I posted on LinkedIn this month about the woman who shaped my career. The post ended with “her full story deserves more than a post.” This is that story.
For Women’s History Month, I’m answering a question that stopped me: “Who is a woman who made an impact on your career?” The answer has nothing to do with a mentor, a manager, or a sponsor. It has everything to do with a woman who never held a paying job — and yet is the reason I work the way I do.
She Was, By Every Definition, a Single Mother
In Indian culture, there is no real concept of a single mom. Family structures are communal — even if a father is absent, extended family fills the gaps. But my mom, Viji Sivapakyam, didn’t have that.
My dad worked abroad. Growing up, I saw him once a year, maybe twice, for a week or two at most. The rest of the year, my mom raised two kids alone. Communication back then meant letters that took a week to arrive and another week for a response — essentially two-week sprints. Long-distance calls were expensive and charged by the minute, mostly reserved for emergencies.
By every definition, she was doing it alone. And she never once made us feel like anything was missing.
A War Zone, Two Children, and No Way Out — Except Forward
I was born in Sri Lanka. In 1983, the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority erupted with horrifying violence. We were Tamils. We were targets.
I was five years old. My brother was seven.
I have one memory from that time that I have carried my entire life. Sinhalese mobs were moving through our neighborhood searching for Tamils. My mom put my brother and me into a small bathroom and closed the door. Then she walked to the front of the house and stood there — alone — as the first line of defense between her children and the armed mob.
Our landlord, a Sinhalese woman, intercepted the mob and sent them away. She told them only her family lived there. We were safe. But I have never forgotten the image of my mom standing in that doorway. She had no weapon. No plan, really. Just the absolute certainty that nothing was getting to her kids while she still stood.
That moment tells you everything you need to know about her.
The Bravest Thing an Introvert Ever Did
When my mom decided we needed to leave Sri Lanka, almost everyone around her thought she was making a mistake.
She had no formal education. She didn’t speak English. She was, by her own nature, deeply introverted — the kind of woman who felt self-conscious simply walking down the street. We grew up in a very conservative time when a certain level of modesty was expected from women, and my mom carried that. People told her she was jumping from the pan into the fire. That India, a country where she knew no one, was no refuge.
She ignored them all.
She walked into government offices in the middle of a war to file the paperwork. She got our passports. She coordinated our travel. She boarded a plane for the first time in her life with two young children and landed in a country where she had to build everything from scratch — housing, school enrollments, residency documentation, and a daily life.
For someone who was shy to even speak to her neighbors, what she did in those months was extraordinary. And she did it anyway.
Building a Life in a Country That Didn’t Always Want Her
Immigration is never clean. For every person who welcomed us, there were others who didn’t.
Growing up in India as a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee, I was called a Tamil Tiger — the name of the very militant group our community was trying to escape from. The irony was never lost on me. My mom navigated that hostility every single day. She absorbed it so we didn’t have to. She made sure it didn’t reach us — or at least, that it didn’t define us.
She found us a home. She found us schools. She created a childhood that felt, remarkably, like a childhood — not a refugee experience, not a survival story, but something that felt normal and full and safe.
And here is the detail I think about the most. She never spoke English herself. But when my brother and I started speaking in English, you could see the light in her eyes. To her, that meant we were going to have a better life. Better opportunities. A different future than the one she had. That look — I can still picture it.
As a mom of two myself now, I understand what it took to hold all of that together.
“Try Everything. Find What You’re Good At.”
My mom’s approach to parenting was ahead of its time.
She enrolled me in piano, classical Bharatanatyam dance, gymnastics, taekwondo, ballet, and more — not because she had grand ambitions for any one of them, but because she believed kids should explore before they commit. She never forced anything. She invited. Try it. See if you like it.
When I found track and field, everything shifted. I loved it. I was good at it. And my mom — a woman who genuinely disliked traveling, who was uncomfortable eating outside her own kitchen, who had her own health concerns — showed up. Every meet. Every competition. Across states, across cities. She handled all the coordination herself.
She never once told me that athletics wasn’t for girls. When people in our community said that all that training would make me look “too masculine,” she — a woman who avoided conflict like most people avoid bad news — drew a quiet, firm line. She didn’t argue. She didn’t fight. She just didn’t change course.
That sport earned me a scholarship to one of the top universities in the state. She is part of every step I have taken since.
The Price of Always Putting Others First
We lost my mom to cancer. She was only 43.
I believe — though no doctor would write it in a chart — that years of putting herself last contributed to that. She didn’t prioritize her health the way she prioritized ours. She didn’t protect her own time or her body the way she protected our futures. She put us ahead of herself in every way. And eventually, that cost her.
It is the lesson she taught me by her own example — the one I carry as a quiet obligation. To take care of myself. To build my own independence. To not disappear into the service of others to the point where there is nothing left.
She was the strongest person I have known. She was also a woman of her time, shaped by structures that didn’t always serve her. I honor her by refusing to repeat the parts that diminished her.
Viji Lives On
I want you to know that my mom was not just a mother who sacrificed. She had a full life of her own. She was an incredible cook — she passed her recipes down to my aunts, and when I visit them, I ask them to recreate her dishes. It is my way of keeping her memory alive at the table. She painted. She did artwork. She kept herself creative and busy in ways that had nothing to do with us. She was a whole person.
My daughter’s middle name is Viji.
That wasn’t an accident. It was a declaration. It was my way of making sure that even after my mom is gone, her name is spoken in our home — that my daughter grows up knowing whose courage made her mother’s life possible.
For Women’s History Month, we celebrate the women on stages, in boardrooms, and in headlines. But today I want to celebrate the women who did their most important work in silence: in bathrooms where they hid their children, in government offices where they filed paperwork in a language they didn’t speak, on bleachers in cities far from home where they cheered for their daughters.
Amma, this one is for you.