TALLULAH CALLIOPE KIPLING.
guess i’ve never escaped me for too long — guess i’ve only ever been who i was.
[ fingernails stained with hair dye, long leather jackets, the way chaotic moms would get ready for work with a piece of toast hanging from their mouths while hopping into their clothes because they were late getting up, wearing jewelry made by a child, grief like a black hole in the back of your mind, open windows to let in the salt air, a home that always has music in it, a drawer full of kid’s colorfully pattered bandaids, a long bike ride in the middle of the night, a past so dense it’s impossible to unpack, florescent lights, a closet that could be an anthropological study, a costco membership card, a whistle in the dark ]
pinterest / playlist / birth chart (coming soon)
basics.
full name — tallulah calliope kipling
nickname(s) — tully—everyone calls her this except her ex, flynn, and her parents (and your muse, if you think it would be in character for them, but the default is tully).
age — thirty-two
date of birth — 1991
place of birth — bolinas, california
current location — monterey bay, california
religion — agnostic
gender & sexuality — mostly cis woman / bisexual
pronouns — she/her
education level — GED & RN with a MSN (master of science in nursing, 6 year degree)
occupation — newly hired school nurse at otter bay elementary (previously an ER nurse at the local hospital)
connection to otter bay — her job + the fact that her 7-year-old daughter, circe, attends school there as a second grader.
family.
mother — theresa “tempest” hopkins
father — oscar “orion” kipling
romantic — apollo monroe (ex, father of tully’s son) flynn caulfield (ex, father of tully’s daughter)
children — atlas alder kipling (born 2008, deceased 2008), circe artemis kipling-caulfield (born 2016)
physical.
height — 5′1
eyes — hazelly brown-green
hair — naturally dark brown, but she changes it often—she usually switches between blonde and black or a reddish dark brown
distinguishing marks — various tattoos
personality traits.
positive: compassionate, loyal, supportive, good with kids, affable, altruistic, loving, virtuous, creative, kind
negative: intense, unorganized, guilt-ridden, overly protective, dogmatic (when it comes to her daughter), perfervid, reticent
more.
mbti — ESFP
alignment — chaotic good
enneagram — 5w4 (the iconoclast)
temperament — sanguine-phlegmatic
hobbies — bike riding, music, songwriting, playing guitar, playing sodoku, getting angry at the crossword, making plastic jewelry with her daughter, collecting seashells with her daughter, writing poetry, painting murals on the walls of her home
past.
tw: drug use mentions, child death mentions, illness/anti-vax mentions
technically, what tully grew up in wasn’t a cult. it was an intentional community, a hippy commune, a place where kids were raised as a group effort, barefoot and unbathed, wild and free-range. tully didn’t attend school, or watch tv, or get vaccinated, or consume artificial food coloring. she wandered through nature, made art, attended anti-war protests, watched her parents speak to the trees while they were tripping.
for the duration of her childhood, tully had no problem with any of this, partly because she didn’t know anything else. she liked to be creative, she hated the idea of being restrained and forced to ‘live in the rat race’, and she was happy where she was. she dyed her hair, she made art, she started smoking weed at 11, she taught herself to read with the allen ginsberg poem book her parents kept lying around.
for all tully enjoyed her life as it was, there had always been a part of her that did want to know more about the world—she was a voracious reader, curious, full of wonder, and she wanted to know more about the world beyond the commune. she wanted to know more about how the world worked, why things were the way they were, what the science behind nature was, etc., and while her parents were happy to explain the ‘beauty of the earth’ with their spiritual ideas about goddesses and so forth, there was always a part of tully that wanted to know more, or to learn, or to be taught.
still, tully didn’t pursue any of that at first. when she was 17, however, she got pregnant with a boy she’d had a somewhat transient relationship with who lived on the commune with her. they weren’t serious, or anything, but she was delighted to be pregnant—she’d always wanted kids. since some kids on the commune were kind of raised by the community at large at least some of the time, her boyfriend didn’t take a very active role in her pregnancy or motherhood in the way you’d expect a father to, but that wasn’t super unusual, so tully didn’t really mind or give that fact much thought.
her parents were perfectly pleased to be having a grandkid—on the commune, teen pregnancy was not treated with any of the stigma that it is in the rest of american society. generally, nobody thought anything of the mother’s age if she was at least 15, and at 17, everyone was very cool with tully bringing a child into the world.
tully’s son, atlas, was born in 2008. he was her whole world. she adored. she was so happy to be a mother. she wanted nothing but the best for him. but when atlas was a few months old, tully contracted measles—her parents had never vaccinated her, so she was susceptible to it. before she even felt sick, she’d already passed it along to her son, and he started showing symptoms not long after she did. (to tully’s parents chagrin) atlas had to be hospitalized—he was just a baby, and it was a big strain on his body, not to mention the fact that he didn’t get the regular check-ups & medical provisions your average baby might get beforehand.
