Meet Dr. Flora Morris Brown of FloraBrown.com in Anaheim

Today we’d like to introduce you to Flora Morris Brown, Ph.D.

Dr. Brown, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I can’t remember when I wasn’t reading and writing. I was an entrepreneur as early as 10 years old when I discovered I could make money selling handmade potholders and other crafts to Mother’s beauty shop patrons while they sat captive under the dryer or waited for their turns. I became hooked on earning money from my creative endeavors, but my love of reading, writing, and school led me to embrace a teaching career. Over a 40-year career, I taught junior-high English through college teacher training and critical thinking. While teaching, I raised four children with my husband but always managed to weave entrepreneurial activities throughout our busy lives, including owning several successful businesses. After retiring from Fullerton College, I stepped up my traveling and writing, began blogging and hosted an internet radio show for three years.

In 2016, I became a Certified Guided Autobiography Facilitator where I help people recall, tell and document their life stories to leave behind as part of their family legacy. I earned a B.A., M.S, and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and am Professor Emeritus from Fullerton College. I’ve published 13 books, the most recent of which are Color Your Life Happy: Create Your Unique Path and Claim the Joy You Deserve and then, following a gratitude theme, The Color Your Life Happy Gratitude Journal. True confession: I’m a coffee snob with an unhealthy love of British TV murder mysteries. I’m determined to visit every continent except Antarctica at least once, and I have one continent to go. Learn more about my books at http://amazon.com/author/florabrown and discover where I’m appearing and how to connect with me on social media at http://florabrown.com.

Has it been a smooth road?
Smooth road? Absolutely not, but it has been interesting, instructional, and transformative all the way.

Notable struggles:

1. I decided to return to earn a Ph.D. when my oldest two children were 5 and 2. I was fortunate enough to get a generous doctoral grant, but to accept it I had to pursue my degree full time. That meant quitting my full-time junior-high teaching position (just as I was about to get a raise the next year) and depending on just one salary when our life clearly depended on two salaries at the time. But my husband agreed, so we took a vow of poverty, I put my nose in the books and we somehow managed to keep the two kids in Montessori school and violin lessons. Then, insisting on having my children three years apart (it sounded like a really good plan at the time), I gave birth to my third child, my son, on the first day of the start of the second year of my doctoral studies.

Thanks to the support of my husband, my mother and a great babysitter, I managed to stay in school, even breastfeeding my son, and four years later happily graduated and landed a teaching position at Californnia State University Northridge (CSUN) that fall. There are many chapters to this story. My fourth child, a daughter, was born while I was a professor at CSUN;as before, we emerged from this adventure learning much about creativity and resilience.

2. After 20 years of marriage and making it through other challenges, my husband and I separated. It was a tough decision for me, but I felt it was the best one. At the time, I had been operating a private tutoring program in Los Angeles and depended on his salary again while we invested in a commercial building and maintained a staff of eight. Without his salary, I knew I had to get back to a “real” job since our business was not going to fully support me and the three children who were still at home. (My oldest daughter was on her own.) So I closed my tutoring program in December 1986.

While hobbling along financially, that first semester after our separation in 1987, I began searching for a full-time job. I was not going to settle for one I didn’t want, so I held four part-time teaching jobs that semester while I donned my blue interview suit over and over again.

Finally, by the end of that semester, I was offered a full-time tenure-track position in the Reading Department at Fullerton College. Of three different jobs I was offered at the same time, this one was the best in many ways, so I gladly accepted it, even though it meant a 37-mile commute from Los Angeles to Fullerton. After making the drive for a full semester, I began to realize I needed to move closer to work.

Although, I had driven 37 miles from Los Angeles to CSUN (in the opposite direction) many years before, I was no longer willing to make that commute, so I began looking for a home in Orange County. As soon as I put my L.A. house on the market while I looked for a home, my husband died suddenly at work. I put my moving plans on hold while consoling my children and planning his funeral. I didn’t know until then that he had let two life-insurance policies lapse. Yikes! So I buckled down and figured out how to manage this, and of course I did. Even though we were separated at the time, he was still my husband and the father of my children. In spite of the differences that led to our separation, he had been a good man, so I ensured that his memorial service reflected that.

3. Watching my strong, independent mother slip into dementia was another major struggle. It was a heartbreaking three years of having to relocate her from Los Angeles to be closer to me in Orange County and having to learn a new way of communicating. She was physically strong and maintained some of her quick wit, but I had to lie to her, like every time she asked when she was going to go home. She was living in a residential facility not far from Fullerton College, but she was always eager to go home.

