Chapter One; Part One: Then to Now

Chapter One

Part One

She’s eleven now. Eva. It was almost thirteen years ago that I was seeing a psychic therapist about her, or grudgingly, “him.”  I wanted to know WHEN I was going to have a baby and WHY couldn’t I stop obsessing about it. I learned from the French psychic who thought she was Jackie Kennedy’s forgotten twin, that this mythical he- or she-baby had been demanding action from the spirit world to my twenty-nine year old ovaries more intensely than I could bear at the time.  But I had been busy! I started as a child of a low-income family in the deep South who had been focused on proving my identity beyond those roots.

As a teen, I fast-tracked my identity as a working girl. I hounded a local drugstore until the pharmacist finally hired me as a cashier. It was easy to have a job and participate in almost every high school club and two sports, softball and cheerleading. I even had time for a relationship with a boy, within which we behaved as if we were a thirty-year-old married couple.

In college, which I started a year early on scholarship, I worked as a media clerk then graduated to become a classroom teacher.  After only a few years, I landed a job as a case manager in a major research project for neurological disorders. That experience quickly led to more and more contracts to provide training and assistance to school districts so I became a freelance educational consultant.  I moved to what I thought was a very cosmopolitan city and started looking for a “donor” to help me get pregnant. Turns out I found her a “father” instead.

Finding a willing and outstanding dad for the imaginary baby, buying my third home to nest us in, birthing Eva as natural as a wildcat, and nursing her on demand barely put a hiccup in my career. Over her sweet life so far, I continued to grow professionally. I signed on with a state agency to become a bureaucratic leader in education focused on systems change. My last stop in bureaucracy was administrator of K-12 student services, which includes school counselors, school social workers, school nurses, and my favorite…school psychologists because they are great help when attempting to multitask an overachievement-obsessed life. Did this paragraph exhaust you? It did me, both in life and in writing about it.