I grew up in Long Beach, California. You know…where Sublime and Snoop Dogg are from. In the LBC.

And not in the super-nice, country club part. No way.

I grew up in the very normal part. We heard gunshots at night. Sometimes near but more often far away. Sometimes if we stretched up on our toes, we could see the Queen Mary fireworks in the summer from our kitchen window. Our house was old and cozy and clean. No air conditioning and no swimming pool. We rode bikes in the afternoon and took swimming lessons at the community park pool. My sister and I went to a Christian school because the public one nearby was old and rundown.

I loved growing up where I did.

Since I was small, Long Beach has had a little bit of a renaissance. The main streets are being cleaned up and the downtown area is alive with restaurants and shops. There is a beautiful aquarium now by the water and the neighborhood school was completely redone about 10 years ago.

And Long Beach is not like Newport Beach. There is no bluff or a back bay. There aren’t beautiful trails along the ocean or open air malls cool with a sea breeze. It is in Los Angeles County and it’s normal, it’s grounded. Long Beach has a lot of cafes and coffee houses and “hole-in-the-wall” restarants. It has a “beach” but it isn’t wide and deep like Huntington, or with cliffs and tidepools like Laguna. It’s near a harbor and a shipyard. But somehow, Long Beach is perfect even so. Its just different.

And a lot of my friends are still there. In fact, I drive there every other week to be a part of a mother’s group. I do that because I connect with those mothers more than I do with some of the mom’s groups near me.

I could have been a Hoosier (my mother’s from Indiana). Or from the Sunflower State (my father’s from Kansas). And I would have been proud of it. But was born in California and I ended up in Orange County on accident by way of Long Beach.