Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom From Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans by Sheinelle Jones - 7

We Only Work as a Family If Everybody Does Their Part; It’s Not My Job to Do Everything for Everybody

Sonya Curry, Steph Curry’s mom

When NBA Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry’s mom, Sonya, invites me into his well-preserved high school bedroom, our similarities leap out at me right away. Now, I know what you may be thinking: What could I, standing five feet tall (on my tiptoes), possibly have in common with an NBA athlete? It was so clear to me we were both dreamers , and we plastered images of those dreams on our childhood walls.

My mom said often when I was growing up, “If you can see it, you can be it,” and I guess I took it to heart. As adults, we know it takes more than posters and vision boards to make your dreams a reality. But as a child , I wanted to believe it was that simple. So in my high school bedroom, I had Janet Jackson posters tacked on one wall and the glossy black-and-white headshots of my local news anchors on another. (Yup! I was already a total TV news nerd at age fifteen.)

While those might have seemed like childish daydreams, three decades later, I found myself actually dancing with Janet Jackson onstage. Talk about a dream come true! Dance and Janet were two of my first loves and this was not a random moment of being pulled up from the audience at a concert. One of my favorite Today Show experiences was dressing up as Janet for Halloween in 2019. My colleagues couldn’t wait to show her that video when she appeared on the show not long after. After she saw it, we connected in a way that rarely happens. I wasn’t even interviewing her; I just came to watch, and when I met her, I totally fan-girled! Bursting with a need to give her ALL her flowers, I gushed about how I grew up with her pictures on my wall and imitated her style right down to her single key-hoop earring. I mean, I held nothing back! Clearly moved, she invited me to her tour’s opener in Hollywood, Florida. As if the invitation wasn’t enough, having seen me dance in the video, she asked me to join her onstage for the song “Together Again.” WHAT? When I arrived, I was quickly taught the choreography, and let’s just say it was a night I’ll never forget. The fact that it was the week of my forty-fifth birthday and the first anniversary of Grandpapa’s passing made it just…perfect. And what do you know, the news anchor thing worked out too. I have my own glossy headshots to prove it. You might say I manifested my present reality! (Wait, who says vision boards don’t work? Not me.)

My own childhood bedroom was turned into my mom’s workspace a hot second after I graduated from high school and moved into my dorm at Northwestern, so those Janet posters and local TV anchor headshots are long gone. But Sonya Curry had kept her son Steph’s old room pretty much intact. The bonus decor of a lot more trophies was up there too, but my favorite part was a signed jersey from LeBron James that Steph got while he was in college. I’m inspired and touched as I imagine how Steph’s teenage self would feel to know how things turned out and that he, too, would one day join the ranks of the all-time NBA greats.

It is well documented how hard Steph had to work to get there, not just to meet the expectations of his coaches and his family, but to reach the bar he set for himself. I admire a child with grit, a child who will practice something over and over, not because anyone else insists on it, but because they’ve set an independent goal for excellence.

After connecting with his mom, it’s easy to see how Steph and his siblings learned the value of self-discipline and hard work very early on. It’s not surprising, given that both Sonya and her ex-husband, Dell Curry, were student-athletes at Virginia Tech, where Sonya excelled in volleyball. Married for thirty-three years before their divorce, Dell was an NBA player in his own right, so basketball was a key driver on their children’s journey. Today, Sonya’s two sons and her son-in-law are all in the NBA. Steph’s younger brother, Seth, plays with Steph on the Golden State Warriors and their younger sister, Sydel, mom to two of Sonya’s ten grandchildren, is married to the Phoenix Suns’ Damion Lee.

Sonya didn’t have to work outside of the home while she and Dell raised their children, and the kids easily could’ve leaned into being entitled, but that path was never an option. Driven by her own independent values, her strong faith, and her passion for education, Sonya founded the Christian Montessori School of Lake Norman in Huntersville, North Carolina, when her children were small—and all of them attended. Experienced teachers, like my own mom, have a certain something—a no-nonsense demeanor, a confidence and integrity—that makes you sit up straight and know you’d better pay attention. Sonya definitely falls into that category and, when we settle in to talk about how she raised her family, I literally feel like I’m about to take another mommy master class.

“I had to be everything but the breadwinner, even though I worked,” Sonya says. “That took a lot of pressure off of me. I could just enjoy my craft, the parents, their children, and the staff.” It occurs to me as she rattles them off, that list is not short.

“People would always stop me and say, ‘How can you do what you’re doing?’…We were in the car, an hour-and-fifteen-minute commute both ways and then a full day of school. Get in the car, come home, dinner. And all my children were in some type of activity in the evening. You just did it.” She claps her hands for emphasis. “You just woke up and got goin’.”

