SaintPaulGrrl’s Northern Exposure

I’m a woman in my early 50s whose life has been anything but boring.  I grew up as an only-child in a dysfunctional home with a usually-absent father due to his job as a long-distance trucker and an alcoholic, emotionally unhealthy mother.  It was a stressful dynamic, and I grew up intact largely due to my inate intelligence and a well-functioning “little adult” inside the child’s mind.  I still attempt to understand how all these pieces came together and made me who I am today.  It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion, and like peeling back the layers of an onion, it sometimes makes me cry.

I married in June 1973 when I was seventeen, three weeks after my high school graduation.  My husband was five years older than myself who graduated from college that same month.  We’re still married, and he is a stabilizing force in my life.  We chose not to have children and have no regrets about that. 

I coasted for just over a year after our wedding, trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, and let him be the sole breadwinner of the family.  I went 70% of the way through an LPN course during Marriage Year #2 and dropped out when Dale lost his job and we relocated out of state where he found another job.  After the relocation to yet again another state a year later, I finished a Vo-Tech course as a medical office assistant.  Eventually, I started pulling together my self-esteem and got over my timidity about facing the world.  I started college when I was 24.  I put myself through school with my part-time jobs and earned two Bachelor’s degrees.  In 1985, I graduated with a degree in Nursing from the University of Minnesota, and in 1993, I earned a degree in Clinical Laboratory Science.  I have been in the health care field virtually my whole adult life and have learned not to trust health care practitioners, particularly doctors!

All of that is fairly mundane, however.  I am much more colorful than that: an avid Renaissance Faire goer, a writer of erotic stories and other fiction, a lover of things both masculine and feminine, a collector and creator of jewelry, a respectful admirer of animals in all shapes and forms.  Music stirs my soul, especially drums and guitar, and I revel in primal rhythms from around the world.  Exotic flavors excite me, and I relish the spices of Thailand, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Vietnam. 

I’m a thinker and a meditator, pondering the mysteries of the Universe and the spirituality that infuses life on this Earth.  I am open to all manner of philosophies and embrace the Native American spirituality, pagan viewpoints, and am very fond of the teachings of the Buddha.

I hope to add to my complexity as I grow older.  I want to experience novel things, new friends, new aspects of old friends.  I want the path to get wider and richer.  I want to live each day to its fullest until the very last, whenever that may be.