Sunday, May 11, 2008

Mother's Day Heroine - Linda LaBrecque

Most of the nations on earth celebrate Mother's Day today. Unfortunately, Nigeria is not even on that maternal map. It's either we are too busy grappling with poverty to remember a 'fad' called mother's day. The real poverty is our ignorance of the capacity of the womb and her amazing 'products'!

On this special day I am dedicating to one woman in obscurity. Many of us don't even know her name, we only know her as the mother of that teenage internet millionaire, Ashley Quails. She is Linda LaBrecque.

A single working-class parent who believed in the potential power of the internet and who lent her 14-year old daughter (Ashley Quails), EIGHT DOLLARS ($8), four years ago to register a domain name and start a website - Whatever Life dot Com, which today has grown more popular than Ophrah Winfrey's website, and is grossing over a million dollars annually.With over a million unique visitors per day and 6 million daily page views to her website, the money soon began rolling in, first, a Google check of $2,700 then $5,000 and then $10,000... then, the explosion started. He he hee..

The first victim of that breakthrough was the crammed one-bedroom rented apartment where Linda and her two daughters (Ashley and Selby) lived in. Ashley bought a brand new $250,000 four-bedroom apartment and waved goodbye to poverty. She compensated her mom by 'employing' her to manage her new busines of webdesign, blogging and internet entrepreneurship. (she was still under-aged [at 17], to manage it by herself).


What have I learned from this inspirational story of Linda and her daughter? I am a visionary mother and I should invest in my children's potential; which would definitely outshine mine. My first daughter would be 10 this week, and I would buy her a gift of desk top computer, to begin to prepare her for that inevitable future of a florishing web career.


I said this because, my children love computer. Their home work were done mostly from Wikipedia and Google searches. Even things assigned by their class teacher to them, which I am not sure of. I always ask them to 'hit the buttons'. My children have learned a precious lesson that the Computer is the totality of human wisdom packaged into a machine.


By the time they are fifteen, I want to see some web whizkids out of them. This is the inspiration I got from Linda LaBrecque, and that is why I am dedicating this mother's day to her and to all visionary mothers out there.

Happy Mother's Day to you all telenovela fans!