If you are reading this and you are wealthy and somewhat attractive, of either gender, I am a single mother of two beautiful daughters who stays at home part time to ensure that my family eats gourmet meals, that the house stays impeccably clean and that my children develop into even-tempered, child prodigies.
If you are reading this and you are my husband, then you know that none of that is true. Hi, honey!
On the reals. I was born and raised in the Central Valley of California. Moved to Marin County for a short middle-school stint and then to the East Bay for the duration of high school. There's not much more to my childhood than that. Other than the brother-eating bush or the time I said "French kiss" at Rainbow Daycare or some other stuff I might make up to illustrate a point to my children.
Then, I went to Wellesley College. Best time EVER. Learned a ton of stuff about stuff. And about myself. There's a bunch of writings on this blog from that era. Very emo, very precocious, very quasi-insightful. Here's an explanation of that load of crap which I imported to DD recently in a moment of panic, worried about losing my college opus housed on my now defunct blog, get this: Laurenarcissus. It's good stuff to read when I start to take myself too seriously. For me, at least, a guaranteed laugh. For my daughters a lesson in the early days of the Internet and over-sharing.
I met my husband, beadle (he goes by his lowercase last name; his first is Michael; it's a PR thing, I guess), the summer after college when I had a rocking body and was house-sitting and interning and hitting the City and living THE LIFE. When I met beadle, I had three other "Michaels" programed into my cell phone. Okay, one was a Miguel. Nevertheless. There was a time...
Next, I went to grad school at UCLA and got my M.Ed. in a social justice education program. Moved to Los Angeles and got married half way through the program. I taught 9th grade social studies in Watts our first year of marriage. I value the experience, but I hated about 95% of every day. Particularly the waking up at 5:30 AM.
So, I got knocked up. Moved back to Northern California. And that's when Babybel entered the scene. Twenty months later: Danjo. Both were planned pregnancies, if you're wondering. And while I'm a womanist who demands equality, it'll probably be me who "gets fixed" instead of beadle, because if I don't cut off the egg supply, I'll keep having babies. Right now, I'd like to have about eighteen more. And I'm not even that kind of religious. So, yes. I'm basically a crazy.
I started writing this blog to keep me sane. Here's one of my inaugural Dearest Daughters/preservation of sanity posts.
