It’s a long story that starts in rural California, with wood heat, no television, lots of beans and rice, and a bearded father that wore corduroy shorts and knee high hiking socks, with a black turtle neck and beret year round. My mother for a time wore a shirt dress, panty hose, and high heeled pumps as her personal demonstration against all things hippy, even though we were riding around in a VW micro bus, eating homemade whole wheat bread and growing our own sprouts in a large recycled glass jar.  I grew up and fell in love with a man with sparkling eyes and a smile that made my knees weak. We had three home birthed children in short order. We longed to start a new perfect version of family life, which neither of us had really had. My own having been so unconventional, and his upset with the brutally abrupt divorce of his parents, and many of his aunts and uncles, in what seemed to be the trendy thing to do for babyboomers  in the 1980s. So we converted to Mormonism and set about perfecting our family life. I spent the first years at home with babies, rising before dawn to cook him a full breakfast, before he went out to work on the rivers doing Chinook Salmon surveys.

 I imagined we would raise our kids in a back-to-the-land-semi-conservative-yet-still-earthy-crunchy-bliss, but jobs were hard to come by in those mountains and we were one emergency away from being broke with a capital B. That’s when my husband decided he was joining the military to assure our family’s survival and ability to thrive. I was lead right out of a comfortable spot in the land of fruits and nuts straight into the land of the really conservative southern christian righteous right. Talk about culture shock. That was 18 years ago. The universe certainly has a sense of humor. Now, I’m stuck understanding both worlds, but not really aligning myself with either of them. Along the way I left Mormonism and became an Episcopalian. Now I am wavering on that. I’m just trying to figure out which box I really belong in, since people are unnerved by those they can’t categorize. Sometimes, even I’m unnerved by not being able to categorize myself.