Letters From a Single Mom

These past few months have left little in the way of free time and free energy and as a result they have not been boring. There have been some unexpected things that have happened and I am still a little in shock about 2 of them.

First (and in my opinion – least exciting) I started a new part time job. It is one that I just sort of fell into and have really enjoyed. I am still learning all the ropes, but have had a very successful first few months and am really looking forward to what the next few months at this job will bring. Sadly I am not currently eligible for health insurance through this new position, but that is about the only con this job currently has. I am really hoping that I will be able to quickly learn all the ins and outs of the job so that it can become a permanent and full time employee.

About the same time as I started the new job I did something in the spur of the moment (or as I told my friends – in a moment of insanity) and without even really thinking about it. Doing this surprised me in a way that I do not even know how to begin to express. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer – I created a profile on a dating site AND actually began reaching out to people in my area!! Now this may not sound like a big deal to you, after all most people would just assume that with my divorce having been finalized earlier this year that I would definitely start dating again, hell even I had anticipated the eventually that I would start dating, but what really floors me is that even as I was creating the profile I did NOT feel like I was ready to start dating. Even so I found myself completing the profile, looking through other profiles and actually trying to initiate contact with several users. I even found one person who I was the most interested in and most hopeful to hear back from.

The entire evening, even as I was going to bed, thoughts like “I can’t believe I am doing this!”, “What am I doing?!?!?”, “I’m not going to hear back from anyone anytime soon, so why am I going to put myself through this?!?”, “I can only imagine what some of my friends and family are going to say when they find out about this.” and so on. You can not imagine my surprise when I woke up the next morning to find that not only had my profile been viewed quite a few times by quite a few different users, but that the one person I had been the most hopeful to hear from had actually responded to me!!! This man, who we will call BD, was the first man whose profile I had actually felt the most potential from and therefore was the first person I attempted to contact and he had responded. I seriously could not believe it!

Work was a virtual impossibility that day. Between the fact that I was still freaking out about having actually joined a dating site, talking to my 2 closest friends and my sister about it and being able to talk to the man (BD) that I had been the most interested in from the get go I don’t think I got more than about 5 minutes of actual work done in my entire shift! (I felt bad about that, but I was too distracted to care too much about it.) My shift the next day was much the same and even though my enjoyment of talking to BD and getting to know him better where starting to heavily outweigh my surprise with myself I was still shocked that I actually had a profile on a dating site and I was actively talking to a man that I was getting more and more excited about meeting!

My conversations with BD flowed easily for the most part, which was another huge surprise to me especially since I was so nervous. Even so it didn’t take long for me to get really excited when I received a notification that I had a message waiting for me from BD. I asked all kinds of questions just trying to keep the conversation going and experienced moments of my heart jumping more than a little when reading messages that he would send saying things like “I don’t care what we talk about. I just want to keep the conversation going!”.  Every time my heart would jump the two parts of my brain would simultaneously (and silently) squeal with excitement and tell me that I was getting too excited about BD too easily. That I was just tempting fate to hit me with another broken heart because I was starting to feel something for BD, excitement.

Eventually BD and I agreed to meet and I could not have been more nervous or excited. We agreed to meet for dinner one day after I got done with work and my mind was out of control with imagining what the date would be like, how it would go, would he kiss me, would I be so nervous that I wouldn’t be able to look at him let alone talk to him and a million other scenarios. Eventually the day of the date came and unfortunately BD and I were not able to meet. I was very disappointed, but still really wanted to be able to keep talking to him and meet him as soon as opportunity allowed.  Fortunately that opportunity came just a couple of days later and despite the fact that I was nervous I was also very excited. The excitement that I had felt during our conversations online were minimal compared to the excitement I felt just sitting next to him as we talked and that excitement increased exponentially when his hand would touch mine and went absolutely though the roof when he (finally) kissed me. We saw each other several more times in that same week, which was amazing and it hasn’t taken long for us to become mutually exclusive.

I may not have felt like I was ready to start dating when I was creating my profile on that website not so long ago, but like I told BD (quoting a movie I really enjoy) when he asked if I was ready to move on from my ex – “You are never ready. You go when you are ready enough.” I am just so glad that BD and I were able to find each other when I was “ready enough”.