I admire her openness about not having to worry about money, which so many families do. I also admire her ability to consider her regrets. I can tell you from years of interviewing people—especially successful ones—many cannot, or will not, go there. But Sonya does.

“One of the things I often reflect on, [is] that I didn’t really feel like I got to be ‘Mom.’ You know how Dad can be the disciplinarian? Even if Dad is strict, he’s still Dad, and then Mom’s the one everybody gets to stick and run to. You can cuddle and those kinds of things. I didn’t get to do that as much, because of all of the other things. I had to make sure they were at their activities, I was running the school. It was almost like, ‘Okay, love you,’ but then I gotta think about all these other things.”

“The logistics,” I say.

“Yes, the logistics—of everything. So that’s one thing that I look back on. But then I also think, maybe I’m just not that kind of person.” She laughs then, reflecting a bit more, she offers that while those long daily commutes in the car with the kids were stressful, the consistent time together was priceless, leading to some of her fondest memories.

“We would get in the car and play gospel music all the way to school,” she says. “It was snack time too. God forbid I forget the snack!” We both laugh at that—I do understand. “It was just something about the music and the food that made life just awesome. I think that’s one of the things that helped me with working, too, is that I got to spend that amount of time [with them] in close quarters.”

Car time may have been an outlet for Sonya but “the sports and activities that they were in was an outlet for them,” she says. “Then, you know, it’s chores and dinner. Then it’s off to bed.”

I wonder out loud if, because their dad was a basketball star, they felt like they had to follow in his footsteps. Sonya doesn’t miss a beat.

“No, our children have always been active. They were always looking for things to do. We never pushed sports on them, but we did want to expose them to a lot of things.” The boys tried football and baseball, but “They always had the passion for basketball,” Sonya says and, as they got older, “you could see the passions wane in baseball and football.”

She was very clear that, despite their father’s career, she wanted them to find their own purpose. They also tried track, but in the end, it was basketball that they loved. “They knew the game. They were children who went to the game, sat, and watched. They weren’t running around. They weren’t worried about refreshments and things like that. They watched games at home. They were students of the game.”

“Would you say you were strict?” I ask.

“Yes!” she answers quickly, but not quite unapologetically. “I try to say I wasn’t that bad, but…” she trails off, leaving me to fill in the blanks. “We did have one rule: whatever you started, you had to finish it.”

There was also a no-tolerance policy around being fully prepared for the next day before you turn out the lights on the day you’re in. Given the family’s early morning departures and twelve-to-fourteen-hour days, the children “had to have their stuff together the night before,” Sonya explains. “When we left the house, we were pretty much gone from seven o’clock in the morning and we wouldn’t get home ’til eight o’clock at night. So we had to be on track when we left the house. The expectation was, if you’re not prepared for your sport, you’re grounded. So my children learned pretty early how to be self-sufficient and take care of things.”

I cringe a little inside, knowing that I can’t even count the number of times I’ve had to trek across the island of Manhattan because somebody (who shall remain nameless—my kids know who they are!) accidentally left their soccer stuff, or their saxophone, or their dance shoes behind. Sure, I tell my kids all of the time to have their bags packed the night before but, at least once a week, it feels like one of them forgets something key when they leave the house. I promise myself in that moment that I’m going to channel my inner Sonya when I get home and start cracking down. But grounding them? Not sure I can hold that hard a line.

“Tell me if this is true,” I say. “I read something about Steph having his first big middle school game, and he didn’t do his chores the night before and he didn’t get to play that first game?”

“That’s absolutely true,” she answers, nonplussed.

I’m stunned. I know myself and, in her shoes, I would definitely have caved and let my kid play in that game. Making rules as a parent takes creativity and planning, but enforcing them takes confidence and rock-hard resolve, two things I struggle with. As I enter my mom-to-a-teen years, I know I need to reinforce my backbone—and double down on patience and prayer. Lest I forget, my own mom reminds me. She thinks I’m too soft; she’d looooove Sonya.

“We had a big chalkboard,” Sonya explains. “I still have a chalkboard actually. We’d put chores up, and then I’d put a scripture up. If somebody had an event, I’d put up encouraging words for them. It was kind of our family hub for communication. Our motto was, ‘We’re a unit and we’re a machine,’ so I wanted to teach them skills, and we only work as a family if everybody does their part. It’s not my job to do everything for everybody. It’s not.”

I didn’t shout, but I thought, Amen! It’s not my job to do everything for everybody . Talk about a revelation! I had three instant (but invisible) reactions:

I felt liberated.

I felt validated.

I felt in awe of this woman because I had never thought about the job of motherhood that way—or heard anybody say this so plainly—even though it made so much sense.

