Jan14
Category Archives: Abandonment
Nov3
Guard Your Heart
A bit more of my dark art… Creating these help channel my energy into a positive, productive venue. The words on this image are from a poem I wrote. I’m still pretty angry, as you can probably tell. One day at a time… I’m learning to heal. It hasn’t been easy though.
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Oct27
God Bless the Child…
Beloved,
I have been totally absent from WordPress as of late. The truth is, I have been totally absent from life as of late. And for the love of God, I honestly started this blog to inspire people and help them find healing! That’s what my vision was. And so lo and behold, would you look at what’s happened? It’s been all about me. It’s been YOU that have constantly encouraged and inspired me. It’s like this:
One day Jesus was teaching, and Pharisees (bastards…ooops!) and teachers of the law were sitting there. They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick. Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. -Luke 5:17-19
You see, that’s me…the sick one; the paralyzed one. I’ve got some pretty phenomenal, devoted friends (like you) who have been carrying my mat for a while now. While I am so thankful to have that kind of love in my life, I am starting to feel kind of shitty and ashamed. I don’t want anyone to have to carry my mat anymore. I really don’t. I want to be able to carry my own and I want to carry yours, for a change.
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I’m having a rough time right now. Not surprised, are ya? It’s the same song I’ve been singing for a little while now… My circumstances have been hard to bear, but Sunday evening, something happened that truly devastated me to the core, something I’ll write about later. This week our cell phones were shut off, my power was shut off, and my car has been grounded with nary a drop of gasoline in it. I got my food stamps this week, so Praise God, we have food to eat, but mind you, I feel like insane white trash every time I swipe that card. I’m so embarrassed. Today, I had to borrow a large sum of money from one of my oldest and dearest friends to get “one” of the medications that I’m out of. And while I’m bitching about everything else, I might as well tell you that I’ve run out of clean underwear and have been going commando for two solid days.
Now while all of that was the gospel truth, I have to be honest with you. I don’t want you feeling sorry for me, friend. What you absolutely have to know if that Ava Elizabeth Wisdom is by no means a victim. A victim is an innocent person who bad things just happen to. The victim doesn’t choose to be a victim…it’s out of the realm of their control.
I am not a victim by any stretch of the imagination. Granted, my childhood sucked ass, like countless other people’s have, but I have to be real with you and confess that I’ve made far to many bad choices in my lifetime. Most of those choices were made out of pain I didn’t understand and a secret, yet overwhelming desperation to be loved…but there came a time in my life where I knew right from wrong and chose wrong anyway.
I guess you could say I have always been an experiential learner. I used to never listen to wise counsel. I was a rebel to the core, always hiding behind my furious, unbridled anger. I was hellbent to feel something real…even it was only agonizing emotional pain.
As a kid I had been violently ignored, ridiculed, and rejected by someone whose affection, approval, and attention I now realize I needed as much as I needed food and water at the time. However, and I am truly ashamed to report this now, “I think I was pretty successful at making him pay the price for the years of hurt I endured.” Mind you, I swear to God that I didn’t ever want to hurt him the way he hurt me (or my mom)… not then and not now could I live with myself if I ever (knowingly) hurt that man. But I will say, I tore his ass up pretty good when I came barreling into my teenage years like a meth-induced bat out of Hades. Holy God Almighty! I was the worst, most impossible teenager in the entire world. Historically, I don’t think anyone in all of North America could have ever compared to me. Come to think of it, I don’t imagine South America or Africa could have held a candle to me either.
Now in my defense, I do believe want to go on record here and say that I wholeheartedly subscribe to the epistemological theory of tabula rasa. Notwithstanding, of course, the powerful role that genetics play in our lives. I do think that we are products of both nature and nurture. But riddle me this, Batman…
Journey with me for just a minute to the land of make-believe. Let’s pretend a child is born with a fully-functioning brain (God knows I was not!). No pathology exists in this child’s brain… Grandpa wasn’t an alcoholic and didn’t wasn’t out chasin’ women in the honky-tonks, Mom wasn’t bipolar, schizophrenic, nor did she have a history of panic attacks, or the slightest trace of Borderline Personality Disorder… Daddy hadn’t done any time in the pen for cooking up bathtub crank either … No family history of pedophilia, and no one’s great-great-great-great grandmother worked a whore in a brothel. You hear me? This kid’s brain is legit. There are no genetic defects. So, fundamentally, we’re talking about a quintessential, genetic apotheosis here… (we’re still pretending)
So suppose that a child is born with this remarkable brain and that she has no genetic predispositions to anything other than
1) Prolific beauty
2)Wicked intelligence…and
3) The disposition of Mother Teresa (mixed with a the slightest bit of my modern-day charisma and savoir faire-Just kidding!).
