STRANGER THAN FICTION

About Me — Lindy Vogel

I’m an unlikely mother of multitudes

I was born a poor, Asian child.

Sorry, that was inappropriate. I’m neither Asian nor a Steve Martin character. Let me start again.

I was born in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Ken, Japan, on a US Naval Base. I’m white. It was the early 1980’s, and at the time of my birth my dad was a Navy Pilot (F-14’s and F-4’s) who was stationed on the USS Midway. My parents are both Michigan natives — my dad from Lansing, my mom born in Manistique — but met in Florida when my dad was in flight school in Pensacola.

When Mom and Dad met, Mom was an emancipated 17-year-old barmaid, a freckled, strawberry-blonde Finn and Norwegian. I owe my life to an extra “L.” Mom narrowly missed winning a college scholarship in a large spelling bee, ironically finishing second by misspelling “fulfill.” She met Dad, instead.

Mom been abused and neglected by her parents, both alcoholics, and had lived with a friend for several years as a teen. She wanted to be cared about.

Dad was (is) an MSU alum. He’d become a pilot and joined the Navy after graduation. Dad grew up in a more functional, albeit explosively-breeding, German Catholic family. He’d known poverty, too— he is the fourth child of nine. Dad’s mother had been the oldest of twelve, herself, and Dad’s dad was one of nine kids.

Move over, Zebra Mussels! My family is the original invasive species of Michigan.

TMI

A recent deep dive on Ancestry.com has unearthed a secret that I lived for 38 years without knowing: Mom was married before she married Dad. I am still Dad’s daughter, as evidenced by my DNA relation to him other family members. But it was this discovery that led me to another story. Mom had married some other navy guy in order to have “base privileges” after my dad had left for Japan. Dad knew. He sent Mom a telegram to propose, then she divorced the other dude and married Dad.

Mom took classes to convert to Catholicism, but she and Dad lied to my grandparents and the priest about Mom’s having been married before. That way, they could get married in the Catholic Church.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ!

Away they went to Japan.

If you’re reading this, Dad, I’m sorry for airing out our Catholic cynicism. I’ll bet Grandma was righteously pissed when she found out. And this won’t be the last time I overshare in this story.

Cletus the Fetus

My mother has said that she simply thought she’d been drinking too much when she found out she was pregnant with me. Cool, cool. Years later, I told my younger brother this, lamenting Mom’s idiocy and blaming her for my lackluster math skills.* Mack teased me. “Could’ve gone to Harvard!” He would laugh. Hahaha. Asshole.

My parents’ marriage had a tragic end, but for a short time things were stable.

When I was six months old, we moved from Japan to San Diego. I do not have dual U.S.-Japanese citizenship but may have been eligible to apply as an infant. My San Diego car rides with my mother were the setting in which I learned to swear in context, which 10 out of 10 good pediatricians recognize as a developmental milestone.

Dad left the Navy when I was about two, and we moved to St. Louis, where he worked as an engineer for aerospace and defense contractor McDonnell Douglas (later bought by The Boeing Co.). My ginger brother, Mack, was born when I was two and a half, jumpstarting my obsession with babies.

I don’t see Mack nearly enough these days; we live more than a thousand miles apart. But he is still one of my dearest people.

Mom went to nursing school and finished when I was in third grade. I was so proud of my mom! One day, I told my teacher I was going to my Mother’s college graduation, and she wrinkled up her nose and said, “is she, like, really young or something?” I didn’t understand what she meant, because I didn’t know there was an expiration date on attaining a higher education.

Mrs. Gilmore, if you’re reading this, please know that you’ve made a negative difference in a child’s life.

Mom went to work as a urology nurse. She once described having a patient who got a visible erection during his exam. Awkward. I think it was Mom’s medical-humor stories like these, told so frankly at our family’s dinner table, that gave me a love for the gross, shocking, and absurd.

GROSS STORY: Another dinnertime, Mom told us an edifying tale of how she was 17 by the time she’d had her first period, and when “it” came out it was like strawberry jelly. Dad stopped eating, pushed himself back from the table, and said, “KIM.”

