( A story starring you, or who you might be, or I might be. Hope you enjoy!)

You are born August fifth nineteen seventy-six in Kansas City, Kansas. You weigh five pounds, four ounces at birth. You were born with a head full of strawberry red hair, of which your mother is very proud.  For the rest of her life she will boast to anyone who will listen that you were born with a full head of hair.  She will attribute this to her genes.

You are a middle class white girl sentenced to a middle class childhood in Kansas City, Kansas. There could be worse, your mother will tell you, and although in time you will agree with her, for the first fifteen years of your life this is not the case. Your father is an insurance salesman, and as such is very aware of the myriad accidents and disasters that befall good middle class white girls like you every single day in America. Even worse, he knows the economic costs of such tragedies and relentlessly tells you about it. "A family in Topeka is now facing over a half million in legal and medical bills after that two car accident on the expressway yesterday, all because they let their daughter drive without properly insuring her car!" He shakes his head in complete horror, "Can you imagine?"

You will be tall, skinny, pale and freckled. The sun will not be kind to you. In your thirteenth summer your mother will buy you a white one piece swimsuit with red stripes. The first day you wear it to the pool, the boys laugh and call you a peppermint stick. A crude joke is made about licking and sucking, and you run home crying. You do not return to that pool all summer.

Midway through that year, you begin menstruating. Your breast and hips grow, and suddenly you have curves. It seems to happen almost overnight. You notice the gazes at school, older boys who had never noticed you before now do. It gives you confidence.
You decide you need an identity, you need to belong. You try for awhile listening to country music, and putting together the closest thing you can come too a cow-girl outfit. You feel ridiculous. You go to the mall, and see that the guys you really like, all have t shirts with Guns And Roses or Metallica on them. You decide that is who you will be. A rocker chick.

You go to the music store and swipe some tapes. You discover that since you have grown breasts, you can get away with almost anything if you are clever about it. If you are caught, you just deny it and look sad. An old man once told you that "he could never refuse a redhead," and let you walk out with the tube of lipstick you had just stolen. You feel like a an out of control racecar.

You start dating one of the older long haired guys who wears a Metallica t-shirt. "Dating" seems to mean making out in his car behind the abandoned mall. You drink vodka with him, because. You lose your virginity to him, because. It hurts a little, is a little awkward, and you think it should feel more monumental than it does. A few weeks later he stops calling you. You don't really care.

You start "dating" one of his friends. The friend is in a band, and thus a big step up. You go to his parents garage, and listen to his band rehearse. Years later, you will realize how awful they were, but at the time you are carried away. Everything is so new and dangerous. You think they are better than most bands on MTV. You think that they will become famous. You think that you are probably dating a future rock star.

They have four songs, and they play them for hours at the time. They are trying to create a new form of heavy metal. To your credit, you are not the only teenage girl who falls for them, their admirers are legion. You all smoke pot in the garage, and dream of New York City, of Los Angeles, of those legendary mythmaking venues with names like "Whiskey Go-Go' and "CBGB's." You picture what you will wear to those places. You see yourself in "Spin" magazine, on the arm of your very own guitarist. You read about yourself in the National Enquirer. You know, beyond any and all doubts, that you too, were born to be a star. You too, were made for those places.

You realize that you are pregnant two weeks after your sixteenth birthday. You do not yet have a drivers license. You are prepared to have an abortion, but neither you nor your boyfriend have the money, and there is no one that you can borrow it from. Your parents find out. At that point, you know that you are having the baby. At that point, you know that your life is over. The dreams of wearing leather and fur in the Whiskey Go-Go crumble into the Kansas clay. You are going to be another teen mom statistic. You cry for two days straight.

Your boyfriend has not called you. After you had told him you were pregnant, over the phone, he hung up on you. He does not speak to your friends. His silence tells you everything, and you are pissed off. You are beyond angry that your father was right about him. You are furious that he could not rise above a Kansas City insurance salesman's low expectations. You want to kill him. You want to kill your father. You want to tear the world itself to pieces. You do not know who to be angry at. You wonder how you can ever be a mother, and you marvel that as mad as you are, at the same time something is finally happening to you. Something unexpected has finally happened. You are shocked to discover that amidst the anger and fear, there is a kind of... anticipation. You feel alive.