Sonya expressed a certainty about her approach to mothering that I longed to acquire someday. “If one thing didn’t work at home, it then affected all the other things outside the home,” she says. “So, God first, family second, and for them, school was next. For Dell and I, it was work. Every decision was based on God and our faith, then our family and how does it affect our family, and our schoolwork. Mama doesn’t have time at ten p.m. to stay up and go around and do all that kinda stuff. If everybody does it, we’re done in thirty minutes. Y’all can do whatever you want after that.”

Still stuck on Steph’s missing that big middle school game and having to tell his coach he couldn’t play, I circle back to say, “He probably remembered the dishes after that.”

“Oh, he did, ’cause it was embarrassing…I never did anything to want to embarrass them but in life sometimes, you know, that’s the natural consequence.” I’m still embarrassed for him just thinking about it, and he’s a four-time NBA champion (so, I’m sure he’s over it).

Whew! I thought to myself. Did my mother secretly call Sonya and tell her to toughen me up?

Steph Curry’s journey to becoming an Olympic gold medalist and one of the greatest NBA shooters of all time has become the stuff of real-life sports fairy tales. Some coaches had doubts about his skill level and size; Sonya admits that even she was a bit concerned. She recalls one of Steph’s biggest games, where he “blew it” in front of college scouts and she had to figure out what to say to ease his heartache. There’s no Mom Handbook for moments like this.

“Dell and I were sitting on the bed, and it’s just crickets in the room, and we’re all trying to process,” she remembers. “We were scared,” she admits, and my heart sinks for her, even though I know the story has a happy ending. There are so many moments in motherhood—big and small—when we feel the full weight of our children’s angst and we want to give them the Perfect Response, but we have no idea what that is.

“[Steph] looked at me, and he said, ‘Mom did I mess up?’ That’s when I had to get past all of my emotions, because part of me was thinking, Yes, you did! ” she says, laughing. “And the other part was, Okay, Lord, you gotta give me something for him . And instinctively the Spirit said, ‘The Lord closed some doors. He didn’t want you to go to those schools that these coaches were representing. So, the school that really wants you, you will know in a couple of weeks, because the coach will show up at our house.’ ”

Sure enough, that’s what happened, and Steph went on to have a storied basketball career at Davidson College before leaving to join the Warriors. But plenty of ups and downs followed, as they always will. For Sonya, this included a highly publicized divorce after her children were grown and on their own. Now, though, she says she can finally exhale.

“What I try to do at this phase of my life, is to just be present,” she says. “I go to their games [and] I first want them to have a great time, enjoy the competition, and then I want ’em to perform. I always say to my children, ‘Give the people what they came to see!’ ” She admits that while she’s “softened” a bit, the mama bear still emerges if another player is too rough with her sons.

“That motherly instinct will never go away,” she declares, but she adds that she doesn’t go looking for things to get upset about. “I will not read a lot of news things [or] social media. We didn’t even do that when Dell was playing. We didn’t buy the newspaper at all because as soon as you’re up, there’s always some ‘negative Nelly’ around trying to bring you down.”

Alternatively, I ask her what she’s most proud of.

“I’m most proud of their faith walk,” she answers. “Scripture says, ‘Train a child in the way that he should go, and when he’s older, he should not depart from it.’ I intentionally went on that journey with them, not to knock them over the head with anything, but we got up every morning at six a.m. and did devotion before school.”

“Every morning at six a.m.?” I repeat, doubtful that I heard her clearly. Granted, I get up just as early, if not earlier—but I’m not waking up three kids with me! It’s enough to get myself out of the house.

“They would get up. We were on a tight schedule. We’d do fifteen to twenty minutes. We’d read scripture. ‘Anybody have anything to say?’ They never had anything to say, because it was too early and they didn’t want to talk,” she recalls, laughing. “Every Wednesday, we went to Bible study. If they had a sport, it had to be done before we went or they weren’t gonna go to that practice. Sunday, we were gonna rest as a family. I was trying to teach these different things. ‘Take a day of rest. Put God first. It’s gonna be tough.’ They got ridiculed, I got ridiculed. But they learned how to take that.”

None of us wants our kids to feel disappointment or to be picked on but, as challenging as it was at times, Sonya believes her children were building life skills they use now as adults.

“When life comes at you, they know that feeling,” she says, “and they know they can get through it. That was a lot of what I wanted to train them, [about] disappointments and how you stand alone and make good decisions and know that your world is not going to come to an end. What I admire most is that they’ve kept that walk, and they’re emulating a lot of that in their own families.”

All three of her children are now married with children of their own, figuring it all out, just as she did. Her grandbabies call her “Grashy,” an outgrowth of “Sashy,” which her nieces call her.

“What advice would you give to your younger self?” I ask.

“Whoo!” She laughs. “Is this about parenting or marriage?”

“All of it!” We laugh again.

