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Nothing's going on this week, so I've decided to make something go on. I wanted to share my story with you that has taken place over the last six months. This story is one of growth and understanding that I have found in my life as I have come to the final stages of my life as a widow.
At this time, I'm about to turn 49 years old. I have spent the last six months raising my two stepdaughters, now 10 and 12 years old. In addition, I have been trying to get my life back on track after my husband and I both lost our jobs over the last several years. I feel I have done an excellent job in raising them and helping them grow into normal, functioning, happy girls.
My husband died five years ago when he was 59 years old after a long bout with cancer. The first year after his death was a sad, lonely year for me. I missed his love, his friendship and his attention every day of the week. I got a job working for an insurance agency writing policies for them plus I had my own small insurance business on the side. I was pretty content with my days in the first year and it seemed as if everything was coming together well for me.
However, over the next three years, I continued working for the insurance agency. I had to do it as I did not want to do anything else. I had a family to take care of and also felt that earning a couple of extra dollars quickly would give me a bit of extra money to put away for when I quit my job at the insurance agency.
On my husband's death, I had some money set aside for him so I did not need a job then. However, once I had started the insurance agency, it became harder and harder to put it all aside for his upkeep. I also felt like I flat out did not like working for others.
I felt like I only had a job, rather than one I really liked. I felt like I never got to the bottom line of anything that really needed to get done and I lost interest in all of my jobs.
Throughout the last four years, I have not exactly been making a lot of money. They were hard financial times for me. It seemed like every month, we were desperate for a little money. We were just getting by month to month, but never any further ahead.
I finally quit my job at the insurance agency after many months of struggling with this decision. I still needed to earn some money and I still had to maintain two households, one for me and one for the two girls. Then, I decided to start my own insurance office. I had been saving and also earning a little money all this time. In addition, the insurance agency I worked for had offered me a few months to work in their office and help them get all set up.
The biggest incentive for me to open my insurance office was that it would allow me more time to get back into a steady, full time job as well as get my family more income. I was not going to work for someone else but was still going to try to manage my own life.
All the hard work of finding a place to rent and then building my office, I finally opened. It was about a year after I had decided to open my office. There were several major things that needed to happen. In addition, I knew it would take a long time to gain some footing in the market and make some money.
During these first few months back in the office, I learned a lot about my family. I learned that the girls really wanted to have a routine or a plan for their lives. As a result, I had begun to try to schedule their after school homework times directly with their teachers. If they needed to study, they could and needed to, just as I had done in my younger days.
I was also always on the lookout for someplace to live. I wanted to have a bit of a life in my own home. I wanted to have a husband. I wanted to have just a normal life. I even started to think that if I were able to find a man to have dinner with two or three times a week, that would be a great idea. He could be an older man, older than I am. I really did not care as long as he was independent, financially stable and had a nice personality. I wanted to be with someone who would like to go out with me two to three times a week. In addition, I wanted to be with someone who had a normal, stable life.
I still loved the idea of having a man in my life with a family, but I also wanted some time to do things for myself. As a result, I started to look at the statistical information on older marriages. In addition, there were some articles I read which suggested that many older couples were working their way up to making intimate love again.
I thought, as I had always thought when I was younger, that it was better to be lonely than to be in an ordinary or loveless marriage. I did not care if I was lonely, I wanted a bit more from life. I also wanted to be with someone who liked the idea of having a little life of their own.
I worked out a deal with the girls that I would always be honest with them. In addition, if I were to be with a man, then I would want them to meet the man and then have dinner with us. In addition, I would want to know when he would be with his family if he had one. That way, the girls would know if I were going to be with this man a lot or on a once in a while basis. I felt it was important that they know everything that was going on with me. I also thought that it was important that they would understand from the beginning that I was looking for love again.
I wanted to be with someone and I wanted to be with them for my own reasons. I wanted to be able to talk with him or her until we were old. I wanted to still be with a person out of love and not just for money. I tried to think about it and try to figure it out. I began to ask myself, ''Why do I feel this way when I started to suspect that I was not getting any younger.'' I thought maybe because I just turned 60 last summer. In addition, I was willing to have a little life. I was just not willing to settle for an ordinary, loveless marriage or a loveless life without caring about someone.