- Not The Only One !
- Post # 57 15Dec. 22
- ” It’s Going By”
- Hey Gang!, as always thank you for checking in and I appreciate you being there. I want to share a little bit more about my journey. I recently had an old friend, almost like blood kin, suffer a stroke at the tender age of forty-seven. If , I said it was a shock, that would be an under statement for a fairly young mother of three kids, with no previous health issues. When I received the news it first drew me to another friend that I had some years ago. The connection for me was that on both cases ,we were a little bit estranged from one another. I don’t know which way to go first, to the recent or the former. Ok, let’s do the recent and work our way back. The family member who had the stroke became estrange to me after my wife and I separated and then divorced. If you have walked where I have walked then you know that there can be a division of friendships as well as property in a divorce. As I have expressed in previous post, divorce is a horrible experience and has a ripple effects long past what you could ever imagine. It’s devastating to the kids, pets , extended family as well as friends and probably other contacts that I am failing to mention. Please don’t write me , telling me about how you escaped some abusive situation. I get that exist from time to time, but that usually is not present in the majority of broken homes, where we just get selfish, give up and refuse to fight at all cost for something that was once alive and very viable. I’ve said it before , if you are on the brink, give it everything you have , and not just for the kids. The children are important, but one day they will move on, and you need to really like the person that you have been partnered with for all those years. I’m not going to lecture you guys on commitment or on the sanctity of vows, when many people just see marriage as a business contract, more so than a covenant that you enter into before God. Again final plea, give it your all, and remember that love is a choice. You choose to or not to love someone. If it’s nothing more than an emotion , then throw in the towel because you are done, because emotions change and you won’t always feel all of those loving feelings, especially in the hard times and everybody, and every marriage has those moments on the rocks, and they are different for every nuptial. Ok, sorry ,I think I got up on my soap box, very unintended. Well, when my wife and I split, this younger married couple who looked up to us, were severely disappointed in us. I get it now, but at the time I think I just wanted them to pick a side. I can’t begin to tell you how close we were and how closely our families were intertwined. Their position was that they weren’t going to take sides and choose to have nothing to do with either of us, if we weren’t going to reconcile.. I can tell you that was a unique perspectives and unexpected. It reminded me of little kids who say they are going to hold their breath until they get what they want. ☺️☺️☺️. Well, as Paul Harvey would say, you know the rest of the story and we didn’t reconcile. I love the inner working of the mind and how things play out and how our minds chooses to process information. Much of it comes down to statistics, much like what the FBI does when they profile a perp, and can be so dead on that it is down right scary. One such statistic is once a married couple separates and stop living under the same roof, the odds go up over fifty percent that they will not reconcile with one another. My wife moved out of the marital home, so we already had that going against us. Here is another little interesting tidbit for you. Couples who hang around divorced people usually end up divorced themselves, talking about misery loving company ☺️☺️. Sometimes I think God just sits back and laughs at us and shakes His head, when we think that we know best. Here a couple of more fun facts for you , at no extra charge. Couples who cohabitate before getting married, divorce at a much higher rate than those who do not . And another one that just blows me away is that prearranged marriages do much better than when we pick them ourselves. I know that may sound archaic to us here in the west, but it is still a very popular practice throughout other parts of the world. Ok, so this young married couple drew a line in the sand hoping that it would get our attention and somehow slap us back to our senses, and we’ll, let’s just say not so much!. As my ex wife moved out of the area to another state, they soften their stance on me, but I had felt betrayed as if they should have been in my corner, so I rebuffed their attempts at trying to mend fences and achieve some sort of healing to the situation, but I did babysit for them a couple of times, when they had outings that didn’t include kids. I love my nephews and my niece, and they just got caught up in some of that rippling that I was talking about earlier. So, now looking back, I think I was holding some kind of grudge against them, when I don’t really believe that they were being wrong. After all it was myself and my ex that were behaving like two spoiled brats. When it comes to family and really good and true friends, you just want them to support you. However if they are worth a grain of salt, they tell you what you need to hear and to know, and not necessarily what you want them to tell you. True friends say the hard things to you , that you probably don’t want to hear, but you need to hear and they say them anyway and they let the chips fall where they may. Ok, I think you should have some kind of grasp of the situation, so let’s turn the page. I said that it had reminded me of another friend from my past. Yes it was a woman and someone who I had an incredible relationship with. This isn’t a tell all, but in the sense of being honest and open with my audience, and that is you guys, if you can ,I want you to have the benefit of some of my wisdom, even if I acquired the lessons from the school of hard knocks.