Imagine, that someone had this perfect brain. Now let’s shift gears a bit, shall we?
Imagine that, even though this darling creature is genetically perfect in every way, her mother becomes unhappy with the progression of her potty training and decides to glue her hands to a wall…and beat her…almost to the edge of death (we’re not pretending anymore).
So what about that? And while we know that there is most likely no chance of the existence of the aforementioned brain that I dreamed up just now, genetically speaking, we do know FOR CERTAIN that recently, 23-year Elizabeth Escalona, beat her baby girl so severely that there wasn’t a spot on her tiny little body that wasn’t bruised or bleeding. She pulverized her little girl until the child entered a coma. Mind you, this didn’t happen in Liechtenstein, Mozambique, or in the South Sandwich Islands that lie off the coast of freaking Antarctica. No. It happened about 30 miles from my home in Dallas, Texas.
I TRUST God to provide SOME sort of healing to this beautiful, precious little girl… But come on. How will her little, human heart ever understand or make sense of the fact that her own mother hurt her like this.
Friends I am very verbose. As you may have noted by now, I am never at a loss for words. But what happened to this little girl… Well, I’ve got the words to talk about what happened… It’s just that for once I am using what little self-discipline I possess to not write about this more than I have already. Truly, I want you to know that I have played this scenario out in my head, far too many times. I am a very visual person and I am also wildly analytic.
All things considered, let’s just say that my mind has considered all things in regards to this little girl’s case. I am aghast. I am veritably horrified and afraid to let my children walk out of my front door. What kind of depraved world do we live in, people? What mind could even contrive such an atrocity. Moreover, what monstrous soul could carry a thing like this out.
Here’s the thing. “Glue doesn’t dry instantly.” It would have taken more than a minute for the glue to dry. That’s all I’m going to say about that. If you choose to follow my haunting, gruesome train of thought then I’ll let you go there without any help from me. I’m just saying, the mother didn’t just snap. Too much time elapsed to say this wasn’t premeditated, at least in some minute way.
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Now, back to the notion of tabula rasa. You should know that I do think genetic factors play a substantial role into the development of a human being but I emphatically lean way more toward the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. I believe that children-being perfect, innocent gifts from God-are born with a relatively blank state. It’s also worth mentioning that I was a Psychology major in college. I’ve studied this issue to no end and hold firm to my beliefs.
Children come to us as these magnificent, blank canvases. I love that about them. Children captivate me. I love them more than life itself. Their pure, unfettered view of the world and their simple, but sometimes magical expressions of faith rock me to my core. And have you ever noticed that a child will never debate you on the existence of God? Never. They’re wired to believe in what they can’t see nor even begin to understand. Of course, I think kids are incredibly connected with supernatural things…and the Divine. They just believe… It’s magical to witness the faith of a child.
With that, I don’t mind shifting my gears a bit and letting you know that I’m mad as hell right now. I’ve been mad as hell for days. Perhaps, you haven’t sensed my anger up to now… But don’t be fooled. My lips have been clinched for days and I’m ready to fight. I’m not kidding, I’m really angry and really on edge right now. I’m sick and freakin’ tired of the maladies that exist in our fallen world and I’m even more tired of the effect that they have on our children. And at the risk of sounding like a crybaby pee-pee pants, I’m really pissed off about the things that happened to me when I was a child. It wasn’t fair. And I still have to fight tooth and nail every day to maintain my sanity and to give my kids any kind of normal life. I’m bitter about that. I just feel like things are coming into perspective for me and I am starting to see things for what they are.
