Welcome! Come meet Alicia

Posted in News
by Alicia Castelli

Welcome.

My name is Alicia Castelli, and I’m going to be the moderator/blogger/jack of all trades for this Web site. (It doesn’t sound all that different than being a Mom, does it?)

Since I’m playing host, I thought I ought to share a few things about me so you know my background.

Who am I? Isn’t that a question for the ages.

In nearly four decades, I’ve yet to fully figure it out. How do you define a person or sum up a person’s life?

You can list the basics. Five feet, seven inches, wife, a hundred and blah, blah, blah pounds, blue eyes, mother of three, brown hair, full time Realtor, part-time writer.

I love to read, write, scrapbook, listen to music, cruise thrift sales and festivals, hang out near the water and do lots of traditional, corny family things like Fourth of July picnics and homecoming parades.

I’m also terrified of bees. I’ve had lots of jobs in my lifetime, but most of them have had something to do with writing.

I grew up in Bay Village before getting my bachelor’s degree from

Miami
University in 19-something or other with a double major in journalism and English literature. A week after graduation, I was off to
Marietta to start my very first “real, adult” job as a reporter for a small local paper.

Three years later, I switched to writing and editing for a small local magazine and married my husband, Daniel. When the magazine went under, I found myself unemployed and decided to write a novel.

One year and several temp jobs later, I finished an historical romance novel. Six years after that, it was finally published by an online publishing company and sold in the tens of … well in the 10s of copies.

By now, we had our first child, and I did the stay-at-home mom thing for four years. After our second child came along, we decided to buy our first house, and shortly after that, I went back to work. I decided real estate was the way to go because I would be self-employed and could set my own hours. (Insert hysterical laughter from all the Realtors out there here.)

Seriously, though, I love being a Realtor, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Last but not least, our third child, a baby sister for our two boys, came along about two and half years ago.

After spending 15 years in Marietta, we decided to move home to Cleveland and settled in

Avon
Lake. Well, the kids and I did. My husband is still in Marietta, hoping to find a job in
Cleveland, so the family has been apart for 10 months now. We see him every other weekend – about four days a month. So, in a way, I guess you could add “temporary single mother of three children under the age of 8” to my specs.

Of all the jobs I’ve ever held — from waitressing to writing and editing to Realtor — motherhood is by far the hardest of them. Single motherhood is harder by a factor of about a gazillion. I’ve been a stay-at-home mother, a working mother and a working single mother. None of them is easy. All of them were wonderful and frustrating and exhausting and challenging in ways I never could have foreseen.

And I wouldn’t change a single minute of any of it.

Well … maybe that 3 a.m. trip to the ER with my eldest for croup so bad he was struggling to breathe. Also, maybe that time he was misdiagnosed with a cold at three weeks old when it turns out he really had RSV – a very serious respiratory illness. And the time my middle son slammed the van door on my daughter’s hand … and the time my daughter clogged the toilet with disposable razors and Q-tips (childproof locks my patootie). You get the idea.

I have a

LOT of stories to share, and I hope you all do, too. So let’s settle in for circle time. Let’s remember to take turns, use our inside voices and our “happy” words. One truism I’ve seen as a mother time and time again is that you really are never too old to learn something.

So what’s your story?