My mother fled her first marriage with myself and my elder sister when I was four years old. My mother was married at seventeen, just after she finished high school, in 1969, and did not have a university degree. When she left my father in 1979, she landed a trainee draftsperson position with a mining company. From the age of four or five I knew my mother as a working woman, like most of my peers, and because she was single, despite having a strong network of friends and relatives who took care of me and my sister when they could, there were many times when my mother needed to work late and took us to the office with her. I was often sick as a child, and spent many sick days in a makeshift bed on the floor of her office.
Perhaps it sounds terribly boring for a child to be stuck in some big office, but in fact I loved it. The geologists took me under their wing and showed me their library, full of encyclopaedias and geology books and maps, and they showed me their samples of diamonds, gold, fossils, and solidified rippled sand from ancient sea beds. I was quite convinced that I would become a geologist then, probably a paleontologist. I still love geology, but prefer "pure" geology rather than the "practical" mining side of it. Through my mother and her colleagues, I got to visit quarries and collect my own rock samples, ride in a tiny four-seater Cessna and take aerial photos to be used for map making, and learn about geology from students and graduates who worked with my mother. During her years with three geology firms, my mother studied geology at the local Institute of Technology, sponsored by the company. Her love was geophysics, but she did not have the physics or mathematics background she needed for it. Her employers advised her to get there "the back way," by getting a geology degree first and gaining work experience in geophysics and seismology. Unfortunately for her geology career, but fortunately in every other respect, the company’s lawyer fell for her and she married him when I was nine. A difficult pregnancy made her give up her degree in her final year and when my baby sister was born, she decided to give up work altogether and focus on her new family.
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