Clara Jobs: The True Mother of Steve Jobs
She had been born Clara Hagopian in New Jersey to Armenian parents who fled the horrors of massacres in the Ottoman Empire. Walter Isaacson emphasizes Clara’s private ills, explaining she suffered an ectopic pregnancy that rendered her unable to bear right children. Nine years after marrying Paul Jobs in 1955, she and he adopted a child.
Steve Jobs: Knowledge of Adoption
Steve Jobs was aware of his adoption from a young age. He remembers, “My parents never didn’t tell me this.” One of his first vivid memories was a conversation with a little girl neighbor when he was only six years old. Upon learning that he was adopted, the girl asked, “So this means that your parents didn’t want you?” This statement struck him like “an electric shock,” as he would later describe. When Clara and Paul Jobs found out that he was distressed, they tried to console him, saying, “Not at all! You are special; that is why we chose you.”
The Unbreakable Bond of Steve Jobs & Clara Jobs
Steve Jobs admired Clara Jobs and Paul Jobs very much and talked a lot about the parents who adopted him. He maintained that they were, in fact, his biological parents saying “Paul and Clara are 100 percent my parents. Only a sperm and an egg bank have Joanna and Abdulfattah Jandali. It’s not rude; it is the truth,” Walter Isaacson quotes.
Overall, Clara Hagopian was a significant influence on the life of Steve Jobs and in ways that need to be protected and will be presented. Some would call her Jobs' "adoptive" mother, but he insisted that Clara Jobs was his true mother, an indication of the depth of the connection that they shared.
