When we put together questions for six inspirational women, we decided not to ask how they balance work and family because nobody asks that of working fathers – do they?
But the truth is, the topic just came up again and again with the moms. It’s part of all parents’ stories and shouldn’t be ignored. How does anyone do meaningful professional work and devote the necessary time to kids? Raising a family is at the core of every one of these women’s journeys. It informs their endeavors in the world.
PAIGE GETZLAF
Getzlaf is a Coto de Caza kid and 2004 Mission Viejo High School grad, so Orange County is home.
Her husband, though, is Canadian.
Ryan Getzlaf came here to play for the Anaheim Ducks hockey team in 2005, and then met and married Paige. He’s the team captain and one of the franchise’s all-time leading scorers.
“He wants to make (Orange County) his forever home, too,” she said.
So the Getzlafs asked around for a local cause to support to further their involvement in the community.
They were introduced to a couple with a son named Hawken who was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
“And we just fell in love with them,” Paige Getzlaf said.
Duchenne is a degenerative disease. Children born with it (1 in every 3,500 boys) usually don’t live past their late 20s.
Hawken is 18.
“We didn’t even know what Duchenne was,” she said. “But we had just had Ryder. Having our own boy, it touched our hearts.”
The couple began organizing the Getzlaf Golf Shootout, a tournament that has been played on various Orange County courses – such as Pelican Hill and Monarch Beach – one weekend each September for three years now. There’s a party for golfers and their guests the night before the shootout.
“It’s super fun. All the hockey players come,” Paige Getzlaf said.
Last year, the shootout raised $375,000.
Paige Getzlaf has also served as co-chairwoman of the Lady Ducks Fashion Show each spring for the past three years. All proceeds go to Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and this year that added up to $225,000.
We raised $225,000 for CHOC at the Lady Ducks Fashion Show!! Thank you to all my friends and family and vendors who came to support me!
— Paige Getzlaf (@Paige_Getzlaf) March 19, 2015
The show features real fashion models, but the Ducks and their wives or girlfriends walk down the runway with a CHOC patient in the finale. This year, it was held at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach. The Getzlafs walked with a 4-year-old girl who has undergone multiple rounds of chemotherapy.
All of the charity work doesn’t leave much time for cheering on her husband at hockey games.
Paige Getzlaf said she had never been to a game until she met her husband. When he is in town, though, she takes the kids to the Honda Center “to support their dad.”
The kids? They have three now, all younger than 5.
When your husband is a Stanley Cup champion, you can afford a nanny. Or two. But Paige Getzlaf couldn’t see it.
“I got a nanny, but I was actually kind of freaked out,” she said. “I really wanted to do it on my own.”
Even if she is a part-time single mom. Ryan Getzlaf is on the road two to three weeks at a time during the season, which can last up to 10 months, leaving her with Ryder, 4, Gavin, 2, and Willa, who just turned 1.
“It’s just crazy, but fun at the same time,” she said. “Who cares if my house is a mess?”
Weekly Bible study with her Mothers of Preschoolers group at Mariner’s Church in Newport Beach keeps her sane, she said.
When Paige met Ryan, she was a waitress at the Rusty Pelican and Rudy’s Pub and Grill while studying to be a nurse at Cal State Fullerton. She quit all of them.
“My job is to hold down the house, raise the kids,” she said. “But I thought, ‘You know what? I’ve got to have a gig.’ My husband’s in the spotlight and I’m behind the scenes. I’m going to put my time and energy into my family but also into charity. That’s my passion and love.”
LETITIA CLARK
Clark is the executive director of the Orange County chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
She is the founder of Black Professionals in Orange County.
She is a board member for the nonprofit Tustin Community Foundation.
She sings in the choir at Friendship Baptist Church in Yorba Linda.
And, oh yeah, she still finds time to raise her 7-year-old twins as a single mother. How, you ask?
Clark said she doesn’t hesitate to bring Theodore and Carin to her functions, toting along homework and snacks, and she recommends other moms do the same.
“I want to serve,” she said. “I have a lot to offer. But I’m a single mom. … I have to just let people know that I do have children and you may have to make accommodations from time to time.”
Besides, she sees a big bonus to bringing her children along. They get to see Mom make a difference. “I hope that my kids see me serving and then it becomes a part of their makeup,” she said.
Her parents made her and her siblings serve food to the less fortunate every Thanksgiving when she was growing up in Santa Ana. “Had they not required us to do that, I may not have this passion to serve like I do now,” she said. “I hope that exposing them is somehow planting the seed.”
Clark was 22 and working as a legislative aide for a New Orleans councilwoman in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina blew in. That led the Xavier University of Louisiana graduate to a job in Atlanta doing community relations for the American Red Cross’s hurricane recovery program. During her time at the Red Cross, she got married, then pregnant with twins while continuing to pursue a master’s in public policy online from New England College.
