About the Author

My childhood was a mixed bag. I was adopted when I was 10 days old. My adopted father was not a good person and my wonderful mother left him when I was two or three and we moved to New York City to live with my grandfather. Just before my 6th birthday, my mother died and I was taken in by her brother and his wife, who lived in the country and had 3 kids and seemed like a perfect family for me. Unfortunately, the new mother didn’t want another child but felt obligated to the family to take me in. It was not a good situation for anyone. I ran away for the first time at the age of seven and continued to run away until they kicked me out when I was 15, which was the best thing that could have happened to me. Another aunt and uncle took me in and let me stay with them until I graduated from High School. A week after graduation, I was in Navy bootcamp and then off to Air Traffic Control School. When I was 36, I found my birth mother and, a year later, found my biological father who had never known that he had gotten my mother pregnant. My birth mother had four other children and my bio-dad had three, which added seven siblings to the three I had grown up with. At different times in my life, I was an only child, the youngest of four and the oldest of 11.