Flo-grown

There's a certain pride among residents of Florida in being born in the state;

they refer to themselves as "Flo-grown."

My mother was Flo-grown. While I was born in Oklahoma, I spent nearly my entire childhood into young adulthood in Clearwater, graduating high school in 1975 and obtaining an Associate's Degree in 1983 (I wandered a bit in between high school and college but it was great fun). At 26 years old, I decided to return to my birth state and my father's birth state to earn a bachelor's degree in accounting. I went to work for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Dallas, Texas Region in the Fort Worth Field Office, as a Bank Examiner.

DINK

Working for the FDIC was interesting in 1986 in the Southwest; with a regionalized bust in the oil and gas industry and a subsequent crash in commercial real estate values, banks were failing right and left. While I was successful in my work, it never brought me joy nor did I feel it was quite the right fit for me. I married in 1990, and for a while, my husband at the time and I were known as double-income, no kids or DINKS. Life was good and we enjoyed golfing on weekends, travel, and a nice home. The closest we came to having a spiritual experience was getting a hole-in-one on a Sunday golf outing.

An Agnostic With Children

In 1994, our first child was born prematurely, an event which turned all my DINK values upside down. It turned out that she was okay, having few lasting problems from being born too soon but my experience of being uncertain about her viability broke my heart and my spirit wide open. After the birth of my second child 22 months later, I knew that I needed a religious community in which to express my gratitude for the blessings of love and a healthy family. I also wanted my children to be raised in a religious institution that would be an arbiter of morality and a teacher of spiritual values in a way that television and and a consumerist society cannot. As a young adult, I had already rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin so I looked for a church that might have different ideas about the nature of humankind and found UUism.