Hi, my name is Martha Wood. I am a work-at-home single mom.

That’s my daughter Annika in the picture above. She is not adopted, even though many people assume it. I came by her the old-fashioned way, and spent 19 1/2 hours in labor, along with 9 months of pregnancy and feet that swelled up the size of footballs to prove it. (I have pictures if you really want to see them, it ain’t pretty.)

If you read this blog regularly, you will get my view on many things, mostly parenting related. I occasionally vent about race-related issues, topics of a biracial nature, and sometimes attachment-parenting-related musings.

I do my best to write coherently even though I keep a well-stocked vegetable bin in my refrigerator full of beer and/or wine.

At the moment this blog has only a handful of readers, but at one point in my life I was a professional reporter, and at least two handfuls of people read my writing on a weekly basis. And I got paid for it. Poorly, but at least I got some health insurance out of the deal.

Anyway, I got laid off from that job, which was in a suburb of Detroit, Mi., and moved back to my home state of Texas.

I grew up in Abilene. Now I live in Austin, which is way cooler.

I am politically liberal. I consider myself a feminist and I am highly opposed to the death penalty. Even so, I love Texas and I have a soft spot for gun-toting rednecks.

That said, Annika’s dad gets nervous when he thinks about leaving the boundaries of Austin, and I kind of don’t blame him. Her dad is an ex-boyfriend, turned co-parent. He wasn’t great at being my boyfriend, but he’s the best dad a girl could have. He is also Nigerian, which is mostly irrelevant to my blog, but it’s a nice bit of trivia.

I am American. Born a Yankee, raised a redneck.

I was born on Long Island, New York. I moved to Trent, Texas when I was 7, with my family: two parents, two brothers and one sister. At the time we had a dog and a cat. The cat ran away somewhere in between New York and Texas.

For seven years we lived on a goat ranch in this small town that had a population of approximately 300. At least, that’s what the sign said.

When I was 14 we moved to Abilene, which was an hour away and comparatively, a big city. At the time, Abilene was able to boast of having the second highest number of churches per capita in the United States. The joke was that we had a church on every corner. It was practically true.

The population there was approximately 100,000, due to three (private Christian) universities and an Air Force Base. When visitors from out of town would ask us what there was to do we’d drawl, “We got a mall.” And we were serious.

When I was 22 I married an Air Force man and moved to Okinawa, Japan. We lived there for three years. I learned how to drive on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car, while reading signs in Japanese.

My husband and I moved twice more after that, landing in Detroit, where he was from. Then we decided to call it quits. I guess I’m crazy, but I chose to stay in Detroit even though I missed Texas.

A few years after my divorce, I went back to school to finish up my languishing bachelors degree and chose to major in journalism because I’ve always loved to write. I found that I had a passion for news and local government, which surprised me as my main reading material as a young girl was Cosmopolitan.

I got a job at a newspaper and now, as you can see, I’ve come full circle.

A few months after I moved to Austin, I went to visit Annika’s dad (he obviously wasn’t her dad at the time), for a few days of fun in the sun, and came home pregnant.

When Annika was born, I quit my job at the ad agency where I was working as a client liaison and became a stay-at-home mom.

And now, here we are.

e-mail me: martha@momsoap.com if you are a reader with a private question, or a blogger who wants to submit a guest post.

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