entirely on their kids, never worrying about themselves. This kind of selfless behavior is actually celebrated in our society, but think about it: We don’t put the same pressure on fathers. Why is that?

Many of us, like Wanda, can lose ourselves in the role of “mother,” to the detriment of ourselves and our own goals. Wanda admits she lacked self-confidence and her own sense of direction when her boys were coming up—and she warns against it.

“When they leave, you’ll be left with you and, sometimes, she’s a woman you don’t know.” That’s not okay, she says, with a conviction that lets me know she learned this lesson the hard way. I immediately took this advice to heart, recognizing that you can’t wait until your kids are out of the house to do a self-check-in and make sure you’re not losing yourself. Of course, this is important once your kids are grown, but it starts now, wherever you are on the journey. Wanda is quick to say that some self-sacrifice is part of the job, especially when your children are young. Even as a single mom, she made it a point to be engaged and present not only for her sons, but for some of their peers who needed support. “It’s extremely important,” she insists. But so is the support and attention you need.

“We have to create a balance. I really didn’t have a balance back then because I did not consider myself,” Wanda admits. “I wasn’t a nun or anything like that. But I chose to make my children’s lives more prominent than mine, and I really didn’t focus on my own personal growth. It’s important that you carve out the time for yourself as a woman.”

While Wanda may have lacked self-esteem and an independent vision for her own life as a young mom, she was one hundred percent clear on what she wanted for her sons’ lives—and the importance of her role in helping them get there. “I realized that it was my responsibility as their mother to teach them how to be the men that I wanted [them to become],” Wanda says, adding that, without the presence or support of their father, her role in raising them into strong, confident, good men was especially important. It became her sole purpose.

Living just outside of Washington, DC, she worked nights at the post office. Eventually shifting to daytime hours was a big win. She and her sons moved often and didn’t own much. Kevin, respectfully known in the basketball world as “KD,” has publicly shared that one of his favorite childhood memories is of moving with his mom and big brother into an apartment and hugging each other happily in the middle of their empty living room because, even with precious few belongings, they felt like they had “made it.”

While Wanda may not have been able to give her sons much in the way of material things, she did her best to pass down the values that were important to her. In the Durant household, those qualities were exemplified in organized sports.

“I wanted my sons to have something that we [could] focus in on as a family,” she says. “That’s why I put them in youth sports. I wanted them to know some of the values I held dear—things like structure, discipline, teamwork, and determination.”

She continues: “I knew being in an organized environment would help shed light on some of the things that I was saying about being kind and sharing and considering other people, working hard and never quitting. I knew if they were part of a team, they had to exemplify these qualities and characteristics that I felt were important.”

I silently agree. With my own kids, I see the benefits of participating in team sports. But that commitment comes with a zillion games and practices and (here it comes again) a nice little dose of mom-guilt when I can’t be there. As if reading my mind, Wanda starts talking about how hard it is for parents—especially single parents—to satisfy the constant time demands of youth sports. And she insists that it’s okay to rely on others in your village for an assist.

“After school and after work, I was present at the games,” she says. “The people that I had entrusted with my children, they were the eyes when I couldn’t make it there. Then I just had to have faith in God that He would honor the things I was doing as a mother, and that He would protect my children as well.” Amen , I think to myself. That sounds like a prayer so many of us can relate to.

KD has talked about the fact that when he was a boy, there were times when he and his brother would go to bed having eaten while they watched their mom go without a meal. He was already six feet tall by middle school (and eventually grew to an adult height of six-foot-ten!), so he clearly wasn’t missing meals. But whenever he recalls watching his mom not eat so he could, there’s no missing the emotions those memories still stir in him.

It’s a painful choice too many parents face. What must it be like to literally go hungry so your children can be full? How do you protect them from the heartbreak such choices can inflict? How do you keep going when you can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel?

“You do what you have to for your children, and them eating was the light for me,” Wanda says. “I would be okay because I could go to work and tell a friend I needed something to eat. Or I would just kinda swallow my pride and not have anything to eat. I could’ve always gone to my family, but I was a proud woman. I wanted my family to know that I was trying to do it on my own.”