Your parents tell you they have decided that you will have the baby, and then it will be put up for adoption. You are speechless. You had never seen this coming. You were supposed to be teen mother statistic, but now they wished to course correct, to pretend, to act as if this life changing event had not happened. You become angry. You are dumbfounded to hear yourself saying that you are going to keep the baby, that you will never, never, never give it up. Something inside of you solidifies. You feel it happen, and in that moment you realize that you mean what you say. You will not give it up, it is yours. When you look back, you will realize that is the first moment you thought of yourself as a mother.

Your parents do not speak to you for three days, but you suspect they are not as angry as they pretend to be. Finally, they tell you that they will help you raise the baby. They spoke to the boys parents, and they agreed to financially help you, but the boy would have no contact with the baby, until he was older. That is fine with you. You had forgotten that he existed.

The weeks pass. You are pregnant, and you start to show. The inevitable withdrawing from school and friends begins, although a few friends stay by you. You will have these friends for life. You are sick sometimes in the morning, and you crave liver. You call yourself a walking afterschool special.

Your social life suffers, but your grades improve. Partly due to your parents insistence that you spend more time studying, and partly due to you needing to prove that you can do it all, that you are, in fact, not failed teen mom statistic. You began to seriously consider a life in medicine. You start researching how much money doctors make.

Your daughter is born on a cold January morning. Your parents are there, and your mother cries when she sees you holding the baby. You name her Olivia Rose, Olivia because that's your mothers name, and Rose because you will always love Axl Rose. Olivia's father was not there, and you choose to believe it is because your father kept him away. You ask your mother to call his mother, and tell her, and she says that she already has. He does not come to the hospital.

Your baby is born jaundiced, and must stay in the hospital under a special light for two days. She is small. When she can finally go home, you have a nursery equipped for her in your parents house. It is decorated with ladybugs, so from that point on, you refer to her as "your little ladybug."

You spend the rest of your high school career as "the girl with the baby." You are an anomaly in your mostly white, conservative, upper middle class neighborhood where, if girls become pregnant, they are driven quietly and secretly to the abortion clinic. You discover that keeping and raising your child in your zip code is an act of shocking rebellion. Parents ask their daughters to avoid you at school. Boys think you are an easy conquest. You embrace solitude, and soon prefer only the company of the two friends who stuck by you during the pregnancy. You throw yourself into the schoolwork, and are consistently on the deans list.

Your daughter is walking by the time your high prom rolls around. You do not attend. Your memory of that night is having a family dinner with your parents and your daughter, and Olivia frantically telling you about a Disney cartoon she had watched during the day. You know that Olivia's father is probably at the prom. You fall asleep with your arms around your daughter. You think your prom night was better than any of theirs.

You feel the gulf between you and your classmates, they look at you like an alien. By the time graduation draws near, you feel impossibly older than they are. You see lines, circles, and wrinkles when you look in the mirror that no one else can see. You are beautiful, still pale and freckled, but you are tired, you have endured.

You graduate with honors. The next fall, you began a premed program, partially on scholarships and partially on loans. Your daughter is nearly three years old, and you have done it. You are no teen mom statistic.
You never lost your love for hard rock music, and you start going to see more of it live. You never got into the flannel shirt sadness of Nirvana, as most of your peers did, but you dig Alice In Chains. You are sitting in the grass on your college campus quad one day with an acoustic guitar trying to play "Down In a Hole" when a long haired boy sits next to you. He likes Alice In Chains a lot too, and knows a band that sounds just like them! Which you doubt. You still agree to go see the band with him, though.

The band is the boys band. You sit in a table near the stage, and listen while they play music that sounds nothing like Alice In Chains. After the concert, the boy sits next to you and sheepishly admits that he knows they aren't that good, but they are "just getting started". He is a dental student, so he hopes if the band doesn't make it big, being a dentists can pay the bills. You say you imagine that it can. You have two drinks with him, then leave alone, and return to your parents house. It is the first time in nearly three years you have been on anything that could be called a "date."

You continue to see the boy, off and on, through your pre-med years. You usually do not sleep with him, and each time you do it is out of a sense of duty. You know that he is not "the one," but it is nice not being alone. He seems to want more, and is resigned, as he puts it to being a dentist. The band goes through three or four iterations and only had five total shows. He is not going to be a rock star. "Don't worry," you tell him, "Neither will I."