I was the oldest of her three daughters and had an older brother who lived in Northern California. The responsibility for making decisions about her care fell on me and, although I was sad during that time, I made the best decisions possible. She was inconsolable. When she complained about the food, I’d sneak in a hamburger or whatever she requested. But she didn’t have much of an appetite. Then, when I picked her up and brought her to my house, which was only about 12 miles away, we saw firsthand what memory loss was doing to her. After we cleared the plates, she’d ask when we were going to serve dinner. No amount of explaining worked in this situation although, like most other families, we tried. My two youngest daughters and I would get into arguments about how to deal with it. We did everything the experts advise you NOT to do, especially trying to explain and reason with her.

Finally, my second daughter figured out a solution. We learned to leave her plate in front of her at the table. When she was about to ask when we were going to serve dinner, she’d look down and see her plate and realize she had been served, although she no longer had the hearty appetite she once enjoyed. The most painful part of her decline was watching her inability to fully recall all the many tunes she had played on the piano and organ all of her life. She was known for wonderful playing of all types of music from classical to spiritual. She had been the accompanist for the children’s choir at our church when we were kids. In addition to operating her beauty shop, she played piano and organ for many programs and soloists and was still a church musician in Los Angeles every Sunday in her early 80s until dementia began to steal her short-term memory. It was painful for me to visit her. Our conversations were circular, and I kept fighting back the tears so she wouldn’t see me. By the time I’d leave, I had to run to the parking lot to get to my car before I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. She died after a three-week stay in critical care, at age 92. I felt guilty about being relieved to see her no longer with a tube down her throat, but had she not died, the doctors wanted to next do a tracheotomy. I wasn’t sure I could bear that.

After she died, as I had done for my husband, I took the reins of planning her memorial service. Unlike my husband, she had planned and paid for her service in advance. She had even created her program, naming who the soloists would be. By the time she died, however, those soloists had predeceased her. It was no problem, though, since we have plenty of singers in the family and among our friends. My second daughter was one soloist, and a family friend was the other.

4. In January 2016, my son died of a massive heart attack at age 40. I was devastated, of course, and even though I attended a bereavement group that spring, I sometimes feel like I’m still in denial. This time, I was so fortunate to have my adult daughters and friends to help console me and help with decisions since he was not married and didn’t have a girlfriend. My youngest daughter took the lead in researching the details that led to our decisions about his memorial service and burial.

Since we had never discussed how he wanted this handled (how many people have at his age?), with one of my thoughtful daughters we recalled what things he liked in order for us to decide what was most respectful and reflective of his life and wishes. Even though he lived in Anaheim with me at the time of his death, he loved Long Beach and wanted to live there. He often hung out at various coffee shops and events in Long Beach, so we decided that a cremation and burial at sea in Long Beach would be what he wanted. At his memorial service, we acknowledged his love of Star Trek and his compassion, and we even had some of his poetry on the program and read at the service.

Weeks later, when we were going through his things, I ran across his incomplete application for a passport. I recalled he had been waiting for a copy of his birth certificate to arrive and remembered how happy he was a few months earlier when it came. I asked him then, where was the first place he wanted to visit when he got his passport. “Ireland!” he said without hesitation. I’m so glad I had asked.

When I shared this with my youngest daughter, she insisted that we go to Ireland in honor of his wish, and so we did in March–April 2017. He was fond of some wooden prayer beads he had ordered online, so I took a string of the ones he had held at the memorial funeral and left a bead of them here and there at the many sites we visited in Dublin and sites along the way to and from Northern Ireland. That 12-day trip gave me some comfort and closure.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
I touched on this in an earlier question, but I’ll share some highlights here. My official company name is Flora Brown Associates, but I typically direct people to my main three websites: FloraBrown.com — from this site you can access the others, but the main business I mention here is Write Your Life Story, Two Pages at Time, ColorYourLifeHappy.com is my blog that focuses on creating happiness and spotlights my book, Color Your life Happy: Create Your Unique Path and Claim the Joy You Deserve. ColorYourLifePublished.com is my blog that focuses on helping writers successfully navigate their publishing journeys.

If you had to start over, what would you have done differently?
I can think of three things:

1. Study financial management and budgeting to better run my family and my businesses.
2. Become bilingual in at least Spanish while in high school and college and raise my kids in both languages.
3. Nurture my musical training and love of dancing.

Contact Info:

• Address: 5753-G Santa Ana Canyon Rd., #360
• Website: florabrown.com
• Phone: 714-408-9937
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/florabrown2u
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/coloryourlifehappy
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/florabrown
• Other: http://facebook.com/coloryourlifepublished

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