Thoughtfully Blended Hearts: Apr 2, 2009

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Just A Piece of Paper (NOT)

After reading a million plus blogs I have decided that my own blog “Thoughtfully Blended Hearts” is definitely lacking personality…my personality…I’m pretty quiet and definitely have some trouble sharing my life with others. So, here goes blogland, I’m off to new adventures of “opening up”…It will be slow and torturous but I’ll work with it as much as I can. I’m starting with “Show and Tell” from Kelli’s House in order to share my life with all of you.

I love studying psychology…didn’t major in it or anything but I have done lots of research and I do know that my personal reluctance to share myself with others is my coping mechanism to keep from being emotionally hurt. So, I’m not so different from all other members of the human race…we want to feel good, loved and want to feel validated…

I live in a home that I built about twenty years ago…when I say built, I mean that I was my own contractor and did lots of the actual work also. Boy, was that an experience…It wasn’t a big or fancy house, just nice enough to live comfortably in…just on the edge of our small town with lots of space for my children to grow…the best part of that house is that it adjoined the property where my Mom lived (my dad had died the year before we moved there) It was a perfect set-up, Grandmother right next door to “help” with the kids. It also put my family right next door to watch and help my Mom…You know something, building that house in that particular spot would turn out to be nothing short of a “miracle”. I loved it and it saved us lots of money…which was a good thing…I didn’t know then-- that in less than five years I would be completely responsible for that house and my two children. In 1993, when my daughter was fifteen and my son was seven, my husband died. Well, that certainly wasn’t supposed to happen to me. Things like that only happened to “other” people, right… Wrong, a trip to our family physician for his headache turned out to be a serious turn in the road of our lives. Franklin (my late husband) was diagnosed with colon cancer and died six weeks after the diagnosis. He was forty-three years old.

This is my son and his Dad…not sure when it was made…definitely the ‘90’s with all the pink and blue going on…that’s one of my paintings in the background…

The three of us the summer after their Dad died…see we were taking an “educational” tour….

I’ve never been one for taking the easy way out of anything…so I decided that I needed a college degree in order to provide for my family. I certainly did not see myself remarrying…no…not me…not ever…(I did remarry, but that’s another story)

So, I enrolled in college and went off to get that degree. I was forty-two years old, a new widow, single parent, homeowner and certified basketcase so why shouldn’t I just get a degree…easy, aaarrrrggghhhh. Getting that degree was the most horrible and the most wonderful four years of my life. Not one person, not even my Mother, thought that I could graduate…but I did, with honors. I got a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a major in Management.

That little piece of paper in my right hand, it’s mine, all mine and I did it…(just patting myself on the back for something I worked soooooo hard at, and in those four years (yes I did it in four) I was healing…sooooo miracles can and do happen.

We may not have been a photogenic trio, but we were opening a bottle of champagne that someone (don’t remember who) gave to us on my graduation day. My son was twelve, I was ….hhhhmmmm forty-six and my beautiful daughter (a college student at the same university that I graduated from) was twenty. That piece of paper should have had their names on it also.