☺️☺️ This woman who we shall call Dickens, use to be my boss. First thing I want to say, I really think work place romantic relationship are a bad idea, as they say, no sticking your pen in the company ink☺️☺️☺️. I was in my twenties and as the saying goes, young and dumb☺️. This woman was super smart and she competed in a man’s domain and she was a force to be reckon with. She stood every bit five feet and three inches, and she had the world by the tail. She became a mentor to me and I learned an incredible amount from her, when I first broke into restaurant management. She was very direct, highly intelligent and she didn’t mix words. She was a Midwest lady, and sometimes operated as if she had a chip on her shoulder. When you see short men, they sometimes refer to it as the Napoleon complex or syndrome, always trying to measure up as if they had something to prove. Well, nothing could be further from the truth with her, and she was just fearless. This woman exuded confidence and it was backed up by a very confident untamable spirit. I still remember my very first interaction with her on day one of me reporting to her unit. When we sat down, she asked me if I knew what my job was, and I enthusiastically said yes I did. After a few short telling of what I believed my job was , she interjected that would be incorrect, or should I say not so much!. She immediately informed me that my job was to get her promoted and the job of my people were to get me promoted. This was the first of many insights that I gained from this small woman from the Midwest. When it came to being on salary, she had the expectation that the restaurant should run the same whether she was there or not, and the smoother and tighter things ran, there was the expectation of not having to be there more than you had to. I know that is a far cry off from where we are now days, with so much babysitting taking place in the work environment ☺️☺️. Well it wasn’t long before we were both got promoted and moving on to bigger and better things, but shortly after we first started working together ,we became involved in a personal relationship. I really don’t know how to describe it , but for almost the next decade we were involved in an on again, off again relationship. It was not like we were fighting and breaking up, but after our initial time together, life took us in different directions. So, whenever one or the other popped in to town, we would pick up where we left off at, didn’t miss a beat and it didn’t matter who or what the other one had going on, they became the priority and everything else could wait. This continued on right up until I met the mother of my children, and it was a really difficult and challenging transition for us both. So, when I interrupted the flow of our time together, we became estrange to one another. Honestly she didn’t get it, and it was a tough pill for me as well, but my daughter changed everything for me and I just wasn’t willing to risk that. In our hay day we use to ride motorcycles together, had sex in a lot of crazy places, and no, I’m not saying where☺️☺️and a lot of other crazy stuff that fed my adrenaline needs to push life to the limits. I can’t even begin to tell you what a dare devil she was . She loved sky diving, I had enough of that in my brief stint in the Army. She was also a scuba diver as well. We both eventually got out of the restaurant business, and at some point she was traveling the world putting up cell towers, when the whole cell phone thing was just heating up. She wore a great many hats in her day, all proudly and fearlessly. She didn’t take well or adjust to me settling down. In true Dickens fashion, she did her best to try and convince me that I was making a mistake. Well, we took separate paths in life and it was weird because we use to be able to talk about anything and everything, and then it was only silence between us and a whole bunch of miles. She did come to town a couple of times and stopped by the house, but mostly awkward, and my wife was fully aware of who and what we use to be to one another. I sometimes felt as if she only checked in to see if I had changed my mind or a change of heart. I don’t have a name for what we were to one another, but I know that we loved each other and there was always a connection there regardless of how strained it had become. Some years went by and neither of us had reached out to the other, on my behalf I knew that it was always going to be a bad idea, because this woman had such a gravitational pull, and her only kryptonite was my two kids by this time now. One day on a Wednesday I was fiddling around the house and my phone rang and it was Dickens daughter on the phone and she told me that her mother had passed away and that the funeral was on Saturday. Talking about shock and awe!. I couldn’t believe it, nor did I want to except it. She had moved back to the Midwest to be closer to her mom by this stage of life. I was trying to scramble and get a flight, but nothing doing, so I rented a car and my wife and I drove to Illinois. I was in denial until I walked in and saw her laying there in that box. All the way there, I was just thinking this could not be for real. It’s no way that she is gone, there were things that we needed to hash out, things to put to rest. We had unresolved murkyness and we needed to clear that up, hug each other and forgive each other…and now that’s gone and can never be. I felt a heavy sadness in my heart for all that we had, and all that would never be. I always saw us as an incredible force to be reckon with when we were together and that there was nothing that we couldn’t overcome together. I just always assumed that we would find the words and the time to heal our broken relationship. As they say tomorrow is not promised to any of us, and as I said before, we are all unfinished symphonies and we never know when the music will stop playing. Well, here’s the kicker, from all of the crazy stuff we did together and her on a personal level, she dies from a complication from a surgery, actually died from an infection, post surgery, just unbelievable. If her parachute didn’t open, or a scuba accident or even a mangled motorcycle crash, all of those would have been somehow more acceptable. She lived life in the full tilt position and burned that candle at both ends her entire life and then she was gone. Let’s get back to the recent instead of me re -mourning a long ago lost love and friendship. When I got the call about the stroke, I knew then and there that we needed to fix our broken relationship, before there was someone else that left the planet that I was not on good terms with. I went to visit my extended family. We got caught up and began the healing process. I’m not sure why we have to have tragedy or almost something fatal to bring us back to the table of fellowship. I’m not proud of myself, actually just the complete opposite of that. As God’s kids, we should be the very first ones to have a firm grip on forgiveness and should be running to extend it to others. If you have read all the way through this and the only take away for you is to not get involved in a romantic work place relationship, then you missed totally the point. The take away should be that life is short and has no guarantees of your next breath. I want to say something casual, like bury the hatched, but some of you may run with that in a literal way and take that to mean bury it in someone’s skull ☺️☺️, no, but be practical and mend those fences while there is still time. If it requires you to be the bigger person, then just own it. This may be a kicker or perhaps a novice idea, sometimes people are unaware of the harm they may have inflicted on you, harm they occurred, or how they somehow offended you, and you are allowing them to live in your head rent free. So do yourself a favor and just forgive the offense. And remember that life is going by!
- Till Next Time ✌️ peace !
- Sandy The Southerner
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