Under My Umbrella

In honor of Valentine's Day it has been requested that I re-post this entry from last October which tells a bit more about my relationship with Hubby and how it came to be... Please enjoy!






I've always loved umbrellas, especially the bright ones.... sunny yellow, cherry red... the eye-catching ones that you could pick out immediately if they were in a sea of umbrellas. I had a plastic one as a child that you could see right through to the raindrops on the other side... it was very chic to a 10 year old girl.

To this day I still love umbrellas and when the new ones hit the department stores in the springtime I am drawn to the umbrella displays to check the newest ones out... okay, so I'm a cornball... we all have our quirks.



Along comes adulthood... ack, why'd I have to grow up? I was doing just fine as a kid splashing in rain puddles in my red plastic boots and peeking through the top of the plastic umbrella, playing dress up, barbie dolls, getting lost in make believe games with my younger sister. All the things that little girls do best. Adulthood.... it was a painful thing for me for a while. I married young, became a mother young and before you know it, poof... it was over and I wore the 1970's scarlet letter on my chest.. the big "D" for divorced.

It was a life decision that I had initiated myself, but little did I know that the big "D" would remain with me for many years. You see, from 1978 until 2007 I was unmarried and looking for love in all the wrong places, until I met a man who would become a wonderful friend to me. I stumbled across him in 1996 on the internet where he had an ad for 'looking for a friend' on a dating site called American Singles. Our online and telephone friendship grew quickly and we spoke to eachother daily even though we knew we would never be together. He was a christian man and his ad had stated up front that he 'only wanted a female to speak to and not to date or to marry'. It was a warm and friendly friendship.... no talks of sex, no phone sex, no 'hey baby, what are you wearing right now', a simple unique and warm man to woman friendship.

We spoke for hours on end, day after day, month after month. We shared things about ourselves that we had never shared with anyone else... an easy thing to do over the phone and in e-mails when you are not face to face. By mid December of that year he said that he wanted to give me a Christmas gift. He said that he would like to write up my profile and place it on American Singles. He wanted to do it in his own words so that the men who were out there seeking a lady to meet and to know and to fall in love with would see me through his eyes... the eyes and words of a man. It may sound to you like a bad thing to do, but I had been single for so very long, so many years, and after months of speaking with this man and hearing about his long term marriage I was convinced that I wanted to find someone for me.... I was finally ready to have a committed relationship in my life. It had taken me years to grow up.... a very very late bloomer.... and I was finally ready. So I gave my permission for him to write and post my ad on American Singles.



The next 45 evenings of my life were filled (and I mean filled) with reading and responding to e-mails from over 100 men. I was over-whelmed to say the least. And I'm not exaggerating ladies and gentlemen. Guys from both coasts of the U.S. and many states in between were flooding my inbox with notes... I was 42 and looked 32, so I'm sure that had a lot to do with it... many of the men had already been listed on American Singles for a few years, sort of a sign that they may not be worth my time.... but I answered each e-mail just the same. Then I received an e-mail from this handsome fellow above... the photo was taken 11 years ago on one of our trips to Sedona, Arizona. By the time this photo was taken I had already fallen in love with him.



Without him, the man who is now my best friend, sweetheart and hubby, I would never have known some of the people you see in the above photo. My umbrella of love would never have stretched above my head and theirs. And it's not a see through plastic umbrella either... it's a firmly solid umbrella of many colors.... I made a pact of friendship with this man 11 years ago, and it has resulted in the melding of our 2 families into one, one which has grown even larger since this photo.



For many years the man I met in 1996 and I kept in touch a few times a year, but I reached a point where the love I had for the man I am now married to simply outweighed the feelings of friendship I had for the man that I had called my friend for so many years. I began to feel that our friendship had changed for him... that something had happened in his marriage and that he was now looking at me through eyes that wanted something more than simply my friendship. So I let him go. You see.... the day I married there was simply no more room under the umbrella. There was only room for two. Children and grandchildren come to visit... they are allowed the comfort of our umbrella from time to time.... but for the most part there's only room for two and that's just the way I like it.