Hello! I’m Micha from Santa Cruz, California (just a mile from the beach and minutes from the redwoods). Thank you for taking the time to learn a little about me! I’m an artist and professor, and I love to read, write poetry and dance.

I love spending time at the beach or by the pool with my friends and chosen family, or walking in the forest with my dog, Roja. I enjoy traveling and am looking forward to new adventures with my future child. I have also been a foster parent, but I am most looking forward to becoming a mother through open adoption and getting to know you along the way!

I have always wanted to become a parent! In 2017 I met one of my favorite science-fiction authors, Ursula K Le Guin, and learned that she had three children and still found time to write many books! That’s when I realized that I could find a balance between my career, my artistic passions, and parenthood as a single mom. A friend of mine suggested adoption and fostering and so I started on this path around that time. In 2020 I was lucky enough to care for a wonderful baby girl for 9 months before she was able to be reunited with her biological family. I am still in contact with her biological family and am able to visit them.

The experience reconfirmed that I am ready to become a mother through open adoption!

My home is filled with art, photos of my friends and chosen family, musical instruments, and books about art and poetry. I also teach art for game design, and I love playing board games and Dungeons and Dragons. I often spend my weekends on real or fantastical adventures with my friends and their kids. If we’re not battling a dragon in a game, we can be found hiking in the Redwoods or out on the bay in a sailboat we rented!

I take Roja out for walks every day, and we often go to the lookout over the ocean near where I live. I can’t wait to share all these wonders with my future child!

I love to have fun with my friends playing games, and I also love making my surroundings beautiful. As an artist and author, I am attuned to beauty. I care for a lot of houseplants to make my home feel alive. My home is often filled with music of all kinds, from electronic to reggaeton to classical music.

I also love to be active, so I am often doing a dance or kickboxing workout, a yoga class, hiking in the forest or walking on the beach. I love being in Santa Cruz because it is such a beautiful place to be outdoors.

As a queer woman, I have had to build my own family. I still talk to my brother and nieces in Miami, but my community here in California is so important to me. I love that many of my friends have children so that my future child will grow-up with playmates that are like family. I am fortunate that my art and writing allow me the opportunity to travel, and I love bringing back presents from the places I visit for everyone.

My core values are honesty, social and environmental justice and commitment to my chosen family. Many of my hobbies and interests involve spending time with them!

I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons since I was a teenager, but now I work with other game designers, so we have the most original and creative games! If you haven’t played, it’s basically a group storytelling game. One person sets the stage, and everyone else improvises their part. In our group, we value creativity the most, so everyone tries to improvise funny scenes and create amazing heroic characters. It is so wonderful to have a group of dear friends who want to come together and hang out and have fun for hours, and it usually involves eating a meal together.

I also love reading. When I’m not reading nonfiction books for work about climate justice and social justice, I enjoy science fiction and fantasy novels.

I enjoy playing lots of different instruments instead of focusing on just one. In my home you’ll find a cello, guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and microphones. I love to play with them all to put together songs! I studied dance for about five years, and still enjoy it very much.

I make digital art, and that involves music, 3D scans, photography, dance and programming video games.

I love to travel, and as an artist and professor I get to travel often. I look forward to showing your child my favorite places, like Paris! I went to Paris this year, and it was so beautiful and inspiring. There is art everywhere, and amazing fashion and incredible food! I went to the best restaurants of my life in Paris! In Paris, I had lunch with my friends and their teenage son, who is about to start college. It was wonderful to get to think about teaching a future child about other cultures, like the French culture of enjoying every day and eating great food!

I live in Santa Cruz, and I love that I can walk to the beach from my home.

I consider myself very lucky to have been a professor long enough that I was able to purchase a condo in Santa Cruz County. We have a natural cooling system from the Pacific Ocean, so it doesn’t get too hot. I love the ocean so much that I’ve been making artwork about it for a few years now since living here. Capitola beach has wonderful restaurants too, like the taco shop that my friends and I love to go to. When the tide is low, you can walk along the bottom of the cliffs, which are very beautiful. There are almost always surfers out in Santa Cruz, which I’ve tried a few times myself.

I enjoy living in a smaller, quieter place, because it means less time in traffic than when I lived in Los Angeles working towards my PhD. The forests here are magical as well. The Forest of Nisene Marks is probably my favorite, because it has many large old trees covered in moss that make it feel like an elf is going to pop up behind a tree any moment, and the streams are very relaxing. It is another place I’m excited to share with my future child!

My dog Roja is a dear, special part of my life. I found her at a shelter in Seattle in 2016, so we’ve been together for over seven years now. She’s an Australian shepherd, I think, or maybe an aussie/collie mix. She’s very gentle and has deep, loving brown eyes. She loves to sit and stare at me! She also gets lots of adventures here in Santa Cruz. I often bring her to friend’s houses as well who have dogs, so they can play together. Roja has been my beloved companion
for a long time.

My chosen family here in Santa Cruz are a part of my daily life. My dear friends Michael and Farhana are two people who I’ve had so many epic D&D adventures with, we’ve been spellcasters and rogues and pirates, and they are also two people who showed up the most when I became a foster parent. And when she was reunited with her biological family, they were right there by my side, and still are. Michael teaches theater and does amazing accents for his D&D characters. We call Farhana the baby whisperer because she’s so good with kids! They have a teenage son who is very thoughtful and is in his second year of college.

I am so fortunate to have a wonderful group of people supporting me on my incredible adoption journey. This includes my dear friend, Marcia, who I hang out with on weekends and travel with several times of year. Marcia is currently a foster parent, and we are lucky to have each other to lean on.

The best thing about my community is that we are incredibly diverse. As a queer Colombian-American person, I deeply value having a diverse community. As the beloved poet Audre Lorde said, “Difference is our spark”. When you meet us, you’ll meet people who are Latinx, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Indian, Jewish, Black, Korean, who are queer, nonbinary, and who teach justice and the value of diversity every day for a living at the university. I love what an amazing mix of people we are and I love learning about cultures and teaching them to kids!

Thank you, so much. I am truly grateful and cannot wait to learn about you and your wishes for your child! Reuniting my foster daughter with her biological family was one of the most difficult times for me, even though I knew that was where she was meant to be. In a way, I know the struggle, but I don’t pretend to know what you are going through personally. I do know that I am looking forward to becoming a mother and that my dream is only possible because of your strength and your love for your child and their future. My heart is so full of love and your child will be the most important person in the world to me.