Not long after that, Mom had an affair with one of the doctors she worked with, and we had to move hundreds of miles away so that my parents’ marriage could continue its ill-fated march. I said goodbye to my childhood best friend, David. And my friend Cassidy Senter, who was later kidnapped and killed as she walked to school.

TW: There are no adequate words to describe the brutality of Cassie’s murder, but this piece tries.

We moved to the D.C. area and lived in Northern Virginia for three years. I made friends — no small miracle for a shy, bookish nerd like me — and started swimming with a neighborhood club. My dad transferred within the company and began work in marketing the F/A-18 Hornet at the Pentagon. He drove to Crystal City each day, from outside the Beltway, so he wasn’t home much. To this day I have little to no idea what he did at work. He never was allowed to talk about classified programs or let me come to his workplace on Take Your Kid to Work Day.

Dude, Where’s My Boobs?

I started to notice that I had delayed puberty, but by the time I was only eleven, my mom was freaking out and pathologizing it, as was her standard of care.

Dad didn’t think it was time to panic; I was a little bit small and didn’t really have boobs yet, but was still very young. His side of the family was full of “late bloomers,” too. But Mom brought me to the NIH in Bethesda against Dad’s wishes — to see another doctor she was having an affair with — and had me clinically diagnosed with MEN1. She laughed and enjoyed herself throughout the doctor visit. But on the car ride home, Mom started crying. She told me I’d probably never be able to have kids.

I didn’t acknowledge it at the time but was devastated. This story’s bare bones are on Quora, but I won’t link to it here, as I don’t want to share my real name as of this writing. Maybe I will rewrite that story in long form someday.

My existential dark comedy on having an inherited cancer syndrome is here.

Oops, I Did it Again

I outed Mom’s affair. I tattled on her by accident, at dinner of all times.

The dinner table can really be a place of revelation.

I forgive myself for extramaritally cockblocking my mom. And I’m glad the truth came out. By this time, our family had moved to Michigan for my dad’s new career in real estate development — and to outrun a divorce. The marriage was limping along but still lived and breathed, as far as I knew. But right before I turned 13, I came home from my cousin’s volleyball game to find that Mom had moved out.

That was a cold-ass winter.

My dad’s sister-in-law stepped up as a major hero. My blog, Letters to Aunt Kay: Salty Open Letters to My Parenting Muse, is dedicated to her. It’s awkwardly formatted in Blogger, and chock-full of strained metaphors, but it’s mine.

Aunt Kay was (is) a positive force in my life. We ended up living down the street from her, my uncle, and their four kids. When I was around their noisy and loving family I felt included and loved. The Detroit area is the original cold-and-damp, but the warmth I felt at Chuck and Kay’s house saved my life when I was a depressed tween. Well, that and a sweary green Muppet —

Aunt Kay is the mom I never had.

My mom’s boyfriend never did leave his wife, kids, or prominent reproductive endocrinology practice. Mom tried to come crawling back to Dad — unsuccessfully. It was hard to watch.

Just the Three of Us

Dad raised me from that point on. I saw Mom, who lived across town, regularly at first. This was as per the custody agreement. But she came around less and less as time went on. I think she expected that I would socialize more with my friends as a teen, but there was only one problem: I was the “new kid” at school and didn’t have many friends.

Sometimes Mom would call if she was running late to pick me up, asking if I “still wanted to hang out.” I would wait hours for her. Then, I’d find out that she’d dipped over to the mall to go to Pottery Barn and lost track of time, having had to return something.

Her shopping addiction was another family sh*tstorm, but that’s a story for another day.

I tell these raw stories about my mother not as a dig in the dried earth. But these things influenced me profoundly. It was a hard, dramatic divorce to live through. I’m committed to my own truth, for having heard Mom’s distortions of it over the course of my life. I watched her lie to many people I cared about. I was supposed to stay quiet.

No more.