I’m not going to write about this now (I will later) but I got into a bar fight on Sunday. I’ve never done something like this. Something happened…something I can’t talk about now. Long story short, this big ol’ , manly gal, who truly looked like Beth, Dog the Bounty Hunter’s wife was bullying me. I was devastated about something that had just happened and she was there to make a complete fool of me and capitalize on my pain. Now, I’m not a big girl by any stretch of the imagination. And yes, I was wearing an argyle sweater, some skinny jeans, a cute little headband, and some gold metallic ballerina flats… It was a biker bar and I suppose I stuck out like a sore thumb, particularly as tears were streaming down my face. So Big Mama got up in my grill. I mean, y’all, she really got up in my grill.
NOTE TO SELF: Think before you engage in hand-to-hand combat!
She was cursing at me and then I guess she shoved me really hard in my chest. After she made contact with me… After she put her damn hands on me, it was over. I was like a Pitbull on PCP with a side of bath salts. It took several men to break up the brawl. It’s like all my fury just showed up all at once. I was told her face was messed up after the incident. I mean, I didn’t break her nose or anything like that, but I did put a pretty good smack-down on the old broad which was, I think, was a complete shocker to everyone who looked on. Mind you, I hadn’t had a single sip of alcohol. As a matter of fact, I had just got up from a little nap. But when she hit me, I felt like an untamed beast. I am super lucky because 1) I didn’t have so much as a scratch on me, and 2) I was merely thrown out of the bar and the police weren’t called. I would have definitely gone to jail if the police had been called. God was really looking out for me… Lesson learned, Ava.
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On a softer less Hell’s Angels-like note, the picture below is me at my 2nd birthday party. In this picture you can tell I was blissfully happy. I was living out my little slice of Camelot but I didn’t know it at the time. All the world was as it should have been for me. You can’t fake a smile like that! Who could have known that my perfect little world was about to change forever? Who could have predicted that the Utopian bubble that I had been flourishing in was going to rupture in less than one year?
Friend, take a second to study my little face. I was so innocent. I was so pure. In overwhelming contrast of how I am today, I was very quiet. I was also very dainty and delicate. I was shy and incredibly modest. Not so much like the career stripper I’d later become. I guess I always did know how to work a crowd at a birthday party!
Nowadays, there are people I know who’d swear that I actually possess a pair of testicles. I can neither confirm nor deny these suspicions. What I can say though is that “if I did“, you can bet that they’d be mammoth in size.
I want to make jokes and laugh the heartache away but the truth is, I grieve for the little girl in the picture above…as if she weren’t me at all. She’s so far gone now, but I remember her. I remember that she wanted to actually be Wonder Woman. I remember that when her sisters took a nap-every day-that she would run game with her mom, pretending to be napping too… In reality she’d quietly go into her room, close the door behind her, and go straight to the bottom drawer of her nightstand. That bottom drawer contained an exorbitant amount of the most amazing make-up you’d ever bear witness to.
It was with that make-up that she… “I” would daily transform myself into a beautiful, enchanting princess who had a life like the one I once knew. A life before the isolation. Sometimes I would pretend to be a lovely, graceful 
ballerina. I would open the top to my cardboard music box and then emulate the little, plastic ballerina by spinning. I’d spin around and around and around… I don’t really remember where it was I would go in my head when I was little. I just know that it was a place where I was happy. It was a place where I was loved the way my grandmother and grandfather had loved me before my mom got remarried…back when my life was perfect… Back when my dresses were adorned with like, 500 gazillion jingle bells that were carefully sewn in just for me… Back when I was the center of my grandparent’s world and nothing else mattered.
You see, my mom wasn’t able to take care of me when she first had me. I suppose she was really young and she had a lot of past hurts and traumas that she had to work through. So, I lived with my grandparents. I was the center of their entire existence. And they were the center of mine…
My biological father had split when his tenacious sperm cell burrowed its way into my mother’s unprotected egg. Men tend to fall asleep after they blow their load (it’s actually called the refractory period) and I suspect that my biological dad could have dozed off during the early stages of my meiosis. But of this I’m certain: the chromosomes hadn’t even had time to split and migrate to opposite ends of the nuclear envelope when that dude jetted and threw us the deuces and all but yelled out, “Peace out, biatches!!” People, I’m talking, the dude left the state to avoid being my dad.
