Single mom beats odds, delivers commencement speech
On her 40th birthday last April, Amanda Spencer made a discovery that most people would have found devastating — mushrooms pushing through the drywall in her daughter's bedroom, the visible tip of a toxic mold infestation that would soon force her family out of their home entirely.
Within weeks, the Aliso Viejo mother of four was shuttling her children between hotels, running to Starbucks to find Wi-Fi strong enough to take her college exams, and scrambling to keep her kids fed on a budget that barely covered a McDonald's drive-through.
She never dropped a single class.
“I’ve come too far,” Spencer says. “This is not going to take us down.”
On June 14, Spencer will stand before thousands at UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology commencement ceremony and tell her story. She will receive her bachelor’s degree in criminology, law and society, a milestone that represents not just an academic achievement but the improbable culmination of two decades of reinvention, survival and perseverance.
Hers is a story measured in resets.
Spencer was a college student back in 2006, taking classes at Saddleback College with ambitions she couldn’t quite name yet. Then, she found out she was pregnant. Rather than withdraw properly from her courses, she simply stopped going and earned a transcript full of zeros.
“I had a really bad scorecard,” she says with a laugh. “I had to come back from all of that and really redeem myself and my grades — coming from that 0.0.”
That redemption would have to wait nearly two decades.
In the years that followed, Spencer built a life the hard way — cleaning houses, reselling vintage jewelry and estate sale finds online, hustling at antique malls, and doing whatever work she could find to support her growing family. She became a mother of three girls, then later a son. She survived abusive relationships and has been raising her kids alone for the past six years.
“I never expected to be a mother, especially of a newborn baby, and not have a partner,” she says. “Really just realizing that I was going to have to do this on my own — taking things from that victim mentality to really owning it and stepping up.”
Finding her calling in a courthouse
It was the family court system, ironically, that set Spencer back on the path to education. After leaving her son’s father, she found herself once again filing protective orders, researching custody law, and navigating bureaucratic paperwork at a self-help legal center — this time with a newborn at home and years of hard experience behind her.
“It was so frightening,” she recalls. “It shouldn't have been so frightening, but there was no real help.”
As she dug into the documents, something unexpected happened: she found herself genuinely intrigued.
“I kind of, in an odd way, enjoyed it,” she says. “Finding the papers and the legal aspect of it was really intriguing to me.”
So, she enrolled at Irvine Valley College to pursue a paralegal degree, determined to atone for the academic wreckage of 2006. She also came in with something she didn’t have the first time around: a reason.
“My kids were my main motivation,” she says. “I wanted them to have a strong support in their life — not a mom falling apart, not more of a victim. I wanted to be an example and a leader to them.”
The woman who once walked away with a 0.0 GPA graduated from Irvine Valley College with a 3.8. She then applied to UCI and was accepted, off the waitlist.
“When I stepped onto this campus for the first time,” she will tell the commencement crowd on June 14, “I felt something I had been searching for my entire life. Fulfillment.”
Spencer is well aware of the generational gap in her lecture halls. She was once invited to a Halloween sorority party by classmates who couldn't believe she had a daughter almost their age.
“I told the girls, I am actually old enough to be your mom,” she laughed. “And they thought that was funny. They were like, ‘what?’ ”
But the age gap, she says, has been more of a gift than a barrier.
This time around, she knew how to ask for help — at the campus food pantry, at the Writing Center, and through UCI's Disabled Student Center, where a staff member she credits by first name, Jesus, helped advocate for her academic accommodations.
Spencer has dealt with serious neurological issues since contracting bacterial meningitis — twice — as a younger woman. The illness damaged the fluid layers surrounding her brain and spine, leaving her prone to severe migraines and other health challenges she has managed throughout her education.
“I never let that get in my way,” she says.
Her GPA at UCI hovered around 3.5 to 3.7 — until last summer, when everything fell apart at once.
Hotel rooms and homework
It started with a curtain rod. In December, Spencer had drilled holes in the wall of her daughter's bedroom to hang curtains. By her birthday the following April, mushrooms were physically growing out of those holes.
Testing revealed the home she and her children had shared for six years was riddled with toxic mold — endotoxins, she explains, not just the more commonly known mycotoxins, but a contamination severe enough that the property was ultimately condemned by the city.
It remains shuttered today.
Her children had been getting sicker for years, and now she understood why. Her 11-year-old daughter — previously healthy — now deals with daily chronic migraines, asthma and other conditions that appeared after the prolonged mold exposure. Her 5-year-old son has been diagnosed with leaky gut and celiac disease. Spencer herself had been feeling chronically run-down for years without understanding the cause.
“I thought we were going to die,” she says. “I mean, I thought for sure.”
With nowhere to go, Spencer moved her family into a succession of hotels for three months. She juggled room rates, McDonald’s dinners, and Wi-Fi access — all while enrolled in three summer school courses at UCI.
“I remember running to find a Starbucks so I could take my test,” she says.
Her instructors asked if she wanted to withdraw. She declined every time.
Her church, South Shore Church, helped her financially. UCI provided assistance for books and supplies. Eventually, she found a mold-free rental in Aliso Viejo, a process that required expensive professional air sampling and swabs, since no landlord was eager to have the request on record.
“It was really hard,” she says. “Not knowing where you’re gonna live and, you know... but we reset.”
The word “reset” is the organizing principle of Spencer’s commencement address, borrowed from an offhand comment made by one of her daughters’ softball coaches during a rough inning.
“He looked at them and said, ‘Alright guys — reset. Just reset your minds. It’s a new inning,’ ” she recalls. “And I was like, wow. That is so good.”
She has applied that lesson to her life more times than she can count: after dropping out of college, after escaping abuse, after giving birth to a son alone, after living in hotels with four children and a pile of homework.
During her commencement address, she plans to challenge her fellow graduates with the question she has carried through her own journey: what are you truly searching for? And she will offer them the wisdom she has earned the hard way: “Good enough isn’t good enough if it can be better — and better isn’t good enough if it can be best.”
Spencer’s plans after graduation are as ambitious as her path to get here. This summer, she will study intensively for the LSAT. In the fall, she plans to apply to law school, with an eye toward family law, real estate or probate — drawn, she says, to the law’s combination of strategic consistency and endlessly varied human stories.
“Every case, the evidence, the papers, the interrogatories — it’s all different,” she explains. “I think that’s what is really most intriguing to me.”
She already does informal paralegal work for free, connecting neighbors and family friends to the right attorneys, helping people navigate a system she once found terrifying.
Her four children — Annabella, 19, Melia, 17, Mya, 11, and Ethan, 5 — have watched their mother do homework alongside them at the kitchen table, read for pleasure to encourage them to do the same, and attend PTA meetings as the sponsorship chair between classes. Her oldest is graduating high school this spring.
“They’re proud of me,” Spencer says when asked what her children think of her. “They’ve seen me work so hard.”
She knows her degree is more than a credential.
“I always felt like I needed to have this perfect family, a father figure, this mold I was trying to fill,” she says. “Once I started going to school, I realized I don’t have to fit into that mold. I can still be successful and do this my own way and still be happy.”
Of all the lessons she’s learned, Spencer says the most important one is this: “You can reset. Not just once. Not just when it’s easy. But, as many times as it takes.”
— Mimi Ko Cruz