My brother and I spent our teenage years with my dad, in the ghetto-est house in a school district for auto executives’ kids. There was food on the table and heat coming from the furnace — the living was much, much easier than it had been for my folks. But it was hard to be the only kid not wearing Patagonia, The North Face, or Prada. One of my acquaintances, Neema, lived in a house that looked like the house from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. For a long time my cousin K was my only friend, mostly because she is an empathic person, but partly because I was bullied for sounding like a “hick” from Virginia. I inadvertently reinforced this idea one day by wearing a plaid shirt.

My parents were both broke from divorce and debt. If I was lucky, they could spring for a few, ill-fitting pairs of pants at Target — and this was long before Target was cool.

The clichéd silver lining is that I learned not to value material things much. And I am still close with brother and my Dad, who (decades later) has an awesome new wife, Sandy.

Swimming was also a turning point. I started to swim for my middle school’s team, and then my friend convinced me to swim in high school. It was hard! I hated wearing a cap and wanted to quit in the first two weeks. One practice I took a drink of pool water while doing backstroke — I was too afraid of my coach to ask to get out and use the water fountain. I always brought a water bottle after that.

I didn’t drown. Somehow I learned to race a little bit, dive without losing my goggles (usually), and power through the hard sets and weight room sessions. I was proud of becoming stronger and more capable.

Another perk was that there were boys in Speedos with chiseled abs to look at. I got hooked on swimming.

I got excellent grades and good test scores and planned to escape my nuclear family’s dramatic meltdown by leaving for college. I was finally in control of my life.

On the Banks of the Red Cedar

I was accepted to the University of Michigan and got a small Regent’s scholarship there. It wasn’t hard — my high school was an elite, public “feeder” school that funneled its students to U-M Ann Arbor. But I listened to my heart and decided to go to Michigan State University, my dad’s alma mater. MSU had awarded me a Valedictory Scholarship, and I’d earned a Michigan Merit Award that many kids get for good ACT scores. I was cost-conscious and determined to make my own way financially.

I landed at MSU because I felt at home in East Lansing, where there were plenty of friendly undergrads who didn’t seem too rich for their own good. Some of the smartest people I’ve known haven’t been graduates of ultra-prestigious schools, after all. I’m a granddaughter of copper miners and farmers, and I wanted to keep it real.

My dad’s maternal cousin-once-removed Ted Simon had a campus building named after him — not because he was any kind of donor, but because he had swept the floors and then supervised the facilities for so many faithful years. This spoke to me. My frenemy classmate, Beth, had been accepted to U of M long before me, despite having much worse grades; her relative’s name was on a building for a different rea$on.

Go Green!

I knew I would love MSU. And I was determined not to be done with swimming, my first love.

Just Keep Swimming

By a miracle that I still don’t fully understand, I managed to walk on to the Michigan State women’s swimming and diving team. MSU is a Big Ten, Division I school. I had never made an individual state cut in any race, and not one school had ever recruited me. But my high school grades were damn near perfect, so the coaches might have hoped I’d boost the team’s GPA.

I’d had no idea whether I would get past my first few sentences of introduction when I showed up at the coach’s office one afternoon. I was able to get my eligibility paperwork in just as the fall season started. I kept expecting them to cut me. Day after day I showed up, bracing myself for the worst. I got lapped more times than I could ever count. My roommate — a non-swimmer junior who, like me, had roomed blind — invited me to join the fencing club if and when I was cut from swimming.

Nobody thought I would make it.

We swam outside until Halloween — or later if you were an unlucky distance group swimmer. If you’ve never been to mid-Michigan in the late fall, you’ll know that swimming outdoors will freeze your hairy nutsack off. I was slow at my stroke (breaststroke) and any and all things I did in the pool. But even on my gloomiest day, I was glad to be there. The water is my lifeblood.

The hardest part was the swim team’s hazing ritual: jumping off the 10-meter platform. All week long I would dread it. Every Saturday morning after practice, I shed a few fearful tears in my goggles and pictured throwing my equipment bag onto the pool deck to run to the showers. But I was an extra body in the pool in the first place. Nobody would have cared if I’d scurried my scrubby, little ass off the deck and never returned. So I ignored my every survival instinct and forced myself to walk the concrete plank.