I wonder if he knew then that he was throwing me to the wolves. If he had have known, would he have given a rat’s ass? Nah. Probably not. He was a famous DJ in the Dallas area at the time; a hippie with a cult-like following of women. I think my mother was outside of her damn mind getting involved with him! He was a wealthy kid from a conservative, VERY Catholic family. I guess they wouldn’t have mixed well with us.
My grandaddy was a deacon in the Southern Baptist Church and my grandmother thought that people who raised their hands during worship were loco (I was raised thinking the term Charismatic mean demonic or something). She could have never gotten jiggy with confessionals, Hail Mary’s, and incense burning of any sort.
And as far as I was concerned, the Virgin Mary was the coolest, most honorable chick on the planet. It’s not like God would have ever chosen me to bear His only Son. But dude, Mary was certainly all that. I can’t wait to meet her when I come home to Heaven… But she was just a human. I’m not going to pray to her. Yeah, so I guess our families weren’t meant to blend.
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So back to my tabula rasa hoopla and ballyhoo… I said all “that” so that I can reemphasize that I BELIEVE that “I” was born a blank slate… a pure-white empty canvas. I experienced things in my childhood that even those closest to me don’t know today. But for fuck’s sake….WHY? Why did these things happen to me when I was just a sweet, trusting, open-hearted little girl. I’m so mad! And I’m not feeling sorry for myself because the little girl who I’m defending doesn’t in any way feel like me. I don’t know where she ended and I began.
Now you’ve experiencing a lot of unfocused, overly emotional, senseless rambling up until this point. Hang with me. If you blew through this post praying that it would end, “That’s OK”. If you don’t hear anything, hear the rest of this, please.
ALL of the unholy shit that I experienced is NOTHING compared to what some of these other children are going through RIGHT now. My childhood was marred and maimed by pain, rejection, and abandonment. However, the reality that I must face is that my life was a freakin’ Marti Gras compared to some of these babies out there in the world right now. And don’t think they’re far away from you. The child next door to you could be going through hell right now and you might never know it.
Oh my God! I want to scream! I want to kick the living shit out of that mean and nasty bar whore again and I want to scream at the top of my lungs!
I know I can’t go back and save myself, but oh God, I CAN do something for them. I can help a hurting child today. It’s so easy to do.
So (at long last) I end by saying, “God bless the child…” God bless the child who is suffering in silence. God bless the child who is alone; that invisible little soul. God bless the child who is injured or molested by the hands that are supposed to love and protect her. God bless the child who cries alone in the dark. God bless the child who is terrified and completely overcome with fear. God bless the child who doesn’t have enough food to eat. God bless the child who is cold tonight. And God bless the child who is only 8-years old and is feeling the weight of being the protector and head of his household because his dad left! God bless the child…
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You know, I think to myself, even Adolf Hitler was a baby at one time. I don’t care what anyone says, he was not born with a bloodthirsty aptitude and a desire to kill millions of innocent people. I will argue that with anyone all day long.
What if his early years were different somehow? Mind you, I’m not saying that he wasn’t a monster as an adult. There is this invisible line when your childhood ends and your adulthood beings. That age is different for each and every one of us I suppose. I think it’s the moment that you consciously accept who you are and what’s happened to you…to the child you once were. That’s healthy. But NEVER is it healthy to just accept your circumstances like a punk bitch and say, “It is what it is. This is just the card that life dealt me.” Hell no. That’s not what you do. You FIGHT…. you FIGHT to get back what was unfairly taken from you.
Look, I’ve come to realize that as much as I hurt for the little girl who was once me…there’s not a damn thing I can do to change the past. I can’t build a time machine and travel back through the years and stop anything that happened nor can I protect myself, my sisters, or my Mom. I would have already done that if it were possible.
But even though I’m getting old I have learned something profound. Some would say my epiphanies have come too late in life. After all, in my head I believe that I am on the cusp of menopause. Plus, not that long ago I literally had to pull a coarse, gray whisker from my face…
Anyway, in all seriousness, here’s the message of my heart: While I can’t go back and heal my own heart… And while I can’t go back and save the innocent little girl that I was once was, I can still find complete healing and experience total reformation with the help of my Lord and Savior. Do you know how? By loving kids today… By loving all of them emphatically, like my very life depends on it. I suppose in a way it does.
