This article by Michele Alperin was prepared for the September 19, 2007 issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
In 2002 Stephanie Clark, founder and chief executive officer of My Daughter's Keeper, was a single mother whose successful marketing business was keeping her at work late into the night. One day her then-12-year-old daughter posed a question that turned Clark inside out: "Mom," she said. "I know you love me, but do you like me?"
Clark responded, "Why would you ask me if I like you?" But her daughter just looked at her.
That night Clark pondered the question, crying, praying, thinking, "Am I a bad mother?" When she awoke the next morning, she realized something important: "I had been working hard to be sure her physical needs were provided for but I was not with her emotionally." Clark thought about how she would get home late from work and, instead of hugging and listening to her very affectionate daughter, she would say she was tired and wanted to take a bath.
Later that year, on the airplane back from Detroit, where Clark grew up and where her daughter spent summers with her father, she got to thinking. She knew she must better provide for her daughter's emotional needs. "I didn't want to risk her turning to other people, boys, or the Internet to provide emotional support and love," says Clark.
As Clark pondered why she was not able to show more affection to her daughter, she got to thinking about her relationship with her own mother. Although she never questioned her mother's love, Clark doesn't remember kisses, hugs, or spoken "I love you's."
Of course, there were good reasons. She grew up in Detroit and her mother, now 83, was left a single parent after Clark's father died, with 11 of their 13 children still at home; Clark was only three at the time. Her mother had just finished beauty college, where she had gone against her husband's wishes, and she opened a salon.
Her mother's business and domestic life were closely intertwined. "She raised us in the back of her beauty salon," says Clark. After her father died, her mother also rejected welfare, agreeing only to take a refrigerator and a stove offered by the social services agency. Clark didn't hear the whole story until she was interviewing single mothers for her new book, "Life As a Single Mom: It Isn't Easy or Is It? 10 Steps to Achieving Success as a Single Mom & A Compilation of Heartfelt, Inspiring Stories Shared by Single Moms," which will be released on Monday, October 1. "She is where I get my strength as a single mom and woman on her own," says Clark, "who is surviving because I choose to, and I know I have the strength to make it on my own."
Even though she traced some of her own emotional reticence to her relationship to her mother, Clark understood that she needed to find a way to provide her daughter with the physical and verbal affection she was seeking.
On that plane trip back from Detroit, she picked up a pen and found herself writing on the napkin "my daughter's keeper." When she repeated it to herself silently, she thought, "That has a ring to it!"
For Clark it was like a lightbulb had gone off. If indeed she was her daughter's keeper, she needed to start acting like it. When she got home, she put together a concept paper for an international organization, which she emailed the next morning to six of her closest friends. They loved it, and within a week, she had secured a domain name and was a legally registered business: My Daughter's Keeper is about to celebrate its fifth anniversary at a gala on Friday, September 21, at the Forsgate Country Club in Monroe Township. The mistress of ceremonies is Kent Manahan, senior anchor of New Jersey Network, and the keynote speaker is Joi Gordon, chief executive officer of Dress for Success Worldwide.
Clark's road to becoming a single parent is not an uncommon one. While she was in college, she became infatuated with a guy who, when she married him at 22, turned out not to be the person she thought he was. "A couple days after we got married," she remembers, "I started to see a side I had never seen." At the beginning he was just argumentative and stubborn but later he became verbally abusive.
Clark's daughter was born a year into the marriage, and because Clark took her wedding vows seriously, she stayed married longer than she probably should have. "I didn't want to leave the marriage," she says. "My daughter was a baby, and I didn't want to become a single mom."
It was her sister who pushed her, one Fourth of July when she came upon Clark lying on a bed, depressed, and staring out a window. Always so particular about her appearance, Clark had really let herself go, and her sister said to her, "Steph, I'm not trying to be in your business but the family is really worried about you. You're not the same Steph that we know and love." Then she gave her some advice: "Take it from me. I've been through two bad divorces where I was physically abused - you can be unhappy by yourself."
It took Clark awhile, though, before she could move beyond the guilt, but she finally realized, she says, that God didn't want her to stay in a bad marriage and suffer, and she started to heal. "For many years," she says, "I would tell people, `I'm happily divorced.' I was happier than I'd been for long time - by myself, making my own decisions, able to pursue my goals and dreams for me and my daughter."
Clark seems destined to have become a businessperson. She says she "was the young lady who dressed like she was going to work every day. I wore a suit and heels and took a briefcase to high school." Her role model was her sister, Diane, 20 years her senior, who was a professional in human resources for a chemical company.
