�Write a biography of yourself - not an autobiography. Write about yourself in the third person. That is, as �he� or �she� rather than �I�. Tell your life story, beginning from your earliest years (or your family history) up to the present as if you were describing someone else. Do not worry about being literary or �correct�. The important thing is to see your life as a whole, as if told by someone else�

On a wintry day in February 1979, Stacey was born. In this case, "wintry" actually means "huge blizzard." Due to the blizzard, no one could come visit newborn Stacey for weeks, not even her grandparents. So Stacey got to spend a lot of time with her parents and her five year old brother, Matthew. They lived in a small house in a blue collar neighborhood in suburban Maryland. Stacey's father was a state trooper and her mother was a stay at home mom. Before Stacey's birth her mother had lots of odd jobs that didn't require any skills, as she had none. As it happens, Stacey's mom married Stacey's dad the day before she graduated from high school, so she never went to college. This fact becomes important later in the story. By the time Stacey was born, it was more beneficial for her mother to stay home with her two children than to pay for childcare for two children. Stacey's mom now looks back on this time as "the best years" of her life.

Stacey and her mother stayed home together until Stacey turned five and went to kindergarten. She got a job working as a secretary, but Stacey and her brother were saved the misfortune of having to go to a babysitter by the fact that her father worked very early in the morning and by the time they were finished school he was already home for the day. One of Stacey's fondest memories of her father are of temperatures. In the winter he kept the woodstove in their basement burning heartily so that they were never cold and in the summer he got home from work early enough to turn on their big old window air conditioner and cool the entire house.

These early years were happy times in the life of Stacey's family. They didn't have very much money, but Stacey never realized. She had roller skates and a bike and a dog and a cat and she loved her parents very much.

Not too long after Stacey turned six, her father sat her brother and her down for a talk. Somehow, in some unbelievable way, Stacey's father had fallen in love with another woman. He was moving out that very afternoon. Tears flowed down Stacey's cheeks as they never had before. She sat in the basement that previously held so many good memories and sobbed. She had never known so much pain in her young life. That afternoon Stacey's father left, but he promised that he'd be back every other Saturday.

That was the day Stacey stopped having a father.

See, to Stacey, a father was someone who was always around to play catch or ride bikes or make a snack or tuck into bed. It was not someone who took her to movies every other weekend and saw her mainly on holidays. Maybe an uncle would behave that way, but never a father. A father would not ever love someone more than he loved her. He'd never allow anyone to come between him and his children. But Stacey's father did just that.

Stacey has since realized that there are many worse fathers than the one she ended up with. But she never changed her opinion of what a father is.

After her father left, Stacey and her family found themselves poorer than ever. They didn't get toys or new clothes, and her mother had to work a lot to pay the bills. Neighborhood teens babysat Stacey and her brother and her grandparents chipped in a lot. Despite the fact that she worked very hard, Stacey's mother didn't make very much money because as mentioned earlier, she had no skills.

When Stacey was eight years old, her mother moved their family to a new neighborhood. She was worried about the schools where they used to live, and the new house was a lot closer to her work so she wouldn't have to spend as much time away from her children. Stacey started third grade with kids whose clothes looked newer than hers and who weren't nearly as fun as the kids in her old school. But she survived, even if she was mad at her mom for moving her away from her old friends.

The in third grade, Stacey became friends with two people who would become instrumental in her later life. Robin was a fun, popular girl and Matt was a friendly, geeky boy. Though Stacey didn't know it at the time, Robin was destined to become her sister and Matt was destined to become her best friend.

In the summer before sixth grade, Robin's father asked Stacey's mother out on a date. Robin and Stacey, who were very close at this point, thought it was fantastic. They got to spend every weekend together when their parents went out on dates, and Stacey's mother was finally happy. On a rainy day in 1991, Robin's father married Stacey's mother, and Stacey was given a new family. Besides Robin she also had Kathy as a new sister, and, best of all, she had a new father. Being the brat that she was, she didn't realize how wonderful her new father was for quite some time.

Married life wasn't all wonderful. Sharing a room with her new sister was uncool, and six people in a house meant for three wasn't ideal. But they eventually moved to a new house and life settled into a pattern. Matthew went away to college, leaving Stacey alone with her new sisters. Kathy was the sullen one, Stacey was the good one, and Robin was the rebel. Stacey struggled with being the good one, but she never screwed up because she was afraid of how it would affect her parents. Robin had stopped being Stacey's best friend a long time ago and they really had nothing in common in their teen years. Stacey's parents spent many nights trying to find Robin after she ran away or searching her room for drugs or bailing her out that time she tried to go on a tour of the white house with drugs in her purse. So Stacey sat quietly on the sidelines, making the honor roll and playing sports and never drinking or partying or doing anything that would cause her parents any stress. She graduated from high school with a pretty high G.P.A. and moved to the beach to go to college. Her parents were very proud of the good daughter they'd turned out, even if she was moody on occassion and somewhat socially inept.

to be continued...