InsaneJournal

Tallulah Dorian Stokes was born to Sonora Munster and Daniel Hawkins on April 12, 1985 in a trailer in the Mojave Desert. Sonora and Daniel were unmarried sweethearts who had met the spring of 1980 at Berkeley in California and had decided within three hours of knowing each other that they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. A year after meeting, they both dropped out of college and bought an old beat up trailer, having decided that they were going to tour the country for the rest of their lives instead of settling down in a middle classes home and leading boring lives like the rest of the world. They had driven cross country multiple times, stopping in one city or town for no longer than a month, picking up odd jobs whenever they ran out of food and gas money. They had no qualms being unmarried, poor, and seeming like, to the public, insane hobo hippies.

The birth of Tallulah made no difference to Sonora and Daniel; they treated her like she had been with them for their entire lives rather than being a new addition to their “family.” Sonora nursed and took care of Tallulah until the baby was a year old, but after that the girl was expected to mind to herself. There wasn’t much a child could do in a trailer, so Tallulah found herself being outside a lot of the times, regardless of whether it was in a city, a rural town, or a desert. As she grew from a baby to a child, Tallulah found that the only things her parents thought she should learn were things she could teach herself. Instead of knowing the alphabet, how to add and subtract, or what H2O meant, Tallulah knew how to find her way to any destination she had. The girl knew how to make a meal out of peanut butter, margarine, cocoa powder, and pickles. She knew how to charm judgmental people, how to play up certain personality traits, and how to sniff out danger from miles away.

Like Sonora and Daniel, Tallulah was easy going, a lover of nature and travel, and not the least bit materialistic. She wasn’t fussy about anything and learned to appreciate all the little things. The family lived their alternative lifestyles happily and without much attention from the public eye for quite a while. It was on Tallulah’s 10th birthday when the girl’s life changed. Sonora, Daniel, and Tallulah were all going to visit Sonora’s sister in Philadelphia to celebrate the girl’s birthday and also the fact that Sonora and her sister Mae were going to be reunited after almost 16 years. Mae did not know anything about Sonora’s alternative lifestyle, just that her sister and her family traveled a lot. When the family arrived in Philadelphia Mae was shocked by what she saw. In her eyes they were not a family that chose to live their lives without conforming to society’s norm, they were delusional and irresponsible people who weren’t fit to raise a child.

After three days of observing Sonora, Daniel, and Tallulah, Mae contacted the proper authorities to notify them of a child who was clearly, in Mae’s eyes, neglected. The authorities, after seeing that Mae was right in the sense that Sonora and Daniel were not responsible enough to raise Tallulah in a way that the child deserved, agreed to take Tallulah’s custody away from Sonora and Daniel. It took a couple of years for everything to be cleared up, but by the time Tallulah was twelve she was under the custody of Mae, living in Philadelphia, and enrolled in an intensive private schooling program that helped the child catch up, at an accelerated pace, on the last six years of education she had missed. At first Tallulah was bitter about having to give up her previous life; she missed the desert, she missed being in a new place every few weeks, she missed living a life without restrictions. But soon she grew accustomed to living with Mae and assimilating to a more mainstream life.

By the age of 21, when Tallulah entered her first year of college, she had all but conformed, (in her own special way) to the life that the general population was leading. She is now in her third year of college at Temple University, double majoring in Advertising and Photography. She lives in a loft with another roommate and works at Homfray’s Tavern for pocket money.