She looked at me so fervently, I could see that light she talked about—and the don’t-you-worry-I-got-this strength that she has showcased for her children all of these years. It occurs to me that in her darkest hours, Wanda was the embodiment of one of my grandmother’s countless sayings, “We’re doing the best we can, with the light we have to see by.”

Wanda wears a stunning black dress that drapes beautifully across a pristine white couch. It’s reassuring to hear her talk about these hardships in her beautiful apartment, so far away from those tough times. The proof is all around her: her family made it. There’s a serenity to her now borne of coming through the storm—but I also know that sweetness and light are not what harsh times require.

“I was tough,” she says, without apology. “I believe I was loving, but I wanted my sons to have qualities that were not easily erased in their lives, like hard work and determination.

“We go through ebbs and flows of life and it doesn’t matter what you have or do, you’re gonna go through those things,” she continues. “You have to have the fortitude to get up. I had seen my mom have a hard life. I had seen the hard life I had growing up, and the life that we were living. I just had to instill those values, that you can’t quit.”

When I consider Wanda’s words about the importance of instilling values in our kids from a young age, I’m reminded of something my own mom has said to me more times than I can count: Stay strong. Be tough. It’s good advice, but often easier said than done—a reality that has been brought home to me and my family more than ever during the last year.

Luckily for me, I watched my mom embody it. There was a lot of love in my life as a child, along with a lot of change. My mother and father divorced when I was a baby, too young to even remember it. They soon both remarried and I gained several new siblings as a result. Then Mom divorced again when I was heading into the ninth grade.

While her life took these unexpected turns, thanks to her and the rest of my family, my life never skipped a beat. My mom had enormous support from her own parents and the means to keep our lives as enriched as possible. Nonetheless, shuffling me off to preschool and dance lessons and then, later, preparing me for high school while caring for my younger brother, who has special needs, couldn’t have been as easy as she made it look. Yet, she never laid her worries on me. Like Wanda, Mom handled her business and tried not to burden me with her stresses. As an adult, I realize what a gift that truly was.

Even as a little kid, I was a big talker (no surprise there). I was pretty well behaved, but I always had something to say and that frequently got me into trouble at home. Add to that, I was an emotional kid who would cry at the drop of a hat. Whenever I got in trouble, my mom would sit me at the edge of our bathtub to discuss what happened. Inevitably, I would start to cry, and she would look me in the eye and say, “You gotta be tough. It’s just me and you, kiddo, and we gotta be tough.”

For Mom, being “tough” included leaning on her faith and a lot of prayer. She has also journaled every morning since I can remember, which I know is an important outlet for her. I’ve watched her stay on track and put one foot in front of the other, always moving forward even when the path of her life was uphill and rocky. Through it all, her talks with me never changed. At the end of tackling whatever the specifics were, the mantra was the same: “You gotta be tough, kiddo.” I understood that she wasn’t asking anything of me that she wasn’t demanding of herself.

Even today, when I call my mom in need of advice about my own children, or just for her listening ear, she’ll often remind me that I must be brave and confident and that, even through our tears, life requires us to stare down the hard stuff and press forward, whether or not we feel like it or feel like we have it in us. According to my mom, if you want to succeed then cultivating toughness is not a choice, it’s a core requirement.

For Wanda, as busy as she was juggling her job against the demands of single parenthood, being tough meant modeling hard work and discipline in her own life, while also making the time to be active in her sons’ schools and advocating for them whenever needed. “I wasn’t a perfect mother, let’s be clear,” Wanda says. “I made some mistakes, but the important part is just being engaged and being present.”

After a dramatic growth spurt in middle school, Kevin was feeling a little uneasy about being so much taller than the other students. “I knew he was having some angst about his height,” she says. “So, I went to the teacher and said, ‘You need to form the line where the tallest student is in the front sometimes, because he wants to feel special too.’ ”

It’s a simple example, but one I take to heart because, first, I was always in the front of the size-ordered lines but “special” is not how that translated. So, I know how it feels to have height issues (even if mine are a tiny bit different from KD’s). Second, I know that being an advocate for your children can change their lives in pivotal ways that are easy to miss in the moment.

