My name is Melanie and, in some strange twist of fate, I’m also known as Big Mama because I started this blog in July of 2006 when my daughter, Caroline, was not quite three years old and I was in the process of convincing her that BIG girls use the potty and BIG girls don’t have pacifiers, thus she thought BIG was the highest compliment in the land and began referring to me as BIG MAMA. She is now almost fourteen years old, but I can’t talk about it or I will need to curl up into the fetal position and rage at the passage of time.
When I began writing this blog I thought it would last a week and eventually fall into the category of things I have started and not finished. It is a lengthy and distinguished list because I am very disciplined and task oriented, except not at all and essentially have the attention span of a feral cat on cold medicine.
However, I told my best friend, Gulley, about it. Then I told my husband. And here I am eleven years later. No one is more shocked by this turn of events than me.
Anyway, this is about me trying to live life with some semblance of grace and dignity while finding plenty of time to watch a lot of shows on Netflix, waiting for things to go on sale at Anthropologie and trying every beauty product I hear about because aging is for real.
I am a child of the 70s, a teenager of the 80s, and a college student of the 90s. This explains my love of bad T.V., novelty rap music, and the denim vest in my closet with which I cannot part.
I married my true love, Perry, in August of 1997 and gave birth to my other true love, Caroline, in August of 2003.
August is a big month for me.
I’ve lived in the great state of Texas all of my life. There is nowhere else I’d rather call home. And I’m a proud graduate of Texas A&M, class of ’93.
Except I didn’t actually graduate until 1994 because I stayed to experience one more football season. Because I am dedicated to great causes like that.
I worked as a pharmaceutical sales rep for ten years and finally, mercifully, retired in April of 2007 after way too many years of trying to intelligently answer questions about the pharmacodynamics of various medications and hauling Chinese food around in my car in a futile attempt to appease nurses. Since then, I have spent most of my time in my car driving my child to all her various social and sporting events.
That’s who I am. Feel free to stick around.
Oh and I guess I should add that I’ve written three New York Times bestselling books, Sparkly Green Earrings, The Antelope in the Living Room, and Nobody’s Cuter Than You. My new book, Church of the Small Things, will release on October 3, 2017. Feel free to email me at melanieshankle@yahoo.com with any other questions that I haven’t already covered here.
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