It's a New Year. A new YEAR. And a new ME.

Today's my birthday. The birth day of a new blog. A New Year - 2015. And the start of a big transition. From mom to not mom. So I'm gonna tell you a story. Not necessarily a funny story, though I hope to funny it up a bit before it's published... really it's more of a framework. I'll hang curtains and give more details and do some forward looking and in-the-moment shit moving ahead.

I had a blog for awhile back in the day... My Biological Clock Still Has a Tick or Two Left! It focused on my efforts to become a mom from 2006 through artificial insemination with anonymous donor sperm... to an adoption match in 2008 up to it going horribly wrong at the start of 2009. Then I quit.

While I was away, I took time off to figure out what was next. I worked on putting my life back together. I started a new non-profit enviro group. I took over a year off from the adoption idea. And then I decided to try it again. I got matched with another girl at the end of 2010. She moved in at the start of 2011 and was successfully adopted at the end of that year. My beautiful daughter was 13.

My beautiful daughter was foreign-born, and it took almost a year for us to get her a green card, which was required before I could petition to adopt her. I decided to get licensed for foster care as I was caring for a foster child and at the time had no idea how long it would take before we could move toward the adoption. In the meantime, I was also matched with another girl--another teenage girl--to adopt. She came to live with us in September 2011. I was the mom of two beautiful teenage girls for 18 months.

My teenage daughter #2 decided early on that she didn't actually want to be adopted. She was 15. And then she was 16. And she didn't really like me or our family or my expectations or even my ideas. Unsurprisingly, she had her own ideas. Unfortunately, those ideas involved alcohol, drugs, sex, lies, and running away. Which sucked. And when I discovered on her second AWOL that she'd been getting my beautiful and by then adopted daughter high, I asked the authorities to not bring her home when she was finally caught about a month later. Don't worry, she continued to grow up, was reunited with the foster family she preferred to ours, and started college at the university a year early. As far as I can tell from Facebook, she's doing fantastic. Without me.

After this beautiful and now successfully college-enrolled teenage girl left our home, my beautiful daughter and I asked ourselves what was next. I had started training the foster care classes at the agency I was licensed through. Though I had started the enviro group and successfully got funding for the first year, I found it too difficult to fund raise in a down-turned economy and do all the work myself for the second and third years. And this while starting a family on my own. So I quit working on my group and did the traditional... I got a job. Weirdly, though, the job was with my foster care licensing agency. Suddenly I'm a social worker. In addition to training foster care classes, I became a licensing worker and had my own case load of 18 families. It's clear I like to do things 100%, 24 hours/day, 365 days/year. With no breaks. Ever. (Until something breaks, of course, which it has... but that's for another post.)

So what did my beautiful teenage daughter of 14 years and 3 months and I decide to do when it was just her and I again? We decided to foster a set of young siblings. A 4-month-old girl and a 4-year-old boy. Adorbs - YES! A handful, hellalotta work - HELL YES! I was now mom to three kids and thought, "I couldn't be happier." But apparently I wasn't happy enough. By September my heartstrings got pulled by another teenage girl. A refugee from Africa. Seventeen years old and a senior in high school, living in an East Valley suburban group home and getting bused daily to a West Phoenix school. She wanted a home closer to her school. And she wanted to be in a family setting. So then we were five - single mom, four kids. And I was so proud! "Look at me!! I'm a single mom to four kids! Wow!! Am I crazy or what?! Crazy-cool, though, right? Right??"

And that lasted almost 9 months. Seventeen-year-olds turn eighteen... and when school was out, she opted out of our menagerie. So we were back to me and 3. And I started doing other things at work. Training still. Plus recruiting. Gave up most of my case load. Eventually started doing placements. None of which takes the place of being a crazy-cool single mom to four kids, though.

And then last summer while my beautiful daughter was 16, she ran away. She ran away for 6 weeks. And then school started. At the end of the first day of school, she showed up on my doorstep and asked to come back in. She went to school the next day, and many of the following days. Her heart wasn't in it. She had other stuff on her mind, which she eventually shared. We worked with a counselor. Amped up her case to high-needs. We changed her schools. We were livin' la vida loca. But I thought we were mostly making it work. And then she refused to come home. Again. The week before Christmas 2014, she just said no. She said without quotes I'm 16, I'm gonna live with my 25-year-old bio-sis. Fuck you very much for the last four years.

And so now I have two. Single mom of 51 as of today with a 2-year-old girl and an on the cusp of 6-year-old boy. Beautiful kids. We had a quiet and lovely Christmas together, just the three of us. And they are in the transition phase of reunifying with their biological mother. That long-wished for day for these two beauties -- to be back with their momma -- could happen any day now. And as my boy reminds me often:

"And then it will just be you. You won't have no one. Just the dogs. The dogs and you. 'Cause no one else will live here -- just you. Not me. Not Lxx. Oh, and the cats. The cats and the dogs. And you. But you will have no one."

And at this point in time, that suits me just fine. Happy New Year to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy renaissance to me.