Your daughter starts kindergarten the year you graduate from college. You know you haven't been around as much as you should, and you feel awful for leaving the brunt of the child raising to your parents. They are stoic as ever about it. The checks from the father's parents have continued to come, and they have helped, but the father has shown no interests in knowing his daughter. You feel it is for the best, and you hope he is doing well. You are not angry at him, you are just indifferent.

Your daughter begins learning how to read, and you start medical school. You tell her that you both have reached an important junction in your life, and then explain to her what the word junction means. You tell her that everything you do, you do for her. You tell her that no matter what, you love her, no matter what. Both of you fall asleep at nights with a book in your hands.

You realize the utter truth of what you told your daughter. It will take too long to become a doctor who makes any money, you realize, and you do not have the time. You switch to nursing school. Your parents outwardly support you in this decision, but you can tell they disagree with it. You can tell, they feel you are making the wrong choice. You tell them that you made one choice, when you were sixteen years old, and now all other choices have to follow from that one. You dig in.

Ten years later, you are a working experienced nurse. Your daughter is dating, and a honors student in her high school. Your hair has strands of grey in it, and you feel never fully rested. Yet, you are happy.
You have never married. There were men, here and there, and you never had time for anything serious. The driving force of your life remained Olivia. You like to annoy her by playing the old song "Sweet Child Of Mine.' "This is the man you were named for," you tell her, "and you are my sweet child." She begs you not to embarrass her around her friends.

Olivia has started a relationship with her father. You barely noticed the years when the checks stopped coming, but then, a few years later, they started again. Her father is in the army now, and married. He is miserable for the way he treated Olivia and you he tells you, and is in therapy. He wished you to forgive him. "For what?" You ask him, genuinely confused, "We were kids..."

The years seem to speed by. Everyone had always told you they go faster and faster, and now you believe them. It seems that you never put in less than ten hours at work, and when you some home your feet ache so bad an ice pack seems like an insult. Olivia has started college, and is excited about her communications major. She has dreams of working in Silicon Valley. You listen at night to her excitedly describe her future, and sometimes you fall asleep while cradling the phone, and dream of her. You were able to give her a childhood, and this feels you with unfathomable joy. There is no weariness that this thought cannot assuage. You did not fail.

Olivia graduates from college in the spring of your thirty-eighth year. Everyone thinks you are her older sister, and you cannot help but derive happiness from this. "I am her grandmother," your own mother tells strangers, "but it's true, that I do look young..."

Olivia goes to The University Of California to graduate school. That year, first your father, then your mother passes away. Grief sets in, and every day feels like eternity. You take a leave of absence from work. You are thirty- nine years old, and you feel like you could sleep forever. For the first time, it all seems like too much.

You move to Portland Oregon, and take a new nursing job there. The change does you good, and soon you are hiking and biking in the natural wonderland. You discover Portland lively music scene, and Saturdays can find you conversing with friends about new and upcoming bands in downtown coffee shops. Your father had left a sizable insurance policy behind, and it comforts you to know that Olivia will never want. It angers you that so many do, so you give much to charity. You have established a rhythm, and you try the word home on your tongue. It feels right to you, and you decide that you are home.

The years pass. Olivia gets a comfortable job in Silicone Valley, you never understand exactly doing what, only that it involved the emerging field of augmented reality and its applications in medicine. You are proud that she is helping the sick. You campaign ceaselessly for a better healthcare system, and you find yourself in marches and protests. Your daughter tells you she is proud of you.

Olivia gets married, and soon, has two children. Olivia expresses her unhappiness that you have never settled down with anyone, and tells you that she just wished you to be happy. You cannot convince her that you are happy. You are soon to be retired, you have your grandchildren, your work, her, your music... you don't know how you could have it so good you tell her, and you mean it.

Your grandchildren grow older. Drew, grows to six feet one inch and plays soccer. His sister, Nancy, plays the piano beautifully. You lavish them with presents when you see them, which you know is not often enough.

Two weeks before your seventy-second birthday you get weak. At first you suspect you are getting the flue, but then you know that it is worse. You check yourself into the hospital, and call Olivia. She and her husband Ron, get on a plane and are there in a few hours. With them is Drew, and he holds in his hand his own son. "This is your great-grandmother," he tells him. "She is the reason any of us are here."

You barely hear the words "inoperable" and "make her comfortable," you take Olivias hand and squeeze it. "Everything was for you," you whisper, "you're my girl."

You began drifting off, you might see a light, in the distance. There was a song, you used to love so much... You smile, humming the tune, the words forming in your mind.