The freshman class would climb over fences and barricades and metal warning signs, reaching a dizzying height above the wet, blue polygon. We sang the fight song and clapped along. Then, one by one, we’d have to pencil-dive off the cement platform, plummeting down, down, down, breaking the water’s surface tension with our heels. My palms and feet still sweat when I remember this.

When you looked over the edge before your turn and peered down into the vastness of the clear blue —Jeebus. Due to the water’s crystal clarity it looked like much further a fall than it was. Fuck, fuck, FUCK!

I have never screamed so bloodily as when I stepped off the 10-meter at IM West. Ask BichoDoMato if you don’t believe me!

Belonging and Significance?

I swam in exhibitions and extra heats only. Sometimes I was the sole athlete in the pool for a race. Hah! And I didn’t get to travel to most events, save for an exciting meet against Oakland U. But sometimes I felt included in a group of great athletes.

I feared (and deeply respected) my MSU coaches, especially Matt “G” Gianiodis. They helped me drop FIVE SECONDS in the 100-yard breaststroke — a staggering feat in the swimming world.

I met scores of lovable nerds while I lived in the Honors College Dorm. In contrast to the kids in the student-athlete dorms, my dormmates weren’t hardcore athletes — they were my people. There were stolen minutes of Dance Dance Revolution, The Simpsons, staying up way too late, “borrowing” a couch from the dorm lobby, working in a structural biology lab, and studying.

And, for me, there was swimming.

I met a hot guy at practice. He looked me up and called my dorm room. When I picked up the phone I was initially confused about which Joe he was — there were three of them on the team. But it was the “right” Joe, the Joe who had sat down on the bench next to me and rubbed his fluffy hair on me like a buck scratching his antlers on a tree.

We went to an ice cream place, he did the college guy’s mating dance — burning a “Mix CD” for me — and we talked late into the night.

Joe was smart, handsome, and surfer-esque. We went on a date to a haunted hayride, during which I went out of the way to claim that I had hay in my panties. He was duly enthused.

Joe asked me to be his girlfriend while we were hooking up in his bed. We drove around campus together in his sh*tty car, where he spun my ring around my finger and joked about getting married. He was a farter, but that only endeared him to me. I hadn’t really had much of a boyfriend before and felt a swimmer’s high of infatuation.

I was in love.

The Mess of Love

But the “swim-cest,” as it’s called when two swimmers date each other, was a DH Lawrence kind of “ego-perverted” love. I sensed something was wrong in the middle of the next summer, while he was in L.A. training with USC’s team. I ignored it; when I’d visited he was all rose bouquets and tenderness.

One night I was back in Detroit, toplessly frolicking at a friend’s backyard party, secure in the knowledge that I was loved, and a mutual friend warned me that Joe was cheating.

Joe denied it over the phone. He insisted he would never do that to me.

We came back to MSU for the fall semester and something still wasn’t right.

He flirted shamelessly with everyone else. Like a ransomless Bunny Lebowski, The Big Lebowski no longer dug me. That was the semester when I took 18 credits, worked in the lab, and swam; I didn’t have a lot of free moments. Work-life balance didn’t matter— I was heading for medical school and a life that would be undistracted by a family, right? I kept my head down and kept grinding the time away.

Finally, I worked up the guts to confront Joe. “Did you hook up with someone else?”

“I, I just…don’t think you’re ‘the one,’” was his only answer.

Umm.

I was crushed. Not only was I not “the one,” — I wasn’t sure he was “the one” for me in the first place. But I wasn’t even “one” he’d bothered to be truthful with.

I was still working, swimming, and going to class, but now I was dragging myself through it all. I lost my appetite and stared into space during organic chemistry. I lost a lot of weight — far too much weight for my smallish frame.

Worse yet, I still had to see Joe’s unconcerned face once in awhile at practice. He was fine, as my cheeks hollowed out in sadness.

My grades sucked. And I considered taking time off from school after Christmas break.

John Wayne once said that “courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” So I came back to plod through the stark East Lansing winter.

