My Life? It's Been a Wild Ride So Far.

It’s mid-morning here in Bellingham, Washington, half a country away from the East Side of St. Paul where I grew up. (Trivia tidbit: Bellingham, just about half an hour south of the Canadian border, is known affectionately as the place where old hippies come to die. Weed is legal and there are as many cannabis shops as there are coffee stands. The teenage me would have been shocked to know that as a senior I'd live in state where I could walk into pot shop and buy those herbs in a variety of forms. Bellingham's claim to fame is the Naked Bike Ride, held every June. And yes, people ride through town buck naked. When we were down at the harbor recently having a picnic supper, two women on their paddle boards stripped down and floated by completely nude. Nobody paid any attention.) And while the 19-year-old me had no issues shedding her clothes to skinny dip in a mixed group, these days I would spare anyone the sight.

I hear from my Minnesota friends that it’s hot and humid. Meanwhile at 62° (temperature, not age; I just turned 67) as I sit on my deck in my pajamas drinking my coffee (hey, I work from home and I’m the boss – don’t judge me), I feel like I need a sweater. This is one of my favorite spots to sit. It’s peaceful, I’m surrounded by lots of growing vegetables in various containers, and deer and rabbits stroll through the yard below. I can see Puget Sound through the trees. Perhaps because I grew up so close to Lake Phalen, the sight and sound of water resonates with me.

Next year is my 50th high school reunion (good Lord, how did I get to be old?), and a Facebook group of our class members has put me in touch with old friends and classmates. Recent questions about things like, ‘What did you do your first year out of school?’or whether your life’s path has followed your goals have prompted me to think about how it is I ended up so far from the Midwest, decades and miles removed from those who were important to me growing up and who contributed quite a bit to who I’ve become.

The reality is my life’s journey is a combination of my inherent wild child wanderlust, a rebellious streak I came out of the womb with, and of what could be kindly termed a tendency to make bad decisions. Oh, and most of all the grace of God and abundant mercy. A number of those bad decisions have resulted in fantastic blessings.

This is my roundabout way of answering some of those questions posted to our alumni group, partly to respond to them but mostly for me. Sometimes you just need to pause and take a look at how you got somewhere before you move forward.

I think I’ll start with a recap of that first year after graduation, because in many ways it laid the foundation for the rest of my life.

A few weeks after graduation – several months pregnant (which nobody but me knew), I went to Young Life Camp in Gunnison, Colorado. (I know, kind of ironic; the ‘good-girl, Sunday School teacher, Bible study fanatic ending up pregnant and not married.) Getting away and spending time in the mountains was good for my soul, but not so much for my body. The long bus ride back to St. Paul was made incredibly uncomfortable by the chills and nausea from a very bad, blistered sunburn. I was already trying to cope with morning sickness, and I still feel compassion for the girl who had to sit next to me for those hundreds of miles.

Not long after I returned home from Colorado, I needed to reveal my condition to my parents, because it was about to be painfully obvious. The long and the short of it was I was asked to move out and put the baby up for adoption. Thank God for wonderful, caring paternal grandparents who offered me a home and love and support. I spent the next four years living with them, and we formed a bond that I would not have otherwise had. My mom’s relationship with them had always been strained, and as a result we were not as close as might be expected. I had spent time with them as a younger child (being sent there whenever a childhood illness threatened to overtake the rest of the household). But this grandmother had a major influence on my life. She's been dead for over 30 years but she still affects me to this day.

For a variety of reasons – some by choice, others not – my relationships with friends and other family suffered, and most of my time that first few months after graduation was spent in the company of my grandparents. Fortunately, my paternal aunts and uncles were compassionate and caring, and I had a great support network.

Because of the pregnancy, my start at the University of Minnesota had to be delayed until winter quarter, and so I worked full time as much as my health allowed. I had lost a job I loved that summer when the owners found out I was pregnant, but I quickly found another one at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I got that job on the day I was contemplating ending my life. But God had other plans for me, and I met some wonderful people there, one young man who became my best friend and was my rock and my sounding board through the darkest time in my life. He's still my friend.

About six weeks after the baby was born and given away to live with another family, I started at the U of M. I knew before I even enrolled that I would pursue a degree in journalism, because I had always wanted to be a writer. Journalism was my favorite class in high school, and many of my fellow JHS grads will remember Mr. Grant. Green Gordy we called him, because of his tendency to dress in shades of green. (Later we found out he was color blind, so that simplified coordinating his wardrobe.) Mr. Grant and I stayed in touch after graduation, and my junior year in college he invited me to be his student teacher on an independent study basis that he coordinated with my college advisor. I would laugh and say that the one thing I learned that year was that I had no desire to teach…ever again.