atlas ended up passing away. tully watched it happen as she stood in his hospital room on her own, sick herself and shaking. needless to say, this was a huge wakeup call for tully. it made her completely reexamine her parents lifestyle, it made her resent them for never getting her vaccinated and generally for raising her the way they had, and it made her feel immense guilt herself, too. tully was just a kid when all this happens, but she’ll never forget that she’s the one who gave atlas the measles—and there’s part of her that still feels like she’s the reason he’s dead. there’s part of her that still feels like she could have done more, should have done more to protect her baby.
her parents didn’t believe that tully being vaccinated would have helped things. they were sad about atlas, of course, but they figured that it was meant to be, and that to have vaccinated tully would have been more damaging. disease is natural, they told her, it happens, some things just happen, they can’t be prevented!
“this could have,” is what tully thought, and she went low-contact with her parents. she got her GED, she got into nursing school, she got vaccinated. she didn’t want to be like her parents. she wanted to learn how science worked, how medicine worked. she wanted to do everything she could to try and prevent what happened to atlas from happening to others, so she became a nurse. she got her masters, graduated with honors, and moved to monterey bay to work at the local hospital.
she never fully recovered from that awful, heart-rending guilt she still feels about atlas. she doesn’t talk about him, and she feels guilty about that, too. it’s something she’s so ashamed of, she can’t tell anyone about him—but that makes her feel ashamed, too, because her baby shouldn’t just be forgotten, not because she won’t spread his memory just because cares too damn much about how people will perceive her once they learned that she’s the reason her son’s dead.
it’s hard for her. god, it’s so fucking hard for her.
that’s not to say there’s no joy in her life, because there is. she loves her friends, her community, and most importantly, she loves her seven-year-old daughter, circe.
when tully was 25, she was working in the ER, and flynn caulfield, an actor (or, a former childhood actor who by this point was sort of a failed adult actor) who was passing through, had been in a bar fight, and he needed a few sutures. tully hadn’t been exposed to much tv growing up, so she didn’t immediately see flynn as flynn caulfield, former child actor; she just saw him as flynn. flynn liked this, and he liked tully, and tully liked flynn, and the two began a whirlwind romance that was full of passion. it was the first true romantic connection tully had made since leaving her family behind, and it was honestly one of the first true connections she’d made at all. the two felt like they were the only ones who really got each other.
flynn wound up flitting back and forth from LA (where he was working as a bad actor) and monterey bay, where tully always had a place in her bed for him. it was the kind of romance only two 25 year olds can have, and tully really loved him.
the details for the next stretch are a little hazy and i’m too lazy to go bug dani about it, but at some point (not all that long after the two had known each other—think a matter of months), tully got pregnant. despite all of her terror about all the ways she could fail her child, and all of her complicated feelings about becoming a mother again after atlas, she was thrilled to be having a child with flynn.
during her pregnancy, though, as her anxiety about their baby grew, she started becoming more and more aware of some of flynn’s flaws—he struggled with addiction which could make him unreliable, he tended to prioritize his work over being around for tully, he cared too much about what his mother thought, he didn’t understand why tully felt the way she did about her own family. tully truly did want to support flynn and help him get sober and get his shit together, but at that point, flynn wasn’t really ready to change, and the strain on their relationship grew. still, they had their daughter, circe, (named after a goddess of magic who turned men into pigs), and tully was instantly in love with her little girl.
their relationship ended when flynn smoked weed while he was watching circe on his own. because of her past, tully is prone to perceiving many behaviors that remind her of her parents as being very intense threats to her daughter’s safety, and thinking about something happening to circe is definitely tully’s biggest trigger that can cause her to get a bit hysterical. she’s protective, a fierce mama bear, and the idea of circe being raised how she was raised made her freak out, so she kicked flynn out.
tully doesn’t want circe to not have a relationship with him, though—she’s continued to encourage flynn to get sober and get it together and be in their daughter’s life, something he’s attempted in the past but been unable to maintain for more extended periods of time. for this reason, and because flynn in the past had spent a lot of time being wrapped up in his career, tully has mostly been doing the full-time parenting stuff on her own, though circe still did have contact with her dad, just not majority custody.
(just recently, flynn has come back into their lives after being incommunicado for a long stretch of time while he got sober, got himself a child bride named tatiana, and opened Center. so, you know—that’s going to be a whole other thing.)
pretty recently, tully decided to leave her job as an ER nurse to start working as a school nurse at otter bay elementary. she wants to be closer to her daughter, and she wants to have a more steady, predictable schedule that aligns with circe’s, instead of working long, odd hours. all in all, baby girl is doing her best. she loves kids, she’s kind, she wants to help people, she has a tendency to babble when she’s nervous. she has some lorelai gilmore energy, for sure. she’s a single mom doing it for herself.