Tammy Tollner is my birth name. And my writing 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! 

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But if we don’t do it, we can’t get the cable company to talk to us because the service was set up in our partner’s name. Or 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 dad was Head Football Coach for the Trojans (a book in itself) and O.J. Simpson was a hero (too many books)—then spent ten years as a senior account executive at an LA advertising agency writing copy for newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Three decades later as an experienced “Wine Mom”, I wasn’t writing much.
 

After the day drinking nightmare of a pandemic, I decided to take a break from alcohol on September 7, 2021. Astonished by the transformations I began to experience in mind, body and spirit, I found little information to explain my surprising discoveries. 
 

But I understood two things clearly. 
        1. I was not going back to drinking. 
       2. 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’ve always felt most at home in the deserts, mountains and beaches of my birthplace. I adore adobe churches and Mexican pottery, cooking and baking for the ones I love, homemade granola, avocados, ice cream and sad pop songs from the Great Recession of 2008. 

I’m passionate about libraries and bookstores, turning plain old houses into cozy, warm homes, long jogs and walks in the sunshine, country music concerts, hot stone massages, traveling and dragging my husband through cemeteries, museums and spooky buildings in new places. 

An Enneagram #9 -“The Peacemaker” - my greatest accomplishment in this lifetime is raising three extraordinary, brave and empathetic daughters, watching them shine and bloom into wild, curious and deeply loving young women, each uniquely their own. 

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, all of them also cultivating their own distinct personalities and lives. 

Half chaotic and half quiet, I cherish the life we share with family and friends between our two homes in Poway and La Quinta, California.