“Enjoy the ride,” she says. “I think, looking back, I was trying so hard to parent them that sometimes I didn’t just stop and exhale and say, ‘That’s okay.’ You can sit back and smile and enjoy them, and just chill with them. Even though we had lots of fun in our activities and stuff together, just that one-on-one I would do a little bit different. ’Cause it goes by so fast.”

Older moms always warn about this—how quickly it all goes by. But when you still have little ones in Pull-Ups or tiny ones not sleeping through the night, time feels like it’s moving by inches. Now that I have a child in high school, I’m starting to understand: we have to fight the desire to rush through it all, or we’ll look back with some regret.

“If I could go back, they talk about doing ‘date nights’ with each one of your children at least once a month. I would do that,” Sonya says. “I’m sure I would’ve learned about them.”

Date nights with each kid: Brilliant , I think, pledging to implement that one myself.

Sitting in her lovely living room as we reflect on the blessings of motherhood, we are surrounded by beautifully framed family photos capturing all of life’s stages, from missing teeth to classic ’90s high-top haircuts. I tell her about a tough time in my own life, a decade before motherhood. I was in my twenties, working late at night as a reporter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, not knowing where my life would go. It was a constant internal battle not to worry about the future, but I would pray about it.

One night, I rushed home as I always did, to watch Larry King Live , and Oprah was the guest. When she said to Larry so fervently, “God has bigger dreams for you than you can dream for yourself,” it was as if I needed to hear that. I wrote it down and taped it to the mirror on my dresser. Even as a young adult, I was still creating my own little vision boards. I didn’t have the posters on my wall anymore, but I still posted plenty of quotes and affirmations all over the place to keep my spirit lifted.

Sonya is clearly moved by my story and gestures as if to say, “And look at you now!” Then, speaking to her own family’s journey, she marvels, “Who could write this script? Who could have imagined this scrawny little boy [whose] body didn’t fit his feet, end up with NBA championships and MVPs? Who would’ve ever thunk it? And even with my daughter, watching her, doing her thing as an influencer—they’re fearless!

“What God places inside the child when they’re born, what they’re going to be, our biggest role, as the adult, is to get outta the way and let them unfold the way God intends for them to unfold. That is so hard, to get out of the way, because as parents and human beings, we all want to get in and form, rather than get rid of the things that are impeding them from blossoming. We feel like we have to be doing something all of the time.” It’s true , I think to myself. We want to protect them.

As if she can hear my thoughts, Sonya continues, “They’re not afraid to experience some failure. They just do it. Just get up every day and keep goin’. Make a decision. If the one yesterday wasn’t good, make a different one. You don’t know if it’s the right one or not. Just make a different one.”

Whether my kids like it or not—and sometimes not—I take my interviews home with me. This one was no exception. I fly home thinking, Discipline, wrapped in love , maybe that’s the key? Of course, we all know that, really, there is no single key. We’re all just doing the best we can. And, like Sonya said, we fail sometimes then get up the next day and try again.

For me, that meant putting a chore chart on the fridge, but I couldn’t keep up with it, so that was a fail. I then bought my kids individual laundry baskets, lined them up in front of the washing machine and showed them how to pour in detergent and fabric softener and put in their own clothes. I will say, my daughter loved this new chore and the independence that followed. In fact, she’s been doing her own laundry ever since. My boys are still a work in progress. They don’t seem to care about keeping up with laundry until it’s the night before school and all of their clothes are in the hamper, or their soccer uniforms aren’t ready for their game the next day. But we’re getting there!

The most important takeaways from my chat with Sonya were about the car ride conversations and mommy dates. Driving in New York City is a pain, but I give it a try a few times a week and the conversations are priceless. For the kids, one-on-one mommy dates have been the biggest hit. My oldest son likes to go for ramen, while my twins love a good diner. Any diner, as long as it has at least a seven-page menu that includes pancakes and hamburgers, will do.

On these dates, for a brief, shining moment, there are no rules, no chores, nothing else to think about, except enjoying each other’s company. Soon after my chat with Sonya, on a diner date with my youngest son, he took a giant bite out of a corn muffin and, as crumbs spilled like confetti, all over his clothes and the table, he gave me the biggest grin. I smiled just as wide and, feeling our date fly by, I thought to myself: while I’m working so hard to make sure I raise happy, healthy adults, I do not want to miss the gift of the present that’s sitting right across the messy table in front of me.

My mom always had a lot of classic sayings or “isms” when we were growing up. Some we poked fun at, like, “Nothing good happens after midnight.” I always chuckled at that one considering I ended up with my own NBC late-night talk show for seventeen years. It aired at 1:30 a.m. Her others rang more profound. “A goal is a dream with a due date.” That one held me in good stead as a college dropout and someone who followed his dream of working in music and never stopped until I made it. That worked like a blueprint for success. Thanks, Mom!

—Carson Daly, cohost, The Today Show; host, The Voice