The day after she delivered, she finished up her thesis on disaster management for cities from her hospital bed.
Clark took the next 18 months off to stay home, breastfeeding the twins for the first year. “It wasn’t easy, for sure,” she said.
In 2012, she earned an online certification in nonprofit management from The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Then, a divorce. She headed back West to live closer to her parents.
“Orange County is home to me,” said the 2000 Tustin High grad. “My roots are here.”
About two years ago, Clark was named executive director of the nonprofit American Academy of Pediatrics, working with more than 500 pediatricians to engage them in the needs of the community, addressing issues like food insecurity, mental health for kids and obesity prevention. “It is really rewarding.”
In 2014, she founded Black Professionals in Orange County to support young and emerging African American professionals. “When I came back, I noticed that the African American community was spread out,” she said. “That speaks to the diversity of Orange County. But there was a disconnect in how to network professionally and understand some of the challenges that exist. Also great opportunities.”
Clark’s latest contribution: Starting a Lean In OC circle, inspired by the Lean In online community, in turn inspired by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In,” a rallying cry, of sorts, for women to work together to create a more equal world.
Clark hosted the circle’s first gathering at a coffee shop in Orange in March.
“Lean In OC empowers women to lean in to leadership roles at work and in the community,” she said. “It’s so important for us to be at the table. We need to encourage each other.”
If she has any secrets for keeping it all together, it’s that she needs only six hours of sleep. Clark also runs on the treadmill 30 minutes every morning after dropping the kids off at school, and she will not look at email until she has some time to “let those creative juices flow.”
But her motivators are her kids. “I just want to make them proud and create a legacy for them.”
ALICIA WHITNEY
Whitney’s talent is creating events. In 2010, she was at the height of her powers, doing concept development for 17 casinos in Las Vegas. She loved her job. She loved Vegas, and Vegas loved her. So much so that the people paying her gobs of money wanted her to move there. But her husband back in Huntington Beach said no way.
One day she jogged across Pacific Coast Highway to Huntington State Beach, fell down on her knees and prayed to God for a sign to show her what to do.
Two weeks later, she got one: She was hosting a family barbecue when she brushed her arm against her breast and it hurt. Really badly. A thought popped into her head. She went inside to the bathroom and found her emergency pregnancy test. It came back positive. She walked back outside with a Corona in one hand and the test in another.
“I’m pregnant,” she announced as people were biting into their burgers.
A cheer went up. Her husband gave her a chest bump.
Goodbye, Vegas.
When her daughter was born eight months later, she was in love all over again, this time with a baby girl she named Sahara (a little bit of Vegas) Merry (she was born on Christmas).
But at six weeks postpartum, she found herself on the bathroom floor bawling her eyes out. “I was so sad I had lost my old life,” she said. “I’m, like, ‘What now? I guess I just clean the house. Walk the baby?’ At one point I had 56 New Year’s Eve promotions in Vegas. It was really hard for me to all of a sudden put the brakes on.”
At the same time, she loved being with her baby.
She began to journal “to get my head on straight.” If I could create anything, she asked herself, what would it be?
“I was just daydreaming. And all of a sudden I had a full PowerPoint presentation.”
Her daydream: a wine bar. Something classic. Timeless. Something that said: The Hamptons. She would call it SeaLegs.
“Before I knew it, I was funded and signing a lease and my baby was 4 months old.”
Family, friends and savings provided the seed money, and she took on most of the jobs, from website designer to accountant to general contractor, strapping her baby to her chest to go to the construction site, because she couldn’t afford to hire a baby-sitter.
“Thank God she was a good baby,” she said. Whitney would then work all night long on the computer after putting the baby to bed, sometimes until 3 a.m. “I was living on the fumes of a dream,” she said.
She excused herself from meetings with designers and sub-contractors to breastfeed in restaurant bathrooms, then returned to the table to do some burping.
Wahoo!!!!!! We passed inspection! Thank you to our team that made this happen!!! Dreams @ SeaLegs Wine Bar http://t.co/0LLngmx4
— Alicia Whitney (@aliciabugg) May 10, 2012
Her husband Mike was her cheerleader: “You have to work every single day for one year straight if you really want this,” she said he told her. “He had my back.”
SeaLegs opened in Huntington Beach in 2011 when Sahara turned 17 months old. When Mike got home from work as an electrical inspector at 4 p.m., Whitney would leave for the restaurant and not return home until 2 a.m.
One day while serving a private bridal shower brunch at the restaurant, she slipped on some bruschetta in the kitchen and smashed her knee. “I saw stars, and Champagne went everywhere,” she said.
Her husband is cut from the same cloth as his dad, Mickey, who happened to be back in the kitchen at the time, and also happened to be one of her investors.
