How Are You Doing?

Take time on your grief journey to stand still and shake off the heavy burden you have been carrying.

Ask yourself some questions:

• Do you still think of your husband every day?
• Do you become emotionally upset or can you enjoy your memories?
• Have you accepted that your life is as a single and not as part of a couple?
• Are you ready to plan for a future as a single person?
• Are you prepared to invest in your own personal growth?

How do you move forward?  There are some specific things you can do to help fill the void created when your husband died.  A good job, support system, friends and family are all important in supporting you as you move forward.

There will be days you may choose to do some implosive grieving and if so then set aside some time to grieve.  Honor your grief time and don’t feel guilty because grieving is important.

But there will come a time when you ask yourself “How Am I Doing?” and your answers may  surprise you.

Real Love For Widows

Love isn’t the only thing in your life.  Being true to your self is as important as just being a loving person.

Why should you have to choose between the best in yourself and the best in love?   It is necessary to just relax when it comes to love but in this world love is scary and difficult.

Love can hurt and it can come with many problems and can leave us unsatisfied.  But at the same time, love is the best thing that can happen to us.  It’s wonderful and exciting, but if you’re not scared, you just fooling yourself.

Hope for love is still fully alive and we keep searching for it, in spite of everything.  Love is inside us, it’s the love we know we can give and it’s our capacity to feel loved again.

Second-rate love just doesn’t fill our needs and if we settle for it we could be closing the door on a relationship that would be perfect for us.  Don’t you want to have a man you tells you, for no special reason, that he really loves you.  

A man who knows how tired you are and so he rubs your feet and sits quietly with you.  When you complain about a problem he doesn’t try to solve it, he just listens.  To most of us this is real love.

Real love has to make you feel safe.  It needs to have that I-can-count-on-you quality.  Real love means knowing, absolutely knowing, that he will not fail you. If you don’t feel safe your love isn’t real love.

Real love is honest and strong.  You can’t say that he is the man for you if you have to watch everything you say.  What kind of relationship is it, if the only way you can manage to keep him is by telling lies or half truths?  The only kind of love I care about is the kind where I can be myself.  It is the kind that can pick itself up after it’s been knocked down because stuff happens.  Real love has to be strong enough to survive the incredible stresses of life.

Real love should feel good and bring out the best of me.  Love should be an experience of pleasure, a man to hold me, our being together just being enough in itself.  I should feel good about who I am when I’m with him.  You see love isn’t love if it cripples the best of who you are and sucks the joy out of your life.

Real love is nothing without respect.   Your man should notice when you’ve gotten a new haircut and care enough to pay you attention.  “Nobodies” are invisible and you shouldn’t feel like a “nobody”.  Making you feel loved and helping you because he sees how exhausted you are, that’s respect!

Real love, you know it when you’ve got it.  You may have all kinds of ideas about love, but real love always seems to come out of nowhere.  You’re just going along in life and it hits you.  It’s exciting and picks up your heart rate.  If it doesn’t hit you like that, it’s just not happening.

Grandparenting As a Widow

Grandparenting can change once you become a widow.  

Baby-Sitting -  Your grown children may think that you don’t have a life of your own and so take it for granted that your available to babysit any time.  You love your children and grandchildren but sometimes you feel like you are being dumped on.

You need to set some boundaries and with love talk about your feelings.  Let them know that you love to baby-sit but that you also need more time for yourself.  Give them a schedule of the days and times that you are available.

You will want to get out more and start having a social life again so ask them to give you a twenty-four hour notice when they need your help.  Also, have the courage to say no if you have already made plans.

Changing Traditions -  For years, your grown children and grandchildren have been coming to your house for Easter dinner, Thanksgiving Day or Christmas but now they want to celebrate in their own homes.  They feel it’s time to start a new tradition of you going to their house.  It’s fine with you but it’s also another change and it hurts.

You need to accept that there are going to be changes and new traditions but the main thing is that you are part of them and they are not leaving you behind.  Just think of all those meals that someone else will cook.  It’s time to pass it on to your daughter or daughter in-law and enjoy the family times no matter where they are celebrated.

Marrying Again -  You have starting dating and when he proposed you accepted but you are worried about what your children and grandchildren will think.

Just tell them straight how happy this guy makes you feel and assure everyone that you will remain active in their lives.  Sometimes the adult child strongly objects to the marriage and it can result in hostility and even disconnection within the family.

It’s not easy so do not move too quickly and just let everyone slowly get use to each other.    Understand that grown children sometimes worry that their widowed mother is spending money and time in a relationship that they don’t think will last.  If you find a second love I am happy for you both and I wish you a long and loving life together.

Grandchildren not visiting -  You have grown grandson’s that were close to their grandfather and since his death they just don’t drop in like they use to.  You wonder how to get them to visit without laying a guilt trip on them.

