My 15 year old daughter has been bugging me to write a blog post that addresses who I am and what my life is like and what the purpose of my blog is. So that is what I'll attempt to do right now.
I am a 40 something year old woman (my birthday was just a few weeks ago: I'm a cancer) with a family who is currently a stay at home mom. That could change at any time, I really need a job! I was born and raised on Long Island, New York, in Suffolk County in a fairly small town that grew up around a rather large psychiatric center, established for the wealthy folks of Kings County, New York. Kind of a country retreat, you might say, for the less mentally stable members of the family. That town is called Kings Park, and it is set on the bluffs of the North Shore of Long Island. My parents were both born in New York City, but both families moved to Long Island when they were still children. My dad was a machinist, my maternal grandfather and and his son were both machinists, and my mom was a bookkeeper for a machine shop my grandfather and dad worked for, so that's how they became acquainted, and eventually married. They moved out to "the country" (Suffolk County) and built our house.
I went to school in that town, and despite my parents' very tumultuous relationship, and many different moves on their parts, I graduated from the local high school. I loved to read, I loved English, I enjoyed writing. I still do. My dream was to attend Sarah Lawrence, but I realized at some point I would have to be satisfied with something more attainable, so I decided I'd attend St. John's University in Queens. Unfortunately, although I was accepted and registered, neither one of my parents would step up to the plate at that time and help me pay, or even fill out the paperwork for financial aid, so I ended up reluctantly "taking a year off" after high school graduation. I moved south to Alabama, I went back to LI, but then, when my dad decided to move to California, I decided to bite the bullet and really move to Alabama, mainly because it was closer to New York.
So, I came south to Birmingham. My mom, grandfather and a lot of extended family was already in Alabama and Georgia. I attended the University of Montevallo, a tiny public university, for two years, and graduated, cum laude from the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB). It took me about 6 years to cram in a BA in English and a minor in Communication Arts (I actually started out as a journalism major in Montevallo). I've done a lot of stuff since then, but really never worked in my field, unless you count working in a book store for a few years as "in my field." I mostly worked in photography, developing film, first in a tiny one hour lab, then in a bigger lab and finally a custom lab. Southern Progress is in our town, so there was plenty of work at the time (1990s), and computer imaging was just getting started.
Of course, I met my husband and had my babies: the girls are now 16 and 15 and our son is 11 (I also have a stepdaughter who is now 21. She came to live with us when she was 5). My girls are currently at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, a kind of magnet school here in Birmingham, where they are music students (Zoë plays piano, Anna is a vocalist). We homeschool Wylie. So that's what keeps us here in Birmingham, and our parents and family of course (my husband has two sisters). We're busy and fairly happy.
I guess I always thought that by now I would have had a writing career of some kind. Maybe editing, or even writing for a newspaper or web site. Perhaps a novel. But somehow, that has never materialized. My kids and husband have all encouraged me to write, especially lately. I've had friends say that my life story is so complicated and crazy and rich, I should mine it for material for a book, maybe a memoir, maybe fiction. I've often thought about writing about my maternal grandmother. But writing about my life here, and about the books I read should help me to get to that place, I hope. It's part practice and part therapy.
So I plan on writing more about my life, with my family and maybe things I remember or want to reminisce about, or maybe that I'd like to forget! I hope that if you're visiting this blog for the first time, you'll maybe leave a comment or book mark it and come back and visit again.
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