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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| In 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a seventeen-year-old girl named Jacklyn Gise gave birth to a son she would name Jeffrey. She was just two weeks past her seventeenth birthday. Most teenagers were thinking about dances, graduation, and first jobs. Jacklyn was thinking about survival. She had married eighteen-year-old Ted Jorgensen, a bike-shop owner and unicyclist, in a rushed ceremony across the border in Ciudad Juárez. They held a second wedding back in the United States, but the marriage was already straining under the weight of youth, poverty, and Ted’s drinking. They were kids trying to raise a kid. In conservative 1960s Albuquerque, being a pregnant teenager carried a stigma so strong it shaped every corner of Jacklyn’s life. Her school tried to bar her from graduating. Only her father’s intervention allowed her to finish—under humiliating conditions. She wasn’t allowed to eat lunch with her peers. She couldn’t socialize. She wasn’t permitted to walk across the stage at her own graduation. It didn’t break her. When Jeff was just seventeen months old, Jacklyn filed for divorce. She returned to her parents’ home and became a single mother while her high school classmates were beginning adulthood from far safer starting points. Her father, Lawrence Preston Gise—a regional director at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—offered support, but Jacklyn refused to let anyone else define her future. She worked days at the Bank of New Mexico and attended night school to continue her education. When childcare was impossible, she brought baby Jeff to class, setting him beside her while she studied. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t easy. But it was forward motion. In the mid-1960s, while working at the bank, she met a young engineering student named Miguel Bezos. Miguel had escaped Cuba at fifteen through Operation Peter Pan. He arrived in the United States alone, speaking no English, and rebuilt his life from scratch. He understood starting over. He understood hardship. And he understood Jacklyn. They married in 1968. Shortly afterward, Miguel adopted four-year-old Jeff, giving him the Bezos name. Ted Jorgensen agreed to the adoption and drifted out of Jeff’s life. He wouldn’t know what became of his son until decades later. Jacklyn and Miguel built a steady life—something she’d never had as a teenage bride. They moved to Houston, where Miguel worked as a petroleum engineer for Exxon, and later to Miami. They added two more children, Christina and Mark. Jacklyn continued her education and eventually earned her college degree at age forty. She raised her children with the same fierce determination that had carried her through her own challenges. When Jeff showed an interest in science and computers, she encouraged it. When he dreamed beyond what seemed realistic, she didn’t pull him back—she cleared the runway. Jeff spent summers on his grandfather’s ranch in Cotulla, Texas, learning to fix windmills, repair machinery, and solve problems with improvisation and grit. That ranch became a quiet forge for his curiosity, a place where he learned to trust his ability to figure things out. Jacklyn reinforced those lessons every step of the way. In 1994, Jeff Bezos was a successful vice president on Wall Street when he told his parents he planned to quit his secure job to start an online bookstore in a garage. It sounded outrageous. But Jacklyn and Miguel didn’t need to understand the technology to understand their son. They invested $245,573—their life savings—into his dream. It became one of the most successful investments in modern history, worth billions years later. But for Jacklyn, wealth was never the point. The question was what she would do with the privilege she had once fought to survive without. She co-founded the Bezos Family Foundation with Miguel, focusing on early childhood development, education, and global leadership. Their philanthropy created programs that transformed opportunities for children around the world—Vroom, the Bezos Scholars Program, and major research and education initiatives. Jacklyn had been a teen mother who studied at night with a baby beside her. She became a philanthropist shaping opportunities for hundreds of thousands of young people. Jeff later summed her impact in one sentence: “I won the lottery with my mom.” He wasn’t talking about money. He was talking about grit, love, and a refusal to let circumstance define destiny. Jacklyn Bezos didn’t just raise a successful entrepreneur. She built a life that proved setbacks aren’t the end of a story—they’re the beginning of resilience. |
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