College, she says, was always part of her plans, and she knew her mother couldn't afford to send her. So she worked full time during the day and attended Mercy College evenings and weekends. Her degree was in business administration, with a concentration in marketing. "I wanted to have a career where I could travel - a glitz and glamour life style, which is why I selected public relations and marketing," she says.
"I was the first one in my family to go to college," she adds, although she did have to take a year and a half off when she married and got pregnant.
Another thing she knew about herself in high school was that she didn't want to work at a fast food restaurant. She took typing classes each year, and when she graduated, she started temping. Her approach to her work is to work hard, learn all there is to learn, and then move on. Her job hopping was strategic. "Every job I took, I took thinking, `I will go to this job, learn as much as I can and make as many connections as I can, always looking at my long-term goal.'" In the future, when she hoped to start her own business, she would need all the skills and connections she could accumulate.
At her first position after college, in the Detroit office of advertising conglomerate J. Walter Thompson, Clark encountered overt racism in the workplace for the first time. "One thing I noticed," she says about this company of about 500 employees, "is that all the black people were secretaries or worked in the mailroom." Noting that she is a quiet rebel, she says she went to her boss and said, "If another job opens up that I'm qualified for, I don't expect to be overlooked for opportunities because of the color of my skin."
She struggled with her employer, even threatening to file a lawsuit, but eventually left because, she says, "I decided don't like to work in an environment where limitations are placed on where I can go."
After a brief stint at an accounting company she started doing marketing and public relations consulting on her own. She was making enough to get by but heard that the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History was looking for a public relations manager. To her surprise was offered the position.
When she started, she found out a few things that made the job a lot more exciting. First, the new museum they were building would be the largest of its kind in the world, and she was expected to market it not only to the local community but nationally as a tourist attraction. "It was like I was giving birth to my baby. I spent many nights in that museum and to see it all come to pass was overwhelming."
At a leadership program for nonprofit organizations run by the Minneapolis Ford Foundation, Clark and her colleagues met people from Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, and they eventually recruited her for a job as marketing and sales director. "It has been a blessing being in New Jersey," she says. "So many opportunities have presented themselves that I would not have had the opportunity to pursue in Detroit."
One thing she particularly likes about New Jersey is that it is has given her daughter a chance to be exposed to different types of people and cultures, which would not have happened in the more insular Detroit. Clark notes that she herself had never met white people until she went to college.
After two years she started her own marketing communications company - fulfilling her high school goal of starting a business by the time she was 35. In July 2000, she started Clark Creative Communications and got a lucky break from an acquaintance, Louisa Kreisberg, whose public relations company in New York had just gotten a Nike contract. Kreisberg subcontracted Clark to host some media events for Nike.
Clark founded My Daughter's Keeper, which she refers to as "the premier organization serving mothers and daughters in state of New Jersey," a year and a half later. For another year and a half, she tried to run both simultaneously but it wasn't working. She was more interested in My Daughter's Keeper and cancelled her consulting contracts to work on it fulltime.
This fall My Daughter's Keeper, which provides individual and family counseling services to referrals from DYFS, mentoring to teenage girls, and family empowerment workshops and retreats, is launching affiliate programs in other parts of New Jersey and in Tampa Bay. The only other national organization that focuses its efforts on mothers and daughters is working with a predominantly predominantly Caucasian population. My Daughter's Keeper is more inclusive, says Clark, working with anyone who is raising daughters, including single mothers or fathers, caregivers, grandparents, and foster parents from different social and economic backgrounds.
Through her work with My Daughter's Keeper and among the single moms she knew socially, Clark would hear a lot about the challenges these women were facing. One day she had heard someone say, "Being a single mom is not easy." And she thought, "That may be true but being a single mom has been easy for me." She realized that what she had done was to distinguish who she is as a woman from being a single mom.
In July My Daughter's Keeper launched Project Single Moms, a national program equipping single moms to make more healthy choices to enhance their quality of life, "to help equip us as women to help us become better mothers for our children. It's about empowering the woman who happens to be a single mom." Twenty-five percent of her book sales will go to create a "hand up fund" to provide temporary financial support to single moms for emergency and empowerment purposes.
Clark is clear about her commitment to the organization: "It is not my business but my ministry."
Gala Benefit, Friday, September 21, 6 p.m. My Daughter's Keeper, Forsgate Country Club, 375 Forsgate Drive, Monroe. Fifth anniversary celebration includes cocktails, silent auction, dinner, awards, dancing, and entertainment. Black tie. Guest speaker is Joi Gordon, CEO Dress for Success Worldwide. $150. www.mydaughterskeeper.org or 732-565-9313.