Marie Cosgrove: Faith, Grit, And Hope

SNIPPET #060

Marie Cosgrove has been defying the odds from the very moment of her existence. Conceived from violence, born against doctors’ advice, raised in a tumultuous blend of love and trauma, and consistently told she’d never make it.

Marie Cosgrove rose above all of those things and turned her pain into purpose.

Today she is a wife, mother, CEO, author, speaker, mentor, and a titan in the industry she was once mocked in.

“Little girl, just go home,” he told her. “The most you’re ever going to sell is candy, with your little girl voice. You won’t make it in this industry.” The sneering insult from the owner of the company hit Marie by surprise. She’d just completed the training for medical device sales with a perfect score.

Marie was the only woman there. She’d left a VP position where she managed a 400 million dollar budget, only to be told she wasn’t qualified for this lesser position. She’d used her sales skills to sell the company owner on giving her a chance and paid for the training herself. She’d worked hard in spite of a palpable sense of derision from her male colleagues. She needed this job and was not about to let anyone intimidate her into thinking she wasn’t good enough.

“Just give me 30 days,” she said. Perhaps as a lark, or perhaps because of the fire in her eyes, the owner agreed to give Marie a 30 day, straight commission contract. If she didn’t meet the quota in 30 days, she’d lose her contract.

Marie had faced far larger bullies than that man.

Even before she’d been born, doctors did everything they could first to convince Marie’s mother and then Marie’s grandparents, not to give life to Marie.

A car accident had left Marie’s mother with significant brain damage. Then she’d been raped. Doctors were certain Marie would be born with major birth defects and insisted Marie’s mother would not be able to care for such a baby – or any baby.

Marie’s mother was adamant that she was not about to kill her baby after God had saved her own life. Doctors had tried to convince her own parents to remove life support when she’d been in a coma. Her parents had fought for their little girl, and she would fight for hers too.

When Marie’s mother refused the abortion, doctors went after Marie’s grandparents to overrule their daughter. “She’s not mentally competent,” they said, and should not have the baby.

The harder doctors fought to abort the baby, the firmer Marie’s grandparents became, especially her grandmother. “That’s why I’m here, because of my grandmother’s faith and determination,” Marie says.

Her grandparents assumed a large role in raising Marie. They loved her deeply and did their best to care for her. Some of her aunts and uncles loved her, too, but the rest were cruel and even abusive. Her mother’s moral compass was a casualty of her brain damage, which opened the door for Marie to experience horrific abuse during weekends in her mother’s care.

All of her life she’d been told she was a blight on her family’s name. She’d been physically abused and beaten. She’d been told she was worthless, and should never have been born. In school she’d been told she was too dumb to go to college and no one would ever give her a scholarship, anyway.

For a time she believed all the people who told her those things. She endured the abuse and the beatings because she felt she had no choice.

“I felt I didn’t belong here. I should never have been born. I didn’t have a purpose.”

But when her children could not take that life anymore, Marie stepped into her strength one more time, and walked out of it.

Marie was 27 years old, twice divorced from abusive husbands. She had three small children, a 4th on the way, and layers of scars on her soul from the horrendous trauma she’d suffered at the hands of so many. And yet – she’d managed to work her way into a Fortune 500 company.

She was the VP of marketing at USAA, even though she didn’t have a college degree. The company believed in her so much, it was helping her pay to get that degree. It broke Marie’s heart to leave that all behind, but she had to take her children far away from the life of trauma they’d all been living.

Now a single mother again, with a  newborn baby, no job, and two of her four children with substantial health issues, Marie and her children slept in a huddle on the floor of a relative’s home. They faced an uncertain future that Marie met with her own brand of certainty.

“I began to know God, and that every single one of us has a purpose,” Marie says. It was time, she knew, to find her own purpose in life.

It was a tough time but Marie was even tougher. No one, she vowed, would ever hurt her children again. She was going to do whatever it took to build a new life for herself and her kids, and nothing would stop her.

Marie left that training determined to reach her quota and then some. But life threw another enormous bolt of sadness her way.