🤱🏻 What My Mother Taught Me About Leadership

Leadership isn’t about titles. It’s about service. My mother showed me that.

A Childhood of Survival

My mother never finished middle school.

She was the third of seven children in a poor Chinese family in Singapore. Her father worked as a coolie (a manual laborer) who hauled heavy sacks of rice on his back, balancing across shaky wooden planks to unload them from the boats to the shore. He fell from those planks to his death in a tragic accident when he was in his thirties, leaving behind my grandmother with seven children and no income.

My mother had two older brothers and four younger sisters. As the eldest daughter, she bore the weight of responsibility early. At just 12 years old, she dropped out of school to work. She sewed in garment factories, washed used Coca-Cola bottles for rebottling, and took on any odd job she could find to help put food on the table.

She lived in a kampong in Singapore, which was a rural village with no plumbing and no real infrastructure. Her home was a wooden shack where rats scurried at night. She remembered lying awake in fear, terrified they might bite her in her sleep. The toilet was a mile away, and walking there alone in the dark as a child left her trembling.

That was her childhood. Not one of dreams but of duty, fear, and survival.

Love in Lean Times

My mother met my father in her teens. His life was no easier. His grandfather in Indonesia lost everything to opium addiction, and my father was sent away to Singapore to be fostered. He didn’t finish elementary school. From a young age, he worked in poultry farms, made noodles in factories, served coffee at coffee shops, and whatever job he could get to survive.

They married when my mother was 19. Two people with very little, building a life from almost nothing. I was their first child. Soon after came my two brothers.

We lived in a humble Malay attap house in the kampong. When it rained, the roof leaked. Eventually, we moved into government public housing, which felt like an upgrade beyond anything we could have imagined.

Even then, everything we had was stretched thin. My two brothers and I grew up on hand-me-downs. We reused school books. We didn’t have toys. We didn’t eat out.

My mother and father at our home in the kampong. I’m the little girl in red next to my younger brother.

The Stay-At-Home Mom Who Worked

My mother stayed home with us when we were little, sewing garments on an old Singer sewing machine to earn a little extra income. I remember how every year, I’d get exactly one new dress for Lunar New Year. She would pick the fabric, measure me, cut and stitch everything herself. It wasn’t just a dress; it was love, expressed in the only way she knew how.

As Singapore’s economy shifted toward electronics, my mom found work in a factory. She worked shifts with long lines of women on the assembly floor, repeating the same motion: attaching components to circuit boards, hour after hour, day after day. Her hands were rough, her eyes tired. But she never once complained.

My father also continued working blue-collar jobs, driving trucks, driving buses, chopping trees by the roadside, and hauling goods in provision stores.

Neither of them ever had the luxury to ask, “What do I want to do with my life?”

Their purpose was survival. Their dream was for us to have more than they did.

Standing on Her Shoulders

Motivated to improve the lives of my parents, I worked hard and was awarded a government scholarship to study in the UK and US. It changed the trajectory of my life. I became the first in my family to earn a college degree abroad.

One of the proudest moments of my life was using my savings to send my parents on their first trip overseas to London to attend my graduation.

My parents took their very first plane ride to attend my graduation in London

But even then, I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of my mother’s strength.

That understanding came only when I became a mother myself.

Becoming a Mother

There’s a quiet pain that mothers carry. The constant worry. The emotional labor. The impossible trade-offs between work and home, ambition and guilt.

Now, I understand the weight my mother bore. The way she carried worry and fear while making sure we felt safe. The way she pushed through exhaustion. The way she gave up her own dreams, so we could chase ours.

The Motherhood Penalty

And now, as a working mother, I carry my own version of that weight.

The “motherhood penalty” still feels real through the subtle ways mothers are sidelined in the workplace. Early in my career, I hesitated to tell colleagues I needed to pick up my child from school, because no one else on my team had young kids. I’ve feared being seen as less committed, less reliable, less ambitious, simply because I’m a mother.

This unspoken fear still lingers in many of us.

But We Are Not Less

But let me tell you this: being a mother has not made me less of a leader. It’s made me more.

Motherhood has taught me empathy. It’s made me a better communicator, a more patient mentor, and a more resilient human.

Everything I know about leadership started with my mother. She didn’t have a resume. But she had grit. She had wisdom. She had the courage to keep going when the world gave her every reason to stop.

Her sacrifices, her strength and her unwavering love are the foundation on which I stand.

She taught me how to survive.

How to serve.

How to lead.

Honoring Our Mothers

This Mother’s Day and AANHPI Heritage Month, I want to honor my mother and the countless Asian women like her. The ones whose stories go untold. Who labored in silence. Who were overlooked and underestimated. Who gave everything so their children could dream.

So if you’re reading this, take a moment this weekend to thank your mother. Tell her what she means to you. Recognize her work. Celebrate her story.

And to the mothers reading this:

I see you.

I honor you.

You are the reason someone dares to dream today.

You are enough. More than enough.

P.S.: This article was first published at deniseang.substack.com/p/mother. Subscribe at deniseang.substack.com for free to receive new posts and support my work.