In 1974, after a church-potluck-casserole dinner, near a puddle of park sewage, my mom and dad shook hands really hard, creating a zygote inside my mom’s stomach. The zygote ended up eating too much, so it grew into a fetus and then the fetus became a baby and the baby fell out of my mom’s dress.

I was the second of four zygotefetusbabies to fall out of her dress in 7 years. And, since there was no “Safe Place” law on the books, they decided to keep us all.

I have a brother who is one year older, a sister who is about a year and a half younger, and another brother who was the result of a very late, but firm handshake five years after me. From the time I was eleven until I left for college, and part of the time between my college careers when I was one of those kids in my generation who wouldn’t move out of their parents’ house–I lived mostly in Pflugerville, Texas.

Our house was a forced labor camp. We couldn’t sleep late, even on weekends. During Spring Break and in summer, we shoveled dirt, pulled weeds, planted trees, and dug flower beds. Every Saturday was spent cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming the floors, windexing mirrors, and dusting the furniture. Every Sunday was church. I would have dreamed of being Annie and finding myself a Daddy Warbucks, but, at the time, I thought nothing was uglier than a redheaded child.

We were middle class folks who were never country enough to use the word “kin”. Our two-story house was off in the suburbs. The driveway was home to a crappy little Dodge Horizon that belong to my dad, and a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me, two-toned brown Volkswagen Vanagon for my mom. It should also be noted that our van was identical to the one driven by my allegedly female gym teacher, whom I often mistook for Michael Douglas.

On Friday nights, when we were younger, we’d make secret hideouts with blankets and sheets and chairs and spend the night on the living room floor. And at least one of us would end up near death every time my parents left us home alone. An innocent game of WWF tag-team wrestling would always turn into a cage-match where someone would get dropped a little too hard on their head. My mom and dad finally threatened to make us pay for our own babysitter if they came home to any more injuries or evidence of fighting. I took that news a little hard. It wasn’t the money, it’s just that up until then I thought our babysitters came over because they liked us and wanted to play with us, not because they got paid. It was at that point that I lost my faith in the goodness of man.

As a kid, I’d eat just about anything. Not typical table food. I made more organic choices. Tar from the sidewalks, grass, weeds, strawberry or mint-flavored Chapstik, Baby Magic baby lotion, Pepto Bismol, glue, paste, glue sticks, paper, brown sugar, chunks of bagged coconut, vanilla extract, tape, and i tried crayons, but they’re not as awesome as you’d think. If you dared me to do anything, I would. Anything. And sometimes I’d even dare myself.

I often made poor choices in school, which resulted in my name being put on the board. In kindergarten, it was for playing cars with a boy who accidentally ran the car into the teacher’s foot. In first grade, it was for arm-wrestling in the cafeteria. And in second grade, it was for eating glue during social studies. I was quiet and shy at the beginning of every school year, but by the end, I’d have my share of minor offenses like talking and distracting others and playing tag in the classroom.

In high school, I never lettered in anything because I wasn’t even close to being athletic, and I would have preferred to stick my face in a giant cow patty than spend my time overachieving for that thing called a GPA. I colored pictures on my SAT and ACT, leading my college to assume I was mentally retarded when I showed up. (My high school English teacher had to write a letter to them explaining otherwise.)

College was difficult and a little bit like a church camp you could never leave. It didn’t require an unreasonable amount of intelligence, but it did require studying and reading and going to class on occasion. I preferred to spend my time at the park or in the printmaking lab with paper from the dumpster, a block of wax, a drill, some Krylon, and a vat of acid. My evenings often stretched to sunrises drowned in coffee in the blue vinyl booths of The Kettle. The waitresses never seemed to mind our markers and sketchbooks or the fact that we had no more money than them. They’d fill our cups just the same and hook us with stories of their cheating husbands who were now in jail or explain how they blasted the daddy of their second daughter with a shotgun after he tried to take the family dog.

For a couple of years after college, I wandered aimlessly, sometimes even to other countries, waiting for a career ladder to fall from the sky. Looking up, I could only see down, so I delayed the descent of that ladder for two more years and moved to Atlanta for design school. I ended up learning much more than they advertise in their catalog: how to live without a 24-hour Wal-Mart, what to eat when chain restaurants aren’t at your disposal, and not to go to the ER without insurance, even if you are dying. School fixed me up and made me look a little bit nicer, which got me a job in Dallas, which led me to drop everything one day and move to New York, where you can still find me writing, designing and painting as a result of the home perms, blonde bottle jobs, braces, retainers, bed-wetting, pants-wetting, bullying, and participant ribbons that I’ve gathered along the way. There’s no time to look for falling ladders anymore. Only pigeons, who sometimes make deposits on my back.