Cartoonist Cathy Guisewite (born September 5, 1950, in Dayton, Ohio) turned late-night doodles about everyday life into the beloved comic strip Cathy. She often joked that her enduring success—and occasional hair-pulling—came courtesy of her determined mother, who nudged her toward syndication “until the ink finally stuck.”

Fresh out of college and working in advertising, Guisewite spent evenings at home eating M&M’s, listening to soulful music, and sketching her “single-career-woman” anxieties. When she mailed the cartoons to her parents, Mom insisted she send them to a syndicate. “All parents believe their children can do the impossible,” Guisewite later wrote. “The really annoying thing is, they’re probably right.”

To “get Mom off my back,” she finally submitted the samples in 1976—and landed a contract within days. Cathy debuted that year and grew strong, eventually running in more than 1,400 newspapers worldwide. Readers saw themselves in Cathy’s honest tangle with shopping sprees, diet disasters, and romantic misfires: “Mother, food, love, and career,” she quipped, “the four major guilt groups.”

Guisewite’s strip resonated because it showcased the weaker moments we all have—proof that vulnerability can be funny, relatable, and healing. As she once said, the comic endures “because it shows the problems we face and the messy, personal ways we solve them.” In sharing every “AACK!” with a smile, she reminded us that laughter softens the loudest doubts—and that moms, though forever behind us, are usually right there cheering, not merely quietly ripping their hair out.