Just When I Have it All Figured Out!!

I love my life!  I'm not exaggerating. I seriously love my career, being single, being 50, being a woman, living alone.  I'm in a great place emotionally and spiritually.  It's all going so well...........

Enter this young man.

My youngest son finishes his tour of duty with the U.S. Air Force in October and will begin classes at Drury University.  Proud?  Oh yes and more.  So thankful everyday he's healthy and happy, And,  uhm......he's opinionated, he's passionate, and not afraid to share his thoughts with others.  He cooks.  He's messy.  He's judgmental and irritable one minute and he's loving and supporting the next.  He is impulsive and moody.  Oh goodness, he is ME and he is moving back home.  Moving back into my house and he already wants to take over my Dressing Room.

Did you hear what I said?  He wants the spare bedroom and the Dressing Room, for God's sake.  My shameless display of jewelry, perfume, cowboy boots, petticoats and all things princess-like and feminine.  My haven of all things girly and good.  Oh my, all of the blood in my brain is falling to the deep caves of my empty heart....................I feel faint.................

And he's dramatic.  Oh crap, he really is ME.

But despite all of the issues we are sure to face living in the same household again, I feel an overwhelming sense of pride.  Me and Christopher have these incredible conversations that a person can only have with someone who really and truly knows you.  Not the you, that you want others to see.  The real you.  I love and embrace the person Christopher has become and look forward to encouraging and supporting him to graduation and beyond.  And I will pick his dirty laundry, iron his shirt from time to time, but mostly I'm grateful that I was blessed to have two boys, Sean and Chris.

It's the perfect story and in the end, it's so great to be a Mom!

The Woman I Aspire to Be at 50

Turning 50 was a huge milestone in my life that I haven't quite become comfortable with.  Physical and mental changes have surfaced in my day to day living that frankly are irritating and distracting commonly in my day to day routine.

Like many women my age, the challenges I faced when married and raising children, then taking the u-turn in the highway and divorcing, raising the children as a single mom and eventually taking another u-turn and watching our children fly on their own have equipped me with the skills to change, alter and adjust.   So I'm just gonna have to pull up my big girl pants and change, alter and adjust to these physical and mental changes.  Losing weight, maintaining the stamina and energy I had in my 40's is........well it's an obstacle that I am gaining traction with and I will contend with.

Okay so, here's the skinny:  There are some immensely meaningful and beautiful things that have happened to me and to other women my age, right now!  I never even understood these concepts when I was 18 and thinking about my future.  The most powerful and inspiring revelation I have had is not about me at all.  I look around at the world today and there are women in business, women CEOs, women politicians, women my age and older in movies and television.  While still the minority in many industries and various positions of power, women with vision, purpose and ambition are visible and tangible.  This source of encouragement wasn't so visible when I was 18.

Several women in our office are involved in the Masterminds of Business networking groups and we all have had the opportunity to stand before the group and present ourselves to other business owners.  Many people are nervous to speak publicly, but when it is my turn, they often have to tell me that my time is up and to sit down and shut up.  (Lol! I admit I get a little excited to have an audience).  At lunch today when everyone was sharing their experience, I said, "It's not that big of a deal and you don't need to be nervous."  Everyone responded back to me, "that's because you don't care what people think of you."  I suppose that's basically true.  I attribute that to my age and to the examples I have had in my life.  Primarily my mother, Kay Van Kampen, started in real estate 30 years ago and 30 years later is part owner of a real estate company, along with my sister, Lina Robertson Jones and several other partners.  Mom is not the only woman real estate agent with a long successful run in this area.  Women real estate agents in the Springfield, Missouri have held positions in the top ten consistently since I joined 13 years ago.  So there are many women in my own industry that I look up to.

The woman I aspired to be at age 18 looks nothing like the woman I strive to be today.

Today I strive to work with my body to appreciate what it does for me, to love myself for who I am, to pay tribute to who I was, what I accomplished and where I am going.  I don't look at my body and myself and strive to alter it to be more pleasing for others, I embrace who I am and cherish the scars and imperfections.  The awkwardness and insecurity of my youth are gone and frankly, they served no helpful purpose in my life.

Would love to hear what inspires you.

I'm the Problem? Whhhaatttt?

When I made the conscious decision to stop dating all together, I was physically and emotionally exhausted.  I just wasn't emotionally in the right place to make good decisions.  So I quit.

I immediately started working on the house and my career.  That's what I do. I go into a hyperfocus and I'm good at what I do.  When I am passionate about a goal, I can throw every waking moment and even my dreams into this one purpose, this vision.  It consumes me night and day, until all of a sudden, out of the blue, I am completely bored with it.  It's not a slow burn, its a back draft until I burn out every possible source of heat.

This happened about a year ago.  My hyperfocus on painting the entire house came to a stand still.  The thought of opening a paint can, spreading out the plastic and cleaning painting brushes made me physically sick.  So I started projects on the exterior of my house, the fence, the deck, the shed.

Today, the master bedroom remains untouched, unloved and a constant reminder to me that I have work that needs to be done, put off, and incomplete.  It would take a good week to complete the master bedroom and bath.  I could find the time to do it, but can't seem to find the motivation.

I had a closing with a great couple last week who I admire very much.  At the walk through the night before, they were discussing what needed to be done to their new house, and immediately started to organize a strategy for accomplishing the plan, discussing who would deal with each detail and established a deadline for completion of the project. WOW!  I thought, "if only I had met someone early in life that was my friend, my lover and my partner, how much more could I have accomplished in my lifetime?"

Now wait a minute.................if these two were single, they would most likely have approached the plan on their own in the same manner.  Right?

Well crap, that means that if I had met the most perfect mate, it wouldn't have changed who I am.I would most likely still struggle with the same things I struggle with as single person.

Driving to their closing the next morning, I thought about my previous relationships and I realized that there were many times that I blamed the significant other in my life for some of the things that I had not accomplished.  And that's just not fair to someone that you have professed to love.  I may or may not have verbally expressed to them that I blamed them, but I'm sure that it affected the relationship.

There were very valid reasons that my marriages ended and that I chose to sever ties.  I would not wish to rekindle or rework any past relationships, but I do realize that I contributed to the dissolution.

If not for my decision to just quit dating and spend time on myself, I'm not sure that I would have realized that many of the problems I had in past relationships, I still have outside of a relationship.  If I can't resolve them myself, I can't expect someone else to resolve theirs.