About the Author

Me and my boys.
Like most guys, they hate their picture being taken.

I'm Christina and I'm your average, middle-aged chick. I don't mind being referred to as a girl, chica, chicky, lady, darlin', sweetheart, broad (although that one makes me laugh), Sheila, (okay, ma'am bothers me when used by the 13-year-old grocery store bagger. I just can't help it.) or whatever else people think are derogatory reflections on womanhood. Why? Because it's not how I define myself.

I'm just a woman writing a book on something I'm trying to figure out. We have more as a society than any generation before us, yet we feel incredibly empty. Our relationships are transient and we're adrift. We've lost something as we've become more "civilized." I'm calling for a restoration, a return to what the genders are good at.

The interest in this topic began when I tuned in to the television show Deadliest Catch. I was taken by the camaraderie the men shared and my initial thought was their wives probably hated them - gone all the time and when they did return there was a lot of drinking and sleeping (the crabbers admitted this, the drinking and gone all the time parts. I am merely reiterating what they have said.) But secretly - or not so secretly - I was intrigued, not by their binge drinking, but by their rugged, no-nonsense lifestyle. They made decisions. They acted. They led in a way that I didn't see on a day-to-day basis. They were men.

They would talk of their homes. Most of them came from generations of fishermen and generations of moms and wives who understood this lifestyle to be the norm. I envied that community. Did I want a man who was gone nine months out of the year? No. But those women (at least in my mind) seemed less lonely than I was as a suburban housewife with a man who came home every night, albeit later and later as our marriage aged.

Years (and a divorce) later, my best friend and I were joking about how we should marry one another - not for anything physical - for emotional support. After all, we could spend hours talking and we listened to one another. Her drama was my drama and vice versa and after our marathon phone conversations, we always felt better.

And so the idea for this book was born.

This is not about sending women back to the kitchen or giving men free reign to walk out. It's about celebrating our strengths and helping both genders feel more fulfilled.

I hope you'll join in the conversation.