My dream was not to have children.

Even when I was a little girl, I didn’t play “House.”  I didn’t dream about being somebody’s Mommy. Carrying a baby gets in the way of climbing trees, and my goal was a tree a day. I climbed in the daytime and read under the covers at night.

I didn’t play with girls and I didn’t chase boys. No dolls, no football, which left me up a tree (literally), but I liked the company I was keeping. I liked being by myself.

So this isn’t going to be the usual story about a girlie-girl raised by her parents. If anybody raised me I raised me.

The ‘best day of my life’ might have been the day I discovered I liked myself as I was, and that I could do for myself. In other words, I was born a person in my own right. That was one fine day when I figured that out.

Or,

the ‘best day of my life’ might have been when I left home at nineteen, rode the bus to Port Authority in the City of New York. Imagine, a teenager moving to Manhattan and becoming a Playboy bunny.

By now you’ve noticed that I cannot be categorized, or corraled.

All I knew was that a Playboy bunny wasn’t like any other girl, so I qualified. BTW, if there was a way to set up a bunny reunion tonight, you could go all around the room, asking the other girls about me:

1. They won’t remember me, or,
2. I wasn’t like anyone else wearing a tail.

The single ‘best day of my life’ was when my first child was born when I became Ryans Mommy!

dawn

(Okay… Next time we meet: “The worst day of my life!”)