New Kind of Normal
Time moves on, as it has a habit of doing. Life over the coming months was not easy for any of us. It was made harder by some very spiteful behaviour on one person’s part, but that another story. It’s fair to say that sometimes death brings out the worst in people.
We all found a new kind of normal, life goes on and you have to go with it.
Dad seemed to be doing better than I dared to hope, as a recovering alcoholic my biggest fear was that he would find anaesthetic in the bottom of a bottle, he didn’t. He was desperately lonely and we did everything we could to help with that. Family days out and he even had the girls overnight so Barry and I could go to a concert, it was a late birthday/ anniversary treat, Mum had died 2 days before our wedding anniversary and 4 days before my birthday, so not a lot to celebrate then.
Regularly I would meet my Dad in his office and we would go to lunch, one day however he wanted me to meet him in a café and not the office, this worried me.
As it turned out he was much more worried than I was. As we sat drinking our coffee, with him looking nervous, this surprised me as it was the first time I had seen him looking this way, he was an extremely confident person and fazed by nothing.
He asked how I would feel if he had a girlfriend, my answer was that as long as she was older than me I didn’t care, I just wanted him to be happy. I do not know why he thought I may disown him (maybe too many horror stories on the internet) for trying to build a new life for himself but that was his biggest fear. Never would I have stood in the way of him being happy, ever!
He told me that he had started online dating, but on a site for business people, he didn’t want to go out with a woman that he could not hold a decent conversation with. He had had a few disastrous dates, with women that bored him, but now had found a lady he liked very much.
Yes, she was older than me, phew!
She was very successful in a highly specialized field of research, she had been divorced for a large number of years and had three grown-up children, she was clever, funny and beautiful. My next question was when would I meet her, that I was told would not be for a while yet.
Their relationship went from strength to strength and we started feeling that we could put our plans to move to Spain back on track.
Of course, luck wasn’t on our side, the housing market had taken a nosedive and our house was now worth considerably less than it had when we had first looked to market it. We were not going to let a small thing like money stop us, so slowly we started to plan again.