I was in the seventh grade when my grandmother changed the trajectory of my education by advocating on my behalf after picking me up after school one day while my mom was at work. Going home with Grandmama was pretty typical. What was unusual was that it just happened to be a day when I had volunteered to transfer out of Honors English to enroll in an easier class. Looking back, I don’t even know how that happened. What I do know is that I couldn’t stop bragging to my grandmother about how easy my new English class was, how few books I was going to have to read now, and how excited I was to be with the cool kids. This was one of those moments (there were many!) when my mouth got me into a fix I didn’t see coming.

As I gushed about how great my new academic reality was, Grandmama turned her big champagne-colored Lincoln Continental around and drove my chatty, oblivious self right back to school. She walked me into the main office, asked to speak with my principal and, before I could blink, I was back in Honors English—the very next day. Grandmama didn’t care about my social prospects in this new class. She wanted me to work hard and learn as much as I could— in every class . And because she was always paying attention to me, to what I said, and to what I needed, she made it happen (whether or not I wanted or knew I needed it myself).

A note here about the importance of staying present with your children. If you’ve ever been in a car chauffeuring kids around, you know that some of the best parental intel can be gathered while you’re stuck in traffic and they’re talking with you or their siblings or friends about seemingly trivial things. Buried in that seemingly casual chitchat is usually some conversational treasure you could dig for all day and never unearth. The same thing can happen while you’re waiting together for the bus, or walking them home from a playdate, or folding laundry while they suddenly get talkative, probably as a hedge against helping you clean up. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing; what matters is that you stay present. If you don’t, you might miss some things that could matter.

When Wanda talks about the importance of staying present with our children, even though we’re all juggling a million things, I agree one hundred percent. What mom wouldn’t? We know our attention matters. But we also know it can be a challenge, especially in a world where nonstop multitasking is a way of life. It’s entirely possible that while you’re folding sheets and your child is talking to you, the TV is on in the background and a stream of texts and emails has your phone steadily pinging, even though you don’t respond. In other words, your hands are doing one thing, your eyes are on another, and you think you’re listening attentively, but the distractions are everywhere—and they’re not just external, some are in your head.

I can’t count the number of times when my kids are telling me something and my mind is somewhere else. It’s something I have learned to consciously guard against, but it frequently requires a real effort. So, I know how easily my grandmother could have missed my rambling story as she drove me home that day (especially since I was always rambling!). I wasn’t upset or asking for advice; I was Miss Happy-Go-Lucky, proud of having maneuvered myself into what I thought was a great situation! Grandmama could’ve easily paid me no mind. Instead, because she listened attentively, her antennae flew up and she drove us back to Brooks Middle School. Because she acted so swiftly, and advocated on my behalf, I didn’t miss a beat in being challenged in class.

It’s not a big leap to say that Honors English was a stepping stone toward discovering my passion and the career I have in media today. But how do parents do that? This is a code I haven’t quite cracked: How do you know when your child has a talent special enough to propel them professionally, maybe at the highest levels?

Wanda confesses that she didn’t necessarily crack that code either, even though a lot was made of KD’s basketball potential from a young age. “My focus wasn’t getting to the NBA, my focus was getting to the next step,” she says, adding that he was still a child, and she wanted him to be able to live in the moment and enjoy where he was. But young KD had already started to formulate his own plan.

“Kevin came to me at about ten or eleven and said that he wanted to be a professional basketball player,” Wanda recalls. “He was talented, I must say, and most of the time, when we went to the gym, he was one of, if not the top player in the gym.”

Her baby boy stood out to anyone watching, not just because of his height and talent, but because of how dedicated he was to the game. After a full practice, he would stay and do drills until his muscles ached. Wanda saw and encouraged that. She also leveraged it, waking him up in the wee hours sometimes to do push-ups and sit-ups. “It was a form of discipline, maybe because some chores weren’t done,” she says, smiling. “I knew that he loved basketball, so he wouldn’t give me too much pushback because it was all pertaining to basketball.”