My swim coaches cared enough about me as a person to call me out for being too thin, and anorexia rumors swirled. They sent me to an eating disorder psychiatrist. I’d had some disordered eating and body image issues, but mostly it was capital-G grief — over Joe, over my mother, over never feeling like I was “enough”— that gnawed away at me.

Mom showed up for me a few times, bringing me home for odd weekends and making me cookies to fatten me up. But it was my dad, Mack, and a few friends that saw me through most of it. And I refused to give up on my life because someone hadn’t loved me back.

Day by day I dug myself out of academic Purgatorio. It was exhausting to fight off the hell-and-ague of depression. I went on antidepressants for the first time.

That summer I went on a study abroad — Tropical Ecology in the Bahamas. When I came back I felt more healthy and whole, having floated in the warm, clear water and learned about reef ecology. I could still taste conch fritters and feel the “saltwater pull” when I saw Finding Nemo in the theater. I could name all of the movie’s invertebrates and fish.

I dated a little — a nice, religious boy wouldn’t have cheated. And then another guy with an earring. It was just alright.

I showed up on the pool deck again, signed up for more biochemistry coursework, and hoped that the team still wasn’t cutting any women swimmers. Most of the team was kind to me, and a few female teammates were not.

One of the not-so-nice ones, an upperclassman, jumped off the 10-m for fun. She landed in a seated position for some reason. SMACK. Her ass and backs of her thighs were black and blue for a month. I am a bad enough person to laugh about this still.

Owner of a Lonely Fart

One day I left my AOL IM account signed in at my mom’s. Mom took it upon herself to IM Joe out of the clear, blue ether, guessing at which screenname was his. I was disgusted that she would ever even talk to him again. Hadn’t I blocked him?? She quickly identified herself as my mom as they chatted, but it was still a betrayal.

Gag me.

Then, he left me a voicemail at my dorm. I did not like this. I confided in my pre-med friend Sahil in our Physiology 431 lecture, asking him whether I should respond.

Joe had let everyone on the swim team think I was anorexic instead of admitting publicly to having put his penis in someone else’s orifices.

Sahil voted nay.

“Never close the door on someone,” my mom kept saying. A self-serving platitude from Mom, to be sure.

But I agreed to hang out with Joe. There was no way he hadn’t moved on to someone younger and dumber, as I had since learned was his M.O. Joe had broken hearts on the swim team before me, and there were sure to be more after. I wanted to forgive him and be free to let him go.

We all know where this is going.

I hadn’t freed myself of jack sh*t. I was still in love with Joe, but I wished I could quit him. He’d probably only shred my heart again, the way he shredded those waves while he surfed.

We went for Chinese food one night. I got an auspicious fortune cookie: “Your dearest dream is coming true.”

I laughed to myself and felt sad because that seemed impossible.

You And Me And The Bottle Makes Three

I got pregnant. I hadn’t thought I could; Mom had said I probably wouldn’t ever. And still, I’d been responsible enough to take birth control. But I’d carelessly left my pills at home the last time I’d visited. I had no idea that Joe would come knocking on my dorm room door, late at night, after having somehow crawled UP into East Wilson Hall through an open casement.

He wasn’t ready to be a dad — creative re-entries into my life and vagina be damned. He cried. I cried. But I wanted to keep our baby. My dearest dream was coming true, whether or not he was “in.”

It was a naïve and privileged choice. My parents were supportive but also quite worried.

Joe seemed relieved when I told him he should still go on his study abroad as planned. He emailed his boss from an internship he’d aced at Boeing, getting himself a job when such dot-com-collapse-era opportunities were few. He would call me from a payphone in Leuven and talk about how he wanted us to live on a sailboat. With our kid.

I was down for that.

He also confessed his cheating sins. I had a hard time trusting him from when I’d hurt so badly. I forgave him but made sure he understood that if it ever happened again, we’d be done.

Joe’s mom talked him out of our sailboat dream. When he came back from Belgium and finished his degree, we headed West. I got on a plane in Detroit, hugged my dad with tears in my eyes, and left with a suitcase of baby shower gifts. Joe met me there with the ’88 Jetta with the loud-ass muffler, but now I felt deeply grateful for that damned car. He started his manufacturing engineer position. There was just the Jetta between us, so we lived in a hotel for the first two weeks of his career — from the Totem Lake Inn I could waddle to the hospital for my appointments.