I have a particular calling and some crazy gift with emotionally disturbed, broken teenagers. I can affect so much change in their lives. I know because I’ve done it. But I’ve been so depressed and out of touch that I haven’t done it lately. I’m changing that tomorrow….
What’s YOUR calling when it comes to children? Your calling may be with boys… or maybe just with girls… You may identify best with a particular age group. But please listen to me… I literally beg each and every one of you to find just one child… Find just one child and pour out your love into one of their darling little lives.
If you’re a man, PLEASE hear me. I believe that the obvious demise in the state of our nation has everything to do with the breakdown of the traditional, American family. In Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose Driven Life,” I remember vaguely that he said that love was spelled like this: T-I-M-E. How do we expect a large majority of our fatherless children to lead anyone or anything when they simply have no leaders in their lives to model? And don’t any of you overzealous single mom’s get up in my grill and start telling me that your kids are fine without a dad. Bullshit. I’m tough as nails and I love my kids with a burning, fervent passion. I have tried to be everything to my boys. But there is one thing I cannot seem to be: their DAD.
As males and females we each bring unique attributes to the table when it comes to parenting our children. But we are different. God did not create a woman to raise her children alone. Conversely, God didn’t create a man to raise his children alone either. We need each other More than anything, our kids need us.
If you’re like me, you can’t change your circumstances. I’d LOVE for a knight to ride up on a white horse and save me from the world. Well, no such knight nor anyone clad in anything that remotely resembles any kind of armor or even aluminum foil has come to call. Granted, I sleep with a box fan on, so I wouldn’t hear if he came at night. But there’d at least be traces of horse dung or something. Right? He’d leave me a note? Aye, aye, aye…. I joke, but the truth is, he’s never come. And I can’t bank on the fact that he ever will.
But about these kids….DO SOMETHING. Please. Pray…give it to God. Ask Him to bring a child into your life that needs you… Who knows, friend… just the tiniest effort on your part may change their world forever and ever and ever. It’s easy to love your own children. But I dare you to branch out and find a child who you didn’t know existed. Pour out some of that love you have… I PROMISE you that, even though, you may change a life, YOUR life will be the life that is transformed.
All my love,
Ava
PS….To Arlene, I’m sorry if the curse words burned your eyes. To Diane, I know you get it… Now talk to Arlene for me! LOL!
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Jun27
Famous and Infamous People Raised in Broken Homes
I was alarmed to find out that the following individuals were products of single parent homes:
- BILLY THE KID
- SIRHAN SIRHAN
- ROBERT GRAYSMITH (ZODIAC SERIAL KILLER)
- JACK THE RIPPER
- JOHN WILKES BOOTH
- CHARLES MANSON
- SADDAM HUSSEIN
- ADOLPH HITLER
- MARC LEPINE (MASS MURDERER OF 14)
- LEE HARVEY OSWALD
- JEFFREY DAHMER
- “MONSTER” CODY (L.A. CRIPS GANGLORD)
Obviously the aforementioned names are some of the worst in the history of mankind. However, my research uncovered many, many more functional, famous people who were also products of broken homes. Take a look:
Maya Angelou was sent to live with her grandparents when her parents’ marriage ended.
Oprah Winfrey was born to an unwed, teenager mother and sent to live with her grandparents.
Lance Armstrong never knew his birth father.
Notorious B.I.G. was abandoned by his father when he was 2.
Kate Beckinsale’s father died when she was 6.
Halle Berry was abandoned by her father when she was 4.
Mary J. Blige was abandoned by her father when she was 4.
Orlando Bloom’s died when he was 4.
Pierce Brosnan was abandoned by his father before his first birthday.
Mariah Carey had little contact with her father after her parents divorce when she was 3.
50 Cent never knew his father and lost his mother when he was 8.
Eric Clapton never knew his real father. He grew up thinking his grandparents were his parents and his mother his sister.
Bill Clinton lost his father in a car accident 3 months before he was born.
Stephen Colbert lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was 10.
Sean Combs was 3 when his father was murdered
Jodie Foster grew up without a father; her parents separated before she was born.
Jamie Foxx was abandoned by both his parents and raised by his adopted grandparents.
Cary Grant grew up thinking his mother had abandoned him when she really was in a mental institution.
Adrian Grenier grew up not knowing who his father was.