He told her to get back out there. “You can do it, kiddo,” he told her, as she wiped her tears. So she limped back out there, later learning she had fractured her kneecap and injured tendons. That’s when she began to delegate and look at the big picture.
Now, four years after opening, a second SeaLegs – and the first franchise – is about to launch inside Terminal 2 at LAX. A third SeaLegs is opening this fall in Belize at a resort called Kanantik.
And Whitney is working on a new concept: Sea Salt Woodfire Grill will open by the end of this summer, inspired by the steakhouse The Hitching Post from the movie “Sideways.”
To manage all her ideas, Whitney has formed the Project Restaurant Group, a hospitality brand based in Huntington Beach.
“I try to take Saturdays off,” she said when asked if she is finally getting some sleep. And she takes her baby to church on Sundays before heading to her other baby, SeaLegs, to work the brunch.
Whitney never did hire a nanny. If she or her husband can’t be home with Sahara, the preschooler, now 4, is at the restaurant with her.
SeaLegs, by the way, has won three back-to-back Golden Foodie Awards (2012, 2013, 2014) for best California cuisine in Orange County.
And Whitney is only 35.
“I’m sure there will be many more storms along the way,” she said.
“But never give up on your dreams. You never know how strong you are until you become a mother and realize what you’re capable of.”
LAURA KASBAR
What do you do when you find out that your twin toddlers aren’t speaking because they have autism, plus you have a 4-day-old baby and two older kids whom you are homeschooling? If you’re Kasbar, you invent a new way of teaching children to speak that will one day be applauded by parents all over the world.
“I was always a ridiculous overachiever to the point of being absurd,” she says.
Kasbar’s ambition sure came in handy when it came to her kids.
The twins had just turned 3 when they were diagnosed with autism 15 years ago.
At the time, Kasbar was homeschooling her oldest two kids, then ages 9 and 11, but they were ahead by a few grades in the curriculum.
“You guys are good, I don’t care what you do in the next two years,” she told them.
The 1985 Corona del Mar High graduate and her family lived in Spokane, Wash., at the time. One room had been turned into a library with 2,000 books. They also had a tennis court on the property and a roller rink, so the older kids had plenty to keep them busy.
Kasbar turned her basement into a therapy room for the twins. But the therapists she hired couldn’t get her son, Max, to speak a single word. Her daughter Ana, was learning but slowly.
Kasbar racked her brain for a solution. Because she has ear canal problems, Kasbar has trouble hearing. Words can sound garbled if there is background noise. So she knew how it helped to watch mouths make words.
She also knew that autistic kids struggled to shut out extraneous stimuli (the whirling of a ceiling fan, the scratching of a pencil, the freckles on a face) and focus on the task at hand. And they are averse to looking people in the eye. Her son made no eye contact, even with her.
So what if she videotaped just her face saying a word while holding up the object the word represented, then zoomed in on her mouth repeating the word?
She recruited her husband, Brian, as videographer and started with the word “cup.” Then they showed the twins the video on repeat, probably about 30 times that day, while the toddlers sat in their high chairs during breakfast, lunch and dinner.
By the end of the day, Max said his first word: puc. Close enough.
“I cried my head off,” Kasbar said. “You’re told your child will be nonverbal. But you just want to know that (teaching them to talk is) possible. I don’t care if it’s going to be hard. Just tell me what’s possible.”
She and her husband went on an object-finding frenzy. Spoons, plates, toys. All weekend long and every night. Brian videotaped his wife’s mouth enunciating each object she held up.
“I was a complete lunatic,” she said. “I was up until 3 in the morning.”
Today, they have more than 20,000 videos in English, some as short as 30 seconds, and are hiring people to make more in Spanish, German, French. Last summer they launched an online platform called Gemiini. Parents of kids with autism, dyslexia, Down syndrome. and others that have impaired language and reading skills, can subscribe for $98 a month, about the price of one hour of speech therapy.
“I want people to be able to afford it,” Kasbar said, adding that 60 percent of users are on scholarships, currently provided by Kasbar and her family.
The latest to benefit: Iris Grace, the 5-year-old painting savant and social media darling from the U.K. who has only recently said some words.
Her mother, Arabella, is one of the thousands who have posted their thanks on the Gemiini Facebook page, which launched in July and has since shot from 40 likes on the first day to 38,000 and counting.
Many of the moms on the page have posted videos of their kids saying their first words after watching the Gemiini videos in their high chairs, bathtubs and car seats.
And how are the twins? Max and Ana both ended up at community college in Spokane at age 16. They, along with the rest of the family, now live six months there and six months on Balboa Island in Newport Beach.
Did we mention Kasbar popped out child No. 6 and child No. 7 while creating Gemiini?