I silently chastise myself for the times when I let my kids get out of sports practice when they asked, secretly grateful to have one less trip to make across town to the soccer field.

“I would go to the hill,” Wanda says, describing a place called Hunt’s Hill in their old neighborhood. “I would sit in my car and read a book; he would run up the hill.” Running reps up and down the hill became a prime training activity, she explains. And no one pushed KD harder than Wanda. “The coach would say ‘Do twenty-five.’ I’d be like, ‘Do one hundred fifty.’ ”

Yep , I think to myself, she’s tougher than I’ll ever be.

“I didn’t take whining,” Wanda continues. “You could cry because you were hurt or something pained you physically or emotionally. That’s fine, and we can deal with that, and I can comfort you. But to whine to not do something or pout, that was unacceptable in my home.”

Okay, even I still whine on occasion. Is it too late for me to stop?

Wanda acknowledges that tough love is not easy to take—or to dole out. But she was totally committed to her approach. She explains that she felt obligated to be firm because “they were becoming [the] men of my family, my extended family, and we needed men to look up to. We’ve had some candid conversations about some of the things they felt I could’ve done a little differently but, at the end of the day, my intention and my motives and my heart were good. I think that’s why my sons still honor me today.”

I think of KD’s loving “real MVP” speech, which earned him and his mother a standing ovation at the ESPYs. Too few moms in this world—my own included—get to have such a moment. Wanda knows it, and it wasn’t lost on her.

“Sitting there, listening to his speech, I was thinking, he got it,” Wanda says. “He understood why I was so tough.” After all of the long nights, all those decades ago, when she went to bed hungry, and the long days of work followed by meetings with teachers and coaches and advocating on her sons’ behalf, she could finally exhale. It was also a moment of recognition for how far she had come from the time when her sons were her whole life. She wasn’t just their “real MVP,” she had finally become her own. Doing so, after decades of being by their side, was hard. Even when Kevin joined the NBA, she traveled with him a lot that first year.

“It goes back to where I was hiding,” she says. “That’s why I encourage moms to really take some time for yourself. Because it was, like, my son is blossoming into the man—both of them—that I have trained them to be. But now, they’re pulling the blanket off of me. So, who are you going to become? Are you just always going to be their mom, or are you going to be Wanda? And then, I was exposed to me.”

Now, like my grandmother in the car with me that day, my antennae are up.

“I went into depression, facing myself front and center,” Wanda confesses. “Everything about me was not all hunky-dory. You know, I was touted as the wonderful mother—‘look at your sons, look what they’re doing’—and Wanda had been hidden away.” Seeing this flawlessly turned out woman oozing big helpings of humor, wisdom, and hard-won self-confidence as she refers to herself in the third person, it’s hard to imagine that she was ever in hiding. But I totally get it. There’s an old proverb, “Just when the caterpillar thought life was over, she became a butterfly.”

“It was difficult, but I got through it, and now you see Wanda today,” she says, snapping her fingers. She is clearly enjoying her butterfly years. But only once her sons were fully launched did she begin that transformation—and she doesn’t want other moms to wait that long.

“Take some time for you, because you are important,” she says, adding that this is essential even in the midst of being an engaging, present, loving mother. The journey to discovering, developing, and embracing who you are as a woman—apart from being a mother—takes patience and time. “I’ve come out,” she says. “I’m still coming. It’s a process.” And, like the effort it takes to raise children who will thrive without you, it’s worth it. YOU are worth it.

My mother has been my most influential teacher, instilling in me values of compassion, love, and fearlessness. Rather than removing obstacles, my mom taught me to confront challenges head-on with gratitude and determination. Her love has not bred dependency; instead, it has fostered strength and independence within me. Everything I am and ever will be is because of my mom. My mom is my real-life guardian angel.

—Mario Lopez, TV host/actor