The Mac & Cheese Millionaire

23PowerHow to Have More of It in One Easy(ish) Step

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

—Alice Walker

In kindergarten, I was convinced that my parents had accidentally misgendered me. I had been given the most Irish-Catholic name a young Jewish girl could be handed: Erin. It literally means Ireland in Celtic—like the punchy saying “Erin go bragh” (“Ireland forever”). However, I didn’t know this at the time. All I knew is that in my Jewish preschool, I was surrounded by boy Aarons in kippahs (the Jewish head coverings that resemble coasters). I had never met a girl named Erin. I didn’t know that it was kosher to spell it that way. And it was utterly unclear why my parents would give me a boy’s name.

I was told with great pride that I had been named after my deceased grandfather, a man named Aaron. My mother would tell me the brave tale of her father’s solo escape from the Nazis from his home in a shtetl in Poland. How he escaped the Nazis only to be captured by the Russians, and sent to a labor camp in Siberia. Toiling in freezing temperatures and growing weaker by the day, Aaron escaped the labor camp and made his way on foot across the war-torn landscape. Aaron had only a sixth-grade education, but traded his skills as a tailor in exchange for food and shelter along the route back to Poland. After a harrowing pilgrimage across Europe, he returned to his small town to discover that his entire family had been murdered ...