When I was five with pigtails swinging, I walked across a redwood bridge connecting my garage to my Northern California home with one prevailing realization. “Oh no,” I groaned to myself. My sister had just explained to me that when I grew up I would have to have sex while lying on my back. “That’s wasn’t at all what I had pictured.” My disappointment was visceral.

But that was just the first of many feelings that I chose to ignore.

Stuck in a house with a hippie mother who had no boundaries when it came to her sex life, and left me exposed to her every orgasmic sigh from behind her closed bedroom door, it was easier to push aside my feelings in order to escape.

I was 37 when I finally succumbed to a deeply buried attraction to women, and already married and a mother of two. During the difficult journey of coming out, my mother became my staunchest ally and stood by me, despite her own struggles.

“I have made many mistakes,” she scrawled in nearly illegible writing as she was dying from ALS and nearly 100% paralyzed, “but I always appreciated your singular sensitivity. This book takes an unconventional and comical look at the sometimes painful journey that transpires when we repress our true nature, due to an inability to feel deeply, until we are fully-grown.