Grown grandchildren start to drift away to their own lives and often don’t even see their own parents as often as they use to.  Keep a memory journal for your grandchildren with stories and pictures of their grandparents and of times spent with them while they were growing up.

It’s a loving thing to do and when you give it to them they will know how much they are loved.

Some of Life Truths

The only thing you can control is how you react to things that are out of your control. – The more you adapt to the situations in life, the more you’ll be able to bounce back from the lows in your life.

Everything is as it’s meant to be. – even the most tragic and stressful situations eventually teach you important lessons that you never dreamed you were going to learn.

Not until you are lost can you begin to find your true self. – Realizing you are lost is the first step to living the life you want.  Making a big life change is pretty scary.

You have to take care of yourself first. – Before befriending others, you have to be your own friend. Once you balance yourself, only then can you balance the world around you.

One of the greatest freedoms is truly not caring what everyone else thinks of you. – When you are worry about what others think of you, you are owned by them. Only when you require no approval from outside yourself, can you be yourself.

It’s usually the deepest pain which empowers you to grow to your full potential. – Stressful choices end up being the most worthwhile. Without pain, there would be no change. But remember, pain, just like everything in life, is meant to be learned from and then released.

If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never grow– If you are thankful for what you have, you will end up having even more. Abundance is not about how much you have, it’s how you feel about what you have.

Happiness and Money

I’ve met people with every expensive toy that money can buy that are living proof that “money can’t buy happiness”.  On the other hand people in some countries have a lightness of spirit and an easy friendliness who are living on the bare minimum with no extra comforts.

What makes a person happy?  Certainly in our county having no money can be a strain on happiness.  But my bank account shouldn’t be the meter to my happiness.  I want to find a way to enjoy my life no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

Looking around I see happy people who are not famous and rich.  Some are married, some are single.  Some with lots of money and some without a dime.  Some are healthy and some very sick.  There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what makes a person happy.

Here are some tips to the pathway of happiness:

• Take ownership of your happiness.
• Do what you love.
• Love your body – you only get one.
• Live, really live and not just exist.
• Nourish the relationships in your life.

So I ask you “Can a person actually be happy for no reason?” and “Does Money buy happiness?”

Retail Therapy and Widows

When Donnie died I was anything but normal. I was unable to think clearly at work,  found socializing painful and used “retail therapy” to ease my pain.

If I bought a new outfit or other stuff it only made me happy for the moment.  Once I became creative I started doing things that gave me something to do with my time and didn’t cost me big money.

My daughter Angela and I did some scrapbooking by creating memory books.  Instead of shopping for clothes I didn’t need, I would have fun shopping for just the right item for my memory page.

I started going to all day auctions and would have fun bidding on the odd item that I found interesting.  Often I would come home without anything but had a fun day out of the house doing something different.

Eventually I started researching how to write and publish a book.  I spent lots of time at the library and talking to other authors about how they did it.

It is the creative process that helps you transcend your pain and create a new, stronger life for yourself.  Whenever I find myself feeling lonely or depressed or lost, I fight the urge to run out and impulsively shop.  Instead, in the midst of my pain, I will redecorate a room, paint or wallpaper, reorganize my closets or create another memory page.

Currently I’m working on several kindle books and it adds some excitement into my quiet home life.

All of these things have added to my peace of mind and helped me to grieve and heal.

Love Lives On

As a widow the world is new to you and you may be living alone for the first time in years and maybe for the first time in your life.

You may be finding out that you can do many things on your own.  In fact, a quiet Saturday to yourself to watch TV, read a book or visit a friend is just what you need. But, you are just getting to meet your new self and you may be vulnerable right now.

There is no way to avoid your feelings of freedom and yet the feeling of being lost without having someone in your life.  It can all be very confusing.  The experience of discovering new things and finding a new life may make you comfortable being single again or maybe you have reached a point where you want to love again.

You run the risk of not going after the good things life has in store for you because of fear.  Only you can judge what is best for you because love lives on only if it’s what you want for yourself.

Are You Hard On Yourself?

Often we handle our negative feelings by eating all the time.  Then we berate ourselves, saying that we have no will power and no one will love us again.

Almost all of our programming, both negative and positive, became part of us by the time we were three years old.  Our life since then is based on what we accept and believe about ourselves.

What happened in the past is done and you now have the opportunity to treat yourself the way you want to be treated by other people.

Be kind to yourself.  If you love yourself others will react to that positive energy.  You will then start to see yourself at your highest potential.

Flow with the changes taking place in your life as best as you can.  Remember that life is ever-changing and that you are doing the best you can.

Release your resistance to change because it’s part of everyone’s life and don’t be hard on yourself if you stumble along the way.

Widows and Love

Widows are standing up for themselves.  They care about love but nothing less than the best will do.  Widows want a love that is rich and meaningful.

