About

I’m over 50, female, average height and weight, not much standing out except my bright red hair, with three kids.  I taught English to homeschoolers, got an AA in journalism, finished up my BA in English after graduating all my kids from our homeschool, went on to get a Masters in English with an emphasis in Education, and now work in an aerospace company coordinating training.  I like to travel and love to write. Can’t draw my way out of a paper bag.

I’m also a PK and moved around a lot as a kid, which is maybe why I like to travel.

I had great ideas about what adult life would look like.  I offered my services to God when I was 14 and was sure He was going to take me up on it (read: send me to the exotic places I had decided would be fun to evangelize).

He didn’t.  Or rather, He did, but in His way, which means I found myself living in a large American city, raising my own children and teaching other peoples’ children, but for financial and other reasons, not traveling much at all, and certainly not living the Glorious Life Of Full-Time Ministry For Gawwwddd (you have to say that last word in a very holy Southern kind of accent) I had expected to.

So it’s a bit disappointing.

(Do you see what I did there?  That’s what we English teachers call understatement.)

At any rate, being a PK and a fine upstanding member of a church, where a lot of people know me, I  learned to hold my tongue.  Because people don’t always want to hear the truth.  That sounds harsh, so I mean it in the most non-harsh, loving way possible, but it is something I’ve noticed.

Okay, and while we’re being completely transparent here (so easy to do when the blog is anonymous), also because I am still a work in progress in the delivering-truth-with-grace department. I tend to hold it in for too long and then, especially when feeling under attack, blurt it out in polysyllabic glory, leaving the recipient metaphorically lying on the floor bleeding as if I had used a sectumsempra curse on them.

So I started this blog as a means to practicing truth telling.  I needed to tell it.  It needed to come out. I reasoned that if I put it HERE, I could get it out, but no one would get hurt.

(Read: Me.  I don’t get hurt.  No one gets mad at me.  It’s all about the not getting mad at me.)

Because the “three kids” phrase is waaaayyyy more complicated than it seems at first glance.

One kid is a Type 1 diabetic.

The others struggle with learning disabilities.

And I’m that certain kind of crazy where I homeschooled them through high school.  I am happy to report that we have all survived and none of them are actually hermits who don’t know how to talk to people; to the contrary, people often comment on how well-spoken they are. I attribute this to them not being “socialized” into the false culture of the American high school, but instead into the real world that high schoolers have to figure out how to adapt to upon graduation.

(I get to be snarky about this because this is an anonymous blog but also, ask any homeschooler how many times they have been scolded about their children “not being socialized” – it’s a pet peeve we tend to have.  But I am not implying here that people who don’t homeschool are evil because that’s just stupid, and I become equally snarky when I hear anyone starting down that road).

And then there’s the glaring absence of the father of those children.  I refer to him, in my less charitable moments, as The Imposter and His Merry Band of Personalities. He deals with ADD, possibly has a toe on the Autism spectrum, lives with four or five major phobias (one of which is travel by air), has some kind of emotional disorder that prevents him from engaging emotionally in relationships, and after over 25 years of marriage, I finally figured out that not only does he have a fractured personality, but some of the main ones are narcissists.  I was willing to go the distance with all this, until it became obvious that he was hurting the children as well as myself, so in Dec. of 2019 I asked him to move out.  This, as you can imagine, put me in a precarious position in the Christian community, and I had to step down from my ministry positions and walk away from my teaching and speaking jobs.  Because despite my forte as a communicator, I still can’t convince many people in leadership in that culture that the kind, nice, Christian personality my ex displays in company is not the one we were dealing with on a daily basis at home. I have learned to leave it at, “if you have never lived with a narcissist or split personalities, you will just not get this, and it’s not my job to convince you – either you’re my friend or you’re not, and if this tweaks your theology, congratulations.  It tweaks mine too.”

But that was a dark era from which I have now emerged. Life is good again.. better than it ever was before, and my kids and I still marvel, especially around the holidays, about how easy life is when you’re not jumping through hoops and not knowing who you would be dealing with at any given moment in the husband/dad department. They are all growing, stretching their wings and starting to launch, learning how life really is and slowly shedding the anxiety and fear they grew up in. It’s a work in progress, and the pandemic didn’t help with the whole “launch” issue, but they are getting there.

With any luck, no one will ever trace this blog to me.  With any luck, this blog will not become the overnight sensation of my dreams but will continue to plod along in obscurity, so I won’t ever have to ‘fess up to the words I write on these pages.  With any luck, only my best friend and I will ever know that it’s me writing this.

With any luck, and the fact that I have flat out lied about some of the details in this About page.  ;D