I finished my final lab paper and turned it in remotely. I had a bachelor’s in biochemistry and molecular biology!

We got a one-bedroom apartment on Mercer Island, which we later learned is a playground for the likes of Microsoft guy Paul Allen. We slept on an air mattress and waited for our crap to arrive by truck. I tried and failed to learn how to cook Swiss Steak. “This is nice!” we took in the scene. “Let’s buy a house here!”

Lol.

Is This Love?

Our son was born right on his due date, after Joe had been sick the previous day, vomiting from the stress of his new job and impending Dadhood. John was beautiful and perfect. It was the strangest sensation to meet a living, breathing being who was utterly dependent on us. How hard could this possibly be? People did it all the time!

LOL.

Spoilers: parenting was hard. I was good at breastfeeding — John squishified out into a delicious infant marshmallow, as all babies should. But being sleep-deprived was tougher than much else I’d done. Both Joe and I battled depression.

I would listen to Joe’s MP3’s in our apartment while he was at work, dancing with Baby John. We liked “Is This Love?” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. I’d thrown my cards on Joe’s table, and somehow he’d seen fit to pick them up.

Joe’s maternal grandma had left him and his siblings some money when she died. He used it to buy us a house, north of Seattle, where we could conceivably stretch to afford it. Our family size stretched, too. By the time John was six months old I was pregnant with Wes. And quickly, again, with Easter.

We were juggling babies.

Joe did a certificate program, climbed the corporate ladder, busted his ass on Boeing’s 787 program, and got into University of Washington’s evening MBA school. Boeing paid for his graduate degree. He only missed class the night Easter was born.

It is searingly tough to tend to three small children at once. We had one local friend, Jane, who we could occasionally get to babysit. And no family within a thousand miles.

Positive Discipline

Our neighbor Lizzie saw how hard we all were struggling. She introduced me to a local co-operative preschool that changed the course of my life. I met other parents, none of whom were quite so young, but all of whom made for a supportive peer group. I learned about Jane Nelsen and Bev Bos, early childhood development and how not to yell at your kids as a chief means of communication.

I started to feel a sense of competence as a mother.

Don’t get me wrong — my kids are still a little bit screwed up for having me as a mom. I tried so hard to “climb clear of my wrong beginnings” as a young woman with trauma and fell short of my hopes on most days. But the parent-education part of co-op preschooling was crucial for my momming life.

I loved Seattle’s people but loathed its dreary climate. After we got married in 2006 on the Kitsap Peninsula, Joe got a job in San Diego. We moved there as he was finishing his MBA.

A year later, we moved again — Joe’s “wet-dream” job had sent a recruiter his way. After briefly living in Tehachapi, we landed in the L.A. bedroom community of Santa Clarita.

Joe had had a vasectomy after Easter was born. We’d been sure we had experienced enough exhaustion for a few lifetimes. But sometimes, a breeding hero’s journey has as many twists and turns as an epididymis.

We had Joe’s vasectomy reversed.

If someone had told us twenty years ago that we would end up birthing six children, I’d have said they were full of bullroar.

But Zeke, Gale, and Andy swam their way into this strange life, too.

We moved to Santa Cruz after living in Santa Clarita for 8 years. Joe went to work for an even cooler company — Joby Aviation. The Jetsons’ metaverse with “flying cars” really has arrived. After renting a few places, we settled in Bonny Doon.

Joe and I became foster parents not long after the pandemic started — this had been a dream of mine for years. During our placement with our teen foster daughter, our home almost burned down in the massive CZU Lightning Complex wildfire. The only reason our house still stands is because of a renegade neighbor who’d refused to evacuate, seen the approaching flames, and flagged down a fully equipped engine. The fire came within a few feet of our house on three sides, blackening big chunks of our five acres.

