Highlights since high school
Figuring kids out — and getting the adults to see it too
What I remember most about high school is cruising around town with however many friends we could fit in, going off campus for lunch and cutting it close getting back. I am still in touch with some of these great people.
I left Fresno in 1986 and have been in the Bay Area ever since — San Francisco first, then Santa Rosa, (a stint back in Fresno) and now Oakland, where I live with my partner Curtis and a dog named Rubio who runs the house. My two sons are grown: Alexander in Portland and Nicholas in Michigan. They turned out to be good people, and they each married someone I would have picked myself. I have three grandchildren — Alex II and Emmett, both nine, and Freyja, five. I visit as often as I possibly can.
I got to my career the long way. Before this I was a couples therapist, a social worker for foster youth, and a clinician for women rebuilding their families after prison, and earlier than that I taught preschool. None of it was wasted. Every one of those jobs was the same job underneath, which was figuring out people. Along the way I became a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, earned a doctorate in neurocognitive and educational psychology, and taught at Loyola Marymount, California College of Professional Psychology, and Saint Mary’s. I am now the lead school psychologist for a group of public charter schools in the East Bay, and I specialize in diagnosing autism and other neurodiversities. It is detective work, mostly — figuring kids out, and then getting the adults to see it too. These days I also lead a team of psychologists, write manuals and best practices we all (and others) work from, and am building an app that helps us make sense of a student’s thinking and turn it into a report a family can actually read. 25 years in, I still like it.
Outside of work I quilt, craft, and cook. I read constantly — literary fiction, and any mystery I can get my hands on. I am probably more interested in true crime than is strictly normal. I built a tiki bar on my deck, which has turned out to be the best thing I have done for my social life. And I travel every chance I get. Japan earlier this year, and I would go back tomorrow.
