I always feel so awkward when doing the “Who am I?�?part of any site. First of all I’m southern and lets face it we southern girls have a reputation for talking a lot. (Truth be told I might be the one responsible for giving us that reputation.) Then there is the what is interesting, what is boring and what is just plain weird part that I still haven’t figured out. (As in what do you actually want to admit to having done because if you are too honest then you risk people thinking you are an idiot.) On top of that is the whole “I’m shy�?thing. (Yeh, honest I really am�?I’m just a shy person with a big mouth. Five minutes after I post this I will start to reread it and think I sound like an idiot.)

My name is Paula Jane but I like to be called PJ. I’m 41 years old and I have 3 adult sons of my own plus 3 step children and 2 grandchildren from my husband‘s kids. I think my husband, Colin, is perfect 99.99% of the time and want to throw the frying pan at him the rest of the time. Honestly, its not the male thing its an engineer thing�?I occasionally want to scream “Quit being so darned logical, I’m a woman and that means I’m too busy being emotional to deal with logic at the moment.�?but the guy eats my cooking without complaint and is easy to live with so what can I say? He even likes all the animals that find their way into our home and there are a lot. I have way too many pets. (Six dogs and four cats at the moment.) My husband is retired and I am supposed to be disabled but neither of us are very good at it. So, we farm in a small way and make candles that look like food. Yes, I know its weird but the things actually do sell.

My favorite song is the sound of a spring morning in the mountains followed closely by almost any type of Irish pub music. My favorite poem is “Clancy Of The Overflow�?by an Australian fellow named Banjo Patterson. When it comes to books�?I’ll read anything�?even cereal boxes. Its hard to pin down my favorite hobby�?shooting and embroidery are a close tie. I’m a martial arts fanatic so if I‘m looking for a movie its either Jackie Chan or an old Bruce Lee flick for me. Not very feminine but raising sons on my own got me hooked on the martial arts and guns thing. Not much else to tell.

I am very happy to be here and grateful to Bob Grey Wolf for his telling me about the site.  I've been feeling a little lost lately trying to understand my family heritage.  Though, it is starting to look like my situation is not as odd as I first thought it was.  My family did this weird “Let’s all pretend we are white and not tell the kids�?thing so I am kind of playing catch-up. My Granny was Cherokee and my Grandfather might have been part Cherokee so it was a really messed up thing to do.  It had a lot of really bad repercussions in the family. Looking back I think my father grew up hating himself for not being “really�?white and hating me for looking too white. Pretty much the same with all my cousins. They either looked too much like my Granny or the looked too white and either way their parents had issues with it. A lot of abuse resulted and many of my realitive turned down the path of alcohol and drugs to hide from the pain.  I try to understand but time has passed and society has changed. There is no one really left to ask “Why did you do that to yourselves and us?�?because my one remaining aunt seems so uncomfortable with the topic that I don’t feel it is fair to press her. The family split up when I was in my early teens and I lost touch with my Granny. She had been the one who really had raised me and now I find I hardly even knew her. So I guess in a way this is a sort of quest to understand myself by trying to understand who she was and what shaped her life.

I guess that pretty much tells all there is to tell.

PJ