For the first time in history we don’t need men to help us survive.  We can put a roof over our heads and feed ourselves.  We can even bring up our children on our own if necessary.  If we are going to love again, we say “no” to bad love; a love that drains you and hurts you.  Instead widows of strength say “yes” to real love; a love that’s alive and fills you with expectations and hope.

What’s true for me is true for you.  Love is the most important thing in my life, but love of people and discovering new things is more important than a love that you lose yourself in.

Looking For the Real Thing

Love isn’t the only thing in your life.  Being true to your self is as important as just being a loving person.  Why should you have to choose between the best in yourself and the best in love?   It is necessary to just relax when it comes to love but in this world love is scary and difficult.

Love can hurt and it can come with many problems and can leave us unsatisfied.  But at the same time, love is the best thing that can happen to us.  It’s wonderful and exciting, but if you’re not scared, you just fooling yourself.

Hope for love is still fully alive and we keep searching for it, in spite of everything.  Love is inside us, it’s the love we know we can give and it’s our capacity to feel loved again.

Second-rate love just doesn’t fill our needs and if we settle for it we could be closing the door on a relationship that would be perfect for us.  Don’t you want to have a man you tells you, for no special reason, that he really loves you.  A man who knows how tired you are and so he rubs your feet and sits quietly with you.  When you complain about a problem he doesn’t try to solve it, he just listens.  To most of us this is real love.

Real love has to make you feel safe.  It needs to have that I-can-count-on-you quality.  Real love means knowing, absolutely knowing, that he will not fail you. If you don’t feel safe your love is not real love.

Real love is honest and strong.  You can’t say that he is the man for you if you have to watch everything you say.  What kind of relationship is it, if the only way you can manage to keep him is by telling lies or half truths?  The only kind of love I care about is the kind where I can be myself.  It is the kind that can pick itself up after it’s been knocked down because stuff happens.  Real love has to be strong enough to survive the incredible stresses of life.

Real love should feel good and bring out the best of me.  Love should be an experience of pleasure, a man to hold me, our being together just being enough in itself.  I should feel good about who I am when I’m with him.  You see love isn’t love if it cripples the best of who you are and sucks the joy out of your life.

Real love is nothing without respect.   Your man should notice when you have gotten a new haircut and care enough to pay you attention.  “Nobodies” are invisible and you should not feel like a “nobody”.  Making you feel loved and helping you because he sees how exhausted you are, that’s respect!

Real love, you know it when you’ve got it.  You may have all kinds of ideas about love, but real love always seems to come out of nowhere.  You’re just going along in life and it hits you.  It’s exciting and picks up your heart rate.  If it doesn’t hit you like that, it’s just not happening.

Contentment

Have you ever known someone who beams with contentment?

They are hard to find and very rare.

To have deep contentment is like having a buffer of peace always surrounding you.  It’s not that nothing hard or painful ever happens to you, it’s just that you have this clarity of focus, this ability to laugh amidst difficulty and this deep satisfaction that doesn’t change with the ups and downs of life.

Something happens to me when I’m with people who are deeply contented with life, I actually soak that contentment in and it feeds my soul.  On the other hand when I’m with people who are negative and discontented I find myself unhappy.

Contentment has been defined as a resting of the mind without craving more of what it doesn’t have.

All things in my life – my work, my money, my body, my relationships are important parts of my life, but my heart is not tied to them.  But I’m like most women my age and I struggle to love my body image even though I’m physically and mentally healthy.

What would it be like to not be tied to our body image and to be content with being healthy? It’s like nothing is ever good enough and we have the “not-enough syndrome”.  Our body is not thin enough, our job is not rewarding enough, our _____ is not _____ enough.

Why is it so hard to be content with what we have?  It is a lie that contentment will come once we get what we crave.  Contentment comes from the inner peace we have with ourselves and also from our surroundings.

Go out and seek those people who have found their inner contentment and spend some time with them.  Learning from others is one of the best ways to find your way on this journey of life.

Year End 2012

My biggest regret is that my husband and I deferred enjoyment until the kids grew up and before that happened he died. We should have reached out for opportunities to have fun and had more of a social life.

We thought that the kids and material things should come first – the big house, vacations and paying for their education but the truth is that although we made those decisions with the best of intentions it was not the best for us or the kids.

I learned from this regret and now try to have more fun and enjoy my friends.  I still find this a hard balance because of my full time work plus “The Sisterhood of Widows” but I’m aware of the danger of not enjoying the time I have.

Life has changed a lot in the last five years and I think I’m a better person for it.  I’m not sure what 2013 will bring me but I know that 2012 was a good year and I’m more at peace with who I am.  It was a year of personal growth and moving forward.  I believe that when I’m old I will look back at 2012 without any regrets.

Happy New Year to Everyone