“The thing about moms is that they have an urgency,” she said. “In the world of research (an idea can take) 17 years from the lab to the public using it. Moms are not going to wait 17 years. My kid doesn’t have 17 years.”
DEBORAH HERNANDEZ
Hernandez has worked in marketing communications for the past 18 years. But for the first 12 of them, she will tell you: “I really had blinders on.”
It wasn’t until after her son was born seven years ago that she traded in her office job for a more flexible marketing consultant position and began “to look beyond my email box.”
“What’s the situation in my community? In my country? I want to make sure my son is growing up in the kind of world he deserves.”
Looking is one thing. Doing is another.
Hernandez went from a looker to a doer in December 2012 when Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and opened fire, killing 20 students and six school staff members after fatally shooting his mother at home.
“I was so devastated by what happened,” she said. “It just felt too close to home. I was having a really hard time.”
Her son was in kindergarten at the time in a school in south Orange County, where they still live.
To try and make sense of the massacre, she turned to the Internet, but only became more confused.
“I could not believe in the face of this tragedy the reactions that gun rights activists were having,” she said.
Hernandez began to research gun laws, which is how she stumbled upon Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a social networking group founded the day after Sandy Hook.
“It really saved me,” she said.
By the beginning of February 2013, she was starting her own Orange County chapter.
“None of us knew what we were going to do, but I just knew if there was a way to speak out, I was going to do it,” she said.
The local chapter has since melded with others to form one large California chapter. It’s virtual, so there is no headquarters. Hernandez manages the California chapter’s Facebook page, with the goal of encouraging other moms to join postcard drives, rallies and petitions demanding that Congress pass tougher gun laws.
“We provide ways that even a busy mom can take action: While waiting in the carpool line at school or while having coffee in that moment before your kids wake up. Anyone can carve out some time, whether 10 minutes a week or an hour a week.
Hernandez’s son is in second grade now. She is the leader for his Cub Scout den, as well as a volunteer at his school and his taxi driver to martial arts and swimming. So her work for Moms Demand Action is mostly done at night.
The state chapter’s biggest victory of 2014: Getting state legislation AB 1014 passed. This enables people to request a temporary restraining order to have someone’s guns taken away by police on grounds they are exhibiting threatening behavior.
This month, Hernandez is working on rolling out the California chapter’s Be SMART campaign to raise awareness about responsible gun storage.
Two kids a week are killed in unintentional shootings in the U.S., according to the Moms Demand Action website.
Hernandez, 40, said she has met with silence from some family and friends for her stance, and taken flak from others.
“I want every mom to know it’s really very fulfilling to speak your mind and know that your voice matters and when we all band together it’s not a scary thing to speak out. It’s a very powerful thing.”
SUSAN HUANG
With the recent superbug scares at California hospitals, it’s reassuring to know there are people like Huang, a professor of medicine at UC Irvine and medical director for epidemiology and infection prevention at UCI Medical Center, who is changing the way hospitals across the country operate. Huang has authored more than 120 research papers with a focus on strategies to prevent infections from spreading in health care settings. The last one led to a lifesaving protocol.
It was published in 2013 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the gold standard of peer-reviewed medical journals.
The paper was on a large clinical trial she led at intensive care units, swapping out regular soap for an antiseptic soap to wash patients and also squirting an antibiotic ointment in their noses, where the killer superbug MRSA likes to hide.
“It was a whopping success,” she said.
The soap switch reduced MRSA infections by 37 percent and blood stream infections by 44 percent, the study found, and it is now a standard of care in many U.S. hospitals.
Huang, 43, travels about twice a month to speak at national and international infectious disease conferences. She has also spoken at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With two kids – Emily, 10, and Joshua, 8 – all the travel can take a toll, but Huang said, “I love the fact that I work.” She adds: “My husband is a godsend. He’s an amazing partner.”
When she isn’t traveling, she makes it a point to leave work by 5 p.m. to get home to Alfred and her kids.
Huang often shuttles the youngsters to football or piano or taekwondo. After their bedtime, she turns her computer on to do some research.
Once a week the family pulls out board games. “Work hard, play hard,” is what she tells her children, a second-grader and fifth-grader at Turtle Rock Elementary.
Huang grew up in the San Fernando Valley, leaving for the East Coast when she got accepted to Brown University. She then went to Johns Hopkins for medical school. And after that, to Harvard to earn a master’s in public health.
Huang stayed on as junior faculty at Harvard Medical School, then moved to UCI seven years ago.
Currently, she is leading three trials: one studying the use of antiseptic soap on patients on regular hospital floors; another studying the use of it post-discharge by people with MRSA; and a third studying people who are resistant to the antibiotic nose ointment.
How does she keep all the balls in the air?
“I’m super-organized,” she said. “I make lists.”
