Tammy Tollner is my birth name. I spent 28 years as Tammy Sieber and I’ve been Tammy Pancheri since April of 2021. I’m currently in the process of figuring out who these three women are. 

What a pain it is for women to legally change our last names, isn’t it? There’s so much red tape and emotional gunk attached to it all. But if we don’t do it, the hotel won’t let us check in because our drivers license doesn’t match the name of the guy who made the reservation. 

Sometimes I feel too tired to fight the system and other times I get so worked up about it I want to smack somebody. My poor husband never knows which side of his Gemini wife he’s going to wake up with but I think he loves both of me. 

My mother says I was a sensitive two-year-old who “liked to write and color”. Born to a football coach and an English teacher in a family of athletes and extroverts, I was the chickiepoo in the room who read all day and cried too much. Preferring to play house and make mud pies, I couldn’t understand why everything always had to be a competition.

 

Why can’t we just PLAY and eat pie? 

I graduated from USC’s School of Journalism in 1986, when my father was Head Football Coach for the Trojans, then spent a decade working at an LA ad agency writing commercials and copy. Three decades later as a high-functioning, perfectionist, people-pleaser, and stay at home "wine mom," I wasn’t writing much.
 

After the nightmare of a pandemic in 2020, my wine consumption reached an all-time high, and I decided to take a break from alcohol on September 7, 2021. Astonished by the transformations I experienced in mind, body and spirit, I found little information to explain my surprising discoveries. But I understood one thing clearly: I needed to tell people about this! 

I sit here today with a clearer mind, healthier body and happier heart—writing again. An eighth generation Californian, I was born in San Luis Obispo, California, and I’ve always felt most at home in the deserts, mountains and beaches of my birth state. I adore adobe churches and Mexican pottery, cooking and baking for the ones I love, and belting out women's power ballads and sad pop songs on our home Karaoke machine.  

I’m passionate about libraries, bookstores and astrology, turning plain houses into cozy, inviting homes, long jogs and walks in the sunshine, country music, genealogy, traveling, and dragging my husband through cemeteries, museums and spooky buildings in new places. 

An Enneagram #9,“The Peacemaker," my greatest accomplishment and honor in this life has been raising my three extraordinary daughters, watching them shine and bloom into wild, curious and deeply loving young women. I’m thankful to partner with my husband Tom in the care and feeding of my three bonus sons, smart, kind and thoughtful young men, and thrilled to welcome two daughters-in-law, a son-in-law and our first grandson, into the fold.

Half chaotic and half quiet, I cherish the life we share with family and friends.