Hah! God heard that. I have worn many hats over the years, and teacher stands out. I tutored high school students in English, taught classes on college level research paper writing, and put together a course on old world history for a local home school group. I learned basic Biblical Greek so I could teach it to high school students in my church who had a desire to learn. For 10 years my family and I lived on a dairy farm, and I taught a variety of community ed courses in cooking, sewing, wool spinning, knitting, canning, and bread baking. More than one woman raised on Chef Boyardee and frozen TV dinners claims to be a graduate of ‘Katie’s Pretty Good School of Cooking from Scratch’. My large farmhouse kitchen let me invite lots of would-be cooks in for hands-on learning. One of my first graduates put together a cookbook for me, and she recently sent me a jar of crab apple jelly she had made. I could taste the love.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That chapter of my life came many years after, and there were adventures in between.

Right out of college I took a job as an advertising manager at a small industrial trade publication. Okay, it wasn’t the writing career I had envisioned, but I learned quickly where the money was. (I have worn a lot of different job hats over the years, but that’s another story for a future article). After all, having been raised as a small child in a financially-struggling family (my dad worked 3 jobs at one point) that what a job paid was going to the top of the list. I loved reporting and writing, but I knew I didn’t have the looks for TV news. I enjoyed my radio broadcasting courses and my partner and I even won a national award for a radio public service announcement for the Red Cross blood drives. If you remember the tag line, ‘Open your heart and roll up your sleeve,’ that was us. We split $75. Radio didn’t pay well unless you hit the big time as a popular DJ, but the courses did give me some background for a couple of voiceovers I’ve done for some of my clients. (Again, another story, another time.)

Few writers get published in the first go-around, so I knew that writing for publication wouldn’t get me the financial success I wanted, but advertising just might! Unlike some of the other career choices I had considered, there seemed to be little discrimination against females in advertising, and I had the creative juices for it.

After a year at the magazine, I got a job at Josten’s, the class ring people. Only this assistant advertising manager job was in their recognition division – the one that sold those emblem awards like the watches or coffee mugs you might get after 10 years at a company. I got to travel (an exciting thing for a single female in her early 20s), and I had an opportunity to do a photo shoot with Mean Joe Green and his ring the year after the Steelers won the Super Bowl. He wasn’t mean at all. (And by the way, not my only encounter with an NFL star – later on I’ll tell you about having champagne at a Holiday Inn bar in Louisiana with Earl Campbell, yes, THE Earl Campbell. Except back then I didn’t know who he was.)

Josten’s was beginning to look like the place where I could settle in for a good career, except life had other plans for me, and a chance encounter with some wonderful women totally altered the trajectory of my journey, and I found myself part of a religious group. (A lot of people have called it a cult, but I can tell you that in that cult I found more love and acceptance than in the mainstream church that shunned me when I got pregnant. I’ve learned over the years that religious people can be cruel and extremely un-Christian. I am happy to be a Christian and even happier to be unabashedly unreligious.)

After a year in Louisiana as a kind of domestic missionary, I took a position at the headquarters in Ohio, and there I met my future husband, a Kentucky boy who was a Vietnam era vet. Kind of ironic for a former war protestor. Oh, the irony gets even better, because my youngest child is now an Army sergeant working as a government contractor for the European & African Army HQ in Germany, not far from where her father was stationed. Not intentional, just a wild coincidence.

Yes, the woman who intended to be a career professional with no husband and no kids has both. My husband and I have been together for 40 years, starting out our adventure on a blind date (only one ever). I was a rich man’s mistress and a poor man’s wife and wife is definitely preferable. At this stage in my life after a variety of titles, the two that mean the most to me are wife and mother. Throw in Grandma, because I have been blessed with three delightful little monkeys who are just as much handfuls as I was. (My mom has her revenge I guess.) The two little girls have mouths like drunken sailors, and the older one (just turned 6) is very much a wild child, even more so than I was at her age.

Yes, I have tattoos (a long-ago friend from high school commented recently that if there had been that category to vote on back then, he would have nominated me as the girl most likely to get one). And I have vibrantly colored hair. Just like back in the day if you were to flip through the yearbook pages, my hair is never the same. Except I’ve gone from Sun-In and Frost & Tip to deep purple and blue, at least right now.

And I’m still wearing a number of hats. I work as a freelance writer managing social media and web content for a few companies, which explains why I am always online. And I manage the painting contracting business my husband and I have owned since 1994. Both allow me incredible flexibility and let me work from home. This is a big plus, since I have had chronic Lyme disease since 1996 and I am still overcoming PTSD. I never know how I’m going to feel from day to day, so on the good days (like today), I try to make the most of it. On the bad days? I just rest and pray for the next good one. Self-care is important, and you may find me soaking in my hot tub with a glass of wine or some iced coffee.

Perhaps that hair and my tattoos sum up my life. A few years ago, my grandson asked his dad, “Why does Grandma have purple hair and tattoos?” Andy’s answer – “Because son, your grandma is a crazy lady.” Yes, I fit that description, but I can tell you that after all the convoluted paths my life has taken, I am at this point happy and content. I am finally writing creatively (the digital marketing writing pays the bills), and my life is full of wonderful friends who are more like family than the physical ones. And though my heart will always be in the East Side, I love where we live. It suits us well, and I don’t miss the humidity or the below zero blizzards.

How did we get here in Western Washington, aging grandparents whose ownership of a company allows them more freedom than any other job would? That’s another story for another time.