FIRST DATE (sort of)

A recently divorced mother of two, it was taking me a bit to adjust to being single.

Actually, it was taking me longer to adjust to not having my children every other weekend than to being divorced.  It wasn't as if this was an overnight decision.  A couple of years of therapy, many tears, humiliation after humiliation, finally culminated in my ex coming in at 6:00 a.m. (I was getting ready for work) and my telling him, "Don't be here when I come home tonight."  And he wasn't.

The situation then was to make this change as easy as possible for the two innocents in this circus.

So I made up a few rules (I'm a rule kinda person).

1.  My children are the #1 priority in my life.
2.  I will provide my children with as stable a home life as possible.
3.  I will not look back.  The decision was made after much angst and I will move forward with it.
4.  I will not talk bad about my children's father.
                 I tried really hard to keep this one.  When they were younger they told me I didn't                               do well with this one.  Now that they are older they see/recognize things they didn't then                     and are more forgiving of my occasional melt-downs.

But that's not the story today.

I worked in a large company.  Gary, a friend I worked with, always smiling and polite, approached my desk one day in May and said, "My brother, Fred, is being stationed at the air base and he is also recently divorced.  Would you be interested in meeting him?"

After asking some questions, "I'll think about it and let you know," was my reply.

A few days later I agreed to meet Fred.

That's when the fiasco began.

Remember #1 above?  One of those priority things was that I NEVER hired a babysitter for my children.  If they couldn't go with me wherever I went, then I didn't go.  Needless to say, above mentioned brother wasn't big on taking two children with us on our first date.

Fred was an air-traffic-controller, which meant he worked 2 days on day shift, 2 days on afternoon shift, and 2 days on midnights with the following 48 hours his weekend.

I worked Monday through Friday, some Saturdays and had Sundays off.  AND, I only dated on the weekends my children were with their dad.

Think about it.  This meant that it was often 2 and 3 weeks between the times when he and I both had a Saturday or Sunday off together.

June, July, and August came and went and we still hadn't had our first date.

In September the children went back to school, which made me even less accessible because I was president of the PTO.  More demands on my time and I still had the rule: No Babysitters.

Gary came to my desk one day and said, "Fred has Wednesday and Thursday off this week.   If you want to go out with him, he has asked you to call him at work. Here's his number."

"I'll call him tonight," I said.

When I arrived home, the children were upset because the dog was gone.  We spent an hour or more searching for our dog, without any luck.

"It's time to eat.  We're all hungry.  Let's go home and we'll go back out after dinner."

They agreed.  We went home and ate.  As we were "redding" the table, the phone rang.  The voice on the other end said, "There is a dog that has been hit by a car and we think it belongs to you."

The three of us rushed out the door and over to the address given us and--sure enough--it was our dog.  I called the emergency vet number.  The three of us spent the next 2.5 - 3 hours at the vets with our much loved pet.

All thoughts of calling Fred were forgotten.

Gary was waiting for me at my desk the next morning.  He was not happy.

He gave me time to sit down and put my purse away, then he leaned over my desk and said, in a quiet voice, "Look, if you don't want to go out with my brother, just say so.  But don't keep stringing him along.  He waited all night for you to call and you didn't."

I've always believed that quiet voices could be more menacing than loud ones.  Gary's quiet voice proved it.  He was mad.  I could tell.

Looking up I said, "I forgot to call him."

"How could you forget?  We talked about it just yesterday!  I reminded you before I left work?!?"

"I am sorry.  I didn't mean to brush him off.  My dog was hit by a car and I spent most of the night at the vets."

He backed off.  "Is that true?"

"Yes.  Of course it is.  Look.  Here's my checkbook.  See?   Dr. Woods, Vet    $300.00."

"Okay.  Here's his number.  Call him now.  He said he'd stay up and wait to hear from you."

(Remember that this was his second midnight day so he had left work around 7:00 so he would just be getting home.)

Finally Fred and I connected on the phone.

He sounded nice.

And I broke my rule.  I agreed to go out with him on Thursday,
if I could get a babysitter.

I found a babysitter.

We went out on our first date and it was, for me, love at first sight.

Thirty-four years later, it still is.