Happily Ever After...

This week has been a tough week.  A week ago Saturday we received the phone call that we had been half dreading, half needing to hear, to say that Lovely Man's father had passed away.  He had been suffering for many months from pancreatic cancer and so it was a relief to hear that he was no longer in pain, but very sad at the same time.  For financial and personal reasons this meant that  I was to stay here and keep the home fires burning whilst Lovely Man returned to the UK for a short while.  Apart from the odd work related conference and one week training courses we have rarely been apart for the last 8 years and yes it's tough!  Don't get me wrong I'm not sat here in a pool of tears and I'm not sobbing down the phone adding to his worries.  But I do miss the guy!  You see he's my Mr Right, the man I thought I would never meet let alone spend the rest of my days with. 

It all started when I finally found the courage to leave what was a particularly toxic marriage.  I had been married for 15 years to a man who had emotionally and verbally abused me, but in June 2004 I found courage from somewhere and I left.  I mean I literally disappeared to another county for three months, but then he found me.  So rather than be in a strange place, with hardly any friends I moved back to my mum's, what was the point in being so far away from those I loved if he could pester me there anyway?  At this point I was homeless and jobless and penniless.  My mum lent me a deposit on a small flat and my wonderful boss found me work back at the company I worked for previously.  It wasn't my original position, but it was work and it paid the rent.  Around the end of September I decided I needed to look for extra work and had thought about working as a Health Care Assistant at the hospital.  I also remembered that a friend of mine and my Ex's was a nurse, I checked my cell phone and found I still had his number so I sent him a text to ask who I should contact at the hospital to see if they had any vacancies.  He text me straight back, saying "Hi Sexy" and how lovely it was to hear from me, he said he didn't work at the hospital anymore but he had the number at home and would call me later.

David & I had known each other, through my ex, for around 15 years.  He had been married but that had ended some years before.  I had often wondered why this woman, his now ex wife,  had ended the marriage as he seemed to me such a lovely man...the sort of man I wished I'd married.  But that was it, just a passing thought, a dream...after all I was married, albeit unhappily but at the time I couldn't ever see a way out and often I would dare to dream what it would be like to be in a loving relationship with a regular guy.  So there I was reading and re-reading this text message.  The woman who had decided that she was giving up completely on men because there was no hope of finding a decent one was now feeling like a confused school girl!  "Hi Sexy"....REALLY?  Nah!

Anyhow he did call.  He gave me the number I needed and added "how about we meet for coffee sometime?  just for old times sake?"  I explained that I'd just had surgery and really wasn't up to going out right now but he could always drop by the flat sometime if he wanted to.  So that following Friday evening he called round.   We drank coffee, we chatted for hours.  The next evening we swapped text messages for over an hour, each asking the other what they were doing and each making out they were highly engrossed in something or another, both hinting we wanted to see each other again but neither of us wanting to risk making it obvious in case we were rejected.  Eventually, he decided it wasn't going anywhere like that so asked if I liked red or white wine, five minutes later he was on my doorstep with a bottle of each!  So another evening drinking and chatting.  This time he confessed that he had secretly thought I was 'lovely' but had never taken that thought any further due our then marriages!  And of course I confessed that I had always thought how nice it would be to have a husband/partner like him.  So there it was... two fumbling adults, both afraid of getting hurt again, both thinking they wouldn't get involved again suddenly thinking that perhaps they could be wrong! 

That was 8 years ago this October.  I can honestly say they have been the best 8 years of my life (not counting raising my baby boy).  He is my best friend, my lover, my partner and just about everything in between.  Two years ago we moved from the UK to Canada, something he had longed to do for many years.  His dream became mine and supporting and encouraging each other we took it to the limit.  Together we have embraced not only a move to Canada but a move to a small far flung, quite isolated, township in Northern Ontario where it gets to minus 40 in the winter and we get eaten alive by blackfly in the spring!  Now that IS true love!

So there it is, my true love story...a little bit of who I am...it was hard to do, took me hours and lots of deleting and then re writing (not changing just sort of being chicken and deleting the whole darn thing!) 

Thank you to Kim at Tiara and Bowties and to Catie at Catie's Corner for your support and inspiration.  xx

Drop by tomorrow and I'll show you what I have been up to whilst he has been away...poor chap won't know his own house when he gets back LOL!