My mamma was born in Brooklyn and raised in Miami. She had a remarkably difficult and abusive upbringing, the unbelievable horrific kind of childhood you read about or see on TV specials.

Finally, she ran away from home at 15, aided by a boy she knew whose family wintered in Miami and spent the rest of the year in New York. He helped her get settled in New York and decided she should repay him for his help by sleeping with him. My mother is a virgin at this point who doesn't even know where babies come from. And she gets pregnant.

She gave the baby up for adoption to friends of this boy's parents. He is my half-brother Ron who lives in New Jersey and who we didn't meet until 1993. There's a whole other story there.

I'm skipping huge chunks, this is the short version, believe it or not.

She moved to Chicago after awhile and put herself through Northwestern. Got a Master's in psychology (hoping to be able to analyze herself). Shortly thereafter she went to see Timothy Leary speak and promptly sold all her stuff and took off with a friend hitchhiking across the US "to go to San Francisco and drop acid" in her words.

She ended up on a commune in Oregon which was featured in a 1969 issue of Life magazine (my mom and a bunch of people I knew as a child are pictured in it, i have 2 copies now). She met my father there, went on a friendly trip to Mexico with him, and they fell in love got married and made me in the space of a few months in southern Mexico (we always joke around that I was Made in Mexico =). They came back to the US and moved to SanFran as my mommy didn't want me growing up in the woods on a commune.

My father became an abusive cocaine addict when i was 2ish and she kicked him out and raised me on her own from there on out. She worked as a teenage psychologist out of the house so she could always be home for me. It was fun for me, being an only child, because her patients liked to hang out at our house so I had lots of 'big siblings' to play with me.

Anyhow, we moved to Texas when I was 12 and she started working in the oil business and ended up owning and running a successful oil & gas company. She worked her butt off 12-18 hours a day for as long as I can remember so I could have the clothes/shoes/car/trips that she wanted me to have and that I wanted. Again, she officed out of the house most of the time so she could be there for me when I came home from school. More than anything, she wanted me to be happy and have as 'normal' an upbringing as possible.

She dated some, but her focus was really on me. She had a few marriage offers that she turned down because she felt they wouldn't be good enough fathers. By the time I was older, her standards had become so high that she had a hard time finding a man who could live up to them. Also, she was incredibly beautiful as well as an intelligent and successful businesswoman. She intimidated a lot of people. She was lonely in a lot of ways. I did my best to alleviate it, but she really did want to be married again.

I was spoiled, I don't deny it, but I was never spoiled rotten, because I appreciated with all my heart every single thing she did for me. She busted her ass so hard so that I wouldn't have to work when I was in college because she had had such a hard time working and supporting herself through school. She wanted me to just learn and have fun. I never had to get a student loan or have a job except if I wanted extra spending money. She never made feel bad or beholden to her because of it, she did it because she loved me more than anything, and I worked hard to do well & make her proud of me, and make her feel that her money was well spent. I have to go on and be a living monument to how hard my mommy worked and how far she came.

I'm doing my best...