Joby’s CEO, JoeBen Bevirt, also stayed behind and brought his own water tender around the mountain, defending homes. He helped save our house while we’d evacuated, and we didn’t even know it until months later.

Then, some more dramatic sh*t happened.

Out of absolutely nowhere, I had a manic episode. I was diagnosed with bipolar I, and our whole family was thoroughly scarred.

We didn’t think things could get any worse.

But later that year, a sexually violent predator (Tier III sex offender and serial rapist) was placed in the house next door to ours. This was insult to injury. It was terrifying to think of rubbing shoulders with a man who, according to his therapists, is unrepentant for his rapes at gunpoint. He’s at high risk to reoffend, as such. We instantly lost 17 years’ worth of equity in our primary home. And we had to move away from our “forever place,” as we weren’t prepared to wall ourselves in with a fortress of guns. As the Dooners would say, the whole point of living in Bonny Doon is its peace and security. We couldn’t let our fifteen-year-old daughter, who was the same age as his victims, be his next one.

We were devastated to leave the ‘Doon, with its wonderful little school and preschool, brilliant teachers, wild-earth beauty, and resilient mountain people.

We live in town now but visit the Santa Cruz Mountains often to see friends.**

Our family is complete, and hopefully, we are settled for the long run. There’s a furry friend in our family now, too. But I’m permanently pet-shy, and here’s why.

It is bittersweet to be done having children. But in addition to full-time momming I have found a new passion for writing. I love satire and dark humor. Parenting Humor is my favorite topic, and I recently got Top Writer status! But I’m trying to be a Jill of all trades.

And I’m grateful every day for my improbable life.

My Life Goals:

My dearest dream — having a family — has come true. Now I’ve set my sights on being a Sweary Grandma who drives a noisy school bus full of grandkids and babysits at will. It will be my leaping delight to let them jump on the couch and eat M&m’s until they’re worked into a lather. Then I’ll bring them back to their parents!

I also aspire to write a memoir.

Joe and I hope to go on a “pools of the world” tour when he retires. We’ve already made Stop #1— the Mandalay Bay pool in Las Vegas. We will splurge on exorbitantly-priced tickets to swim in the Hearst Castle pool, as well as another decadent one on the seaside cliffs of Croatia.

F*ck, yeah.

My heroes:

Mary Roach, for the passage she wrote about the space toilet in Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.

Barbara Kingsolver, for High Tide in Tucson: Essays From ‘Now or Never,’ which is a book my dad read to me and Mack when I was in high school. All the more meaningful, because my dad is NOT a book lover.

Barbara Kingsolver once collaborated with her daughter, Camille, to write something. I would love to do that, too, with my daughter.

Zora Neale Hurston, for every last bit of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

David Sedaris, for everything he has written.

Sarah Silverman, for The Bedwetter and Sell the Vatican, Feed the World. For me, the pinnacle of a literary career would be to write a Bedwetter from the parent’s perspective, only with less pee and more skidmarks.

My goals in writing on Medium:

I write for myself. But I’m edging toward a memoir of essays. I’m trying to figure out whether Medium allows you to take your metered stories and republish them elsewhere as a book. If so, I hope to reuse some of these articles.

I’m enamored of my pub, Sweary Mommy.

Something is wrong with me: I cannot write fiction for fiction’s sake. I don’t like to write stories in the third person. I think it’s because, as I child, I was often criticized for “exaggerating” and doubted as to whether I was telling the truth (#MommyIssues).

I feel fake when I can’t see my own “voice” on the page. I have read that the same was true of Sylvia Plath, but fortunately, I am not nearly as depressed or talented.

I’d also like to hone my craft and publish more pieces in Pregnant Chicken, Nameberry, and my other favorite sites.

Thank you for reading my About Me story!

*FASDs are not funny, y’all. I know. But sometimes you have to laugh about the things that make you feel helpless, like how someone managed to treat you with disregard from when you were, like, a zygote.

**The story of our family’s displacement by the violent rapist is in the works. Its working title is Excitable Boy.

Special thanks to @HSISC for the John Wayne quote, to my editor, Recel, and to Quy Ma for creating About Me Stories.

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