From a Mother to a CEO

Heba Salem did not choose this path. The path chose her, one closed door at a time.

Hussein was born in Cairo into a world that would take years to understand him. What followed was two decades of assessments that offered no answers, schools that closed their doors, a medication that dimmed the light in her child's eyes, and a relentless search across four countries for a world that could hold him. Egypt taught her devotion. Canada taught her self-reliance. Saudi Arabia gave her a vision. Texas gave her the place to build it.

From A Mother To A CEO is the story of how a woman forged by waiting rooms and parking lot tears became the founder of Breakthrough ABA, a behavioral therapy practice built from the four gaps she experienced as a mother that no clinic ever closed. It is the story of Hussein, a young man who navigated the streets of Paris at six years old but could not yet

form a sentence, who went on to complete a four-year specialized university program for individuals with developmental disabilities and, in May 2026, walked that campus on his own and graduated. And it is the story of what two decades of fighting for a child quietly builds inside the person doing the fighting.

Heba does not write about resilience as a virtue. She writes about it as something you develop when you have no other option, and what you discover, when you finally look back, is that the suffering and the purpose were the same thing all along.

For every mother who has cried in her car after a meeting that broke her heart, and then wiped her face and drove to the next one. This book is yours.