Marianne Richmond
My favorite saying: Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird. ~ Anne Lamott
We tend to write our bios for specific situations…we need a business bio for our blog so we write about our professional self. We need a bio for a new business presentation and we might take that professional bio and highlight things most relevant to the potential client’s business. Then there are the more personal bios for various situations, such as the class reunion, the volunteer group, the book club…but here we are mother, dog owner, book lover; still defined by the situation that required the bio.
The basic facts don’t change of course, just the way we tell the story. And so here I am writing a bio for All The Single Girlfriends and quite frankly, I have been procrastinating. This is different, isn’t it? Because this bio is on a site where the specific situation is life and how we are defining ourselves as we live it….and so the way that I see this bio is maybe the prologue and the posts that I am going to write will be chapters in this ongoing story of my life after 40 (waaaay after 40) with style and denial.
When I think about my life as a LIFE I typically look at it as periods of time tied to an event, the befores and the afters. For instance, before the kids were born or after the kids were born; or before we lived in Florida or after we moved back to St. Louis.
I recently had some of the home movies that my parents took of my childhood converted and put on my hard drive. Unfortunately many of them have not withstood time very well but it has been an amazing experience from many respects. They have the ability to transport me back to many moments of my childhood…some of which I have very strong memories of and some that I cannot remember at all but yet can feel as I watch. I am now in the process of trying to restore edit them, which will probably be a many year project but in the meantime I have been making some shorter videos. I am including this one below as part of my bio.
I am so looking forward to traveling down the rest of this road right here, out loud on All The Single Girlfriends and listening to and discussing all of the various ways each of us makes sense of the journey. And in writing as well as life I have learned so far, it is best to take it “bird by bird.”
Other than right here, I can be found on Twittter, Facebook, Resonance Partnership Blog.
I hope you will enjoy reading my posts on All The Single Girlfriends.
My Unforgettable Mother
I wrote the post below in October 2008 and as I tried to write a Mother’s Day post this year I decided that I felt pretty much exactly the same today as I had felt then….probably not the best endorsement from the department of “letting go” but honestly after three years I am just now maybe getting […]
The Royal Wedding Fairytale
When we first discussed the idea of an All the Single Girlfriends post regarding the upcoming wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton not surprisingly there was a diversity of opinions amongst the Girlfriends regarding the Royal to-do ranging from yawns to disgust, and everything in between. This is not all that different from the rest […]
Chocolate Chip Pecan Pie
When I lived in New York City a lifetime ago, summer weekends followed a long standing ritual practiced in various ways by what seemed like an entire city….packing up and getting out. For me it was a group of single girlfriends who rented a beach house in Southhampton. We spent our days there on the […]
Corn Dogs!
Like Tani, feeding people has been a part of my life that has evolved over the years. However, maybe because my nest is only semi-empty at this point in time or maybe because she has two daughters and I have two sons (the difference between boys and girls in family dynamics with a single mother […]
Cutting the Cord
Yes, apparently that’s the term for canceling cable and watching TV programming over the “air”, over the net, or some combination of the two with emphasis on the online sources. So, there is a lot being written about this in terms of “the truth” about cord cutting….either it is true that hundreds of thousands of […]
Recycling Valentine’s Day
So, another Valentine’s Day has come and gone. Maybe this year you received something wonderful from the special someone in your life…maybe there is really not a special someone in your life right now. But maybe, you have some once wonderful Valentine’s Days artifacts from someone not so special any longer. Recently, I did an […]
The It’s Not DiGoirno…… OR Delivery, It’s Actually Good Pizza Recipe
I used to watch cable news incessantly…maybe obsessively. It started with the 9/11 attack and continued until I finally decided that The Food Network was actually a lot more fair and balanced. It also had added benefits. There was an endless array of new recipes to try that for the most part all seemed to get rave reviews from […]