Laird Hamilton was abandoned by his father when he was an infant.
Samuel L. Jackson only met his father twice during his life.
Jay-Z was abandoned by his father.
Alicia Keys grew up without a father.
Kid Cudi lost his father to cancer when he was 11.
Martin Lawrence rarely saw his father after his parents divorced when he was 8.
John Lennon grew up without a father and lost his mother when he was 17.
Jet Li lost his father when he was 2.
Lindsay Lohan grew up without a father while he was in prison.
Shelby Lynne lost her mother and father in a murder suicide when she was 17.
Madonna lost her mother to cancer when she was 5.
Paul McCartney lost his mother to cancer when he was 14.
Eva Mendes was raised by her single mother after her parents divorced.
Marilyn Monroe grew up without a father.
Demi Moore was abandoned by her father before she was born.
Eddie Murphy’s father was killed when he was just 8.
Jack Nicholson never knew his real father.
Shaquille O’Neal grew up without his birth father.
President Barack Obama met his father only once before he died in a car crash.
Clive Owen was abandoned by his father when he was 3.
Al Pacino grew up in his grandparents’ home with his mother.
Audrey Hepburn was sent to boarding school at age 5; at age 6 her father walked out.
Mariah Carey eventually became estranged from her father after her parents’ divorce when she was 3.
Guy Pearce lost his father in a work related accident when he was 8.
Mekhi Phifer never met his father.
Sarah Polley lost her mother to cancer when she was 11.
Ellen Pompeo lost her mother when she was 4.
Gabrielle Reece lost her father when she was 5.
Keanu Reeves was abandoned by his father when he was 13.
Julia Roberts lost her father when she was 10.
Alex Rodriguez was abandoned by his father when he was 7.
Ronaldinho lost his father from a heart attack when he was 8.
Jason Schwartzman lost his father to cancer when he was 13.
Tupac Shakur grew up not knowing his birth father while his stepfather went to prison when he was 2.
Anderson Silva was raised by his aunt.
Gene Simmons was abandoned by his father when he was 3.
David Spade was abandoned by his father.
Jon Stewart was raised primarily by his mother.
Barbra Streisand lost her father when she was 2.
Shania Twain was abandoned by her birth father.
Liv Tyler didn’t know who her birth father was until she was 9.
Raoul Wallenberg lost his father to cancer 3 months before he was born.
Orson Welles lost his mother when he was 11 and his father when he was 15.
Kanye West was abandoned by his father when he was 3.
And I “sure enough” was abandoned by my biological father the moment he found out my mother was carrying me…
I get that those who were raised in utter pathology and in absolute psychologically damaging circumstances are not necessarily always going to come out unscathed. However, I like to think of the human spirit as tenacious in nature, and capable of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And after all, we all have choices. For me, I wasn’t going to sit around complaining that life had dealt me a bad hand, and that there was no hope. Which is why I hate the saying, “It is what it is.”
My childhood was incredibly painful and dysfunctional. This is why you could frequently find me in the self-help section of my neighborhood bookstore since I was an adolescent. I was reading self-help books since I was a young teen and voluntarily attending counseling, which I still do today. I even have a hypnosis app on my iPhone for topics like “codependency” and “how to forget your ex”, for goodness sakes! I was never satisfied with the status quo and have been pulling myself up by the bootstraps for as long as I can remember.
You will never hear me utter the words, “That’s just how I am.” Although I am still a work in progress, I believe that someday I will rise victoriously from the ashes. And as far as this crazy generational cycle that is marked by the suicide of my beloved mother… I am fighting with every breath in me to say, “This ends here.”
It was hard being a child of a single mother; and I know it’s hard for my children too, most of the time. We may struggle financially, but we are rich beyond measure in the love department. For me this is what matters most. Some days I can barely find the strength to get out of bed. But mark my words, “I can do all things through CHRIST who strengthens ME.” (Philippians 4:13)
Sources:
http://www.notablebiographies.com/An-Ba/Angelou-Maya.html#b
http://oprah.about.com/od/oprahbiography/p/oprahchildhood.htm
http://www.audrey1.org/biography/16/audrey-hepburn-timeline-1929-1949
http://withoutafather.com/celebrities.php
All Things to All People: Confessions of a Baby Mama 
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