It All Started...

...when my mother spent my college fund on a slightly-used Jaguar. Well...that's not entirely true - and certainly isn't the whole story, but it's what I go with. The fact is, two weeks before I was to start my freshman year at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts with the majority of the rest of my graduating class (local and cheap), my mother told me she wasn't going to help with the cost. No explanation. Not a penny.

Three days later, she upgraded her black Honda del Sol (great gas mileage, not so great for carting around me and my friends) for a forest green Jaguar with keyless entry and seats that automatically adjusted to the driver. Hey - it was 1994. Impressive, but more importantly - expensive.

Well - as you can imagine, I reacted as any rational 18-year-old adult would and immediately moved out of the comfortable two-bedroom condo I shared with my mother and her crappy boyfriend (who she's currently in the process of wisely divorcing), into a tiny one-bedroom attic apartment with slanted ceilings and only a claw foot bathtub with my best friend (right)...her 2-year-old daughter...and her crappy boyfriend. It was going to be great

I slept on the living room floor in the two feet of space between the couch and the entertainment center. The little girl literally sat on my sleeping self with her sippy cup and turned on Barney at 6:00 every morning. My closet was in the bathroom, which sadly, was the biggest room in the place. It went on like that for about two years, during which time you would think the little girl would grow out of 'Barney.' She didn't. Nor did she grow out of her early wake ups.

I blame this situation for the varying bouts of insanity I experienced throughout the ages of 19 and 20. During one such maniacal episode I joined the Army. Anything had to be better than being the footrest for my 'so-called' best friend (an oil bill and an uninsured car nearly did us in; we later reunited) and her no-job-having, non-rent-paying, and unforgivably long-bath-taking boyfriend.

There was just one minor problem with my impending military career. I was not athletic...or tough...at all. Exercise just wasn't something I was interested in. I was the girl that cut across the middle of the track when we were supposed to be running around it. I was the tall girl all the coaches had high hopes for, who ducked when a volleyball headed her way - and ran from any approaching softball.

Nope, I was a writer, a reader, and if I'm being honest, a cigarette-smoking beer drinker who had a desk job during that day that I performed quite efficiently between cigarette breaks. (This was back when you could actually smoke at the mall!) But I overlooked these seemingly irrelevant characteristics and figured I would just deal with it when the time came. What was the worst that could happen? They couldn't 'kill me.'

So you can probably imagine how this Boston girl who never left the house without makeup was received in good ole' South Carolina for Basic Training. And for now, you'll have to do just that. There's laundry to be done, children to be put to bed and lots of reading. So maybe next time.

But now it's time for the:

Random Development of the Week

Nathan, my older son (right), learned to pee standing up. Seemingly a positive masculine trait for a four-year-old boy - but this training period has been very messy in spite of 'sink the Cheerio' or 'aim for the square of toilet paper.' There's lots of bath mat laundering and shirt changing. How in the world is he peeing on his shirt?

Gentlemen?