I am 43 years old, married and a mother of five children, who are most of the time great kids. My children range in age from 5 to 22. I have four daughters and one son, who will make a great husband one day after being around all these girls.

I have been married twice and my oldest three children are from my first marriage. I married my high school sweetheart, we were married for 8 years, we really did love each other a lot and it was very difficult for me to decide to leave, especially when you consider I had three children to care for. I was very scared, but knew it was what I need to do. Having grown up in a very dysfunctional family, I knew I did not want the same for my children and that I would rather be alone and be happy with my children than be unhappy and teach my children that the way we were living was “normal”. I decided that I needed to leave for the sake of my children if I couldn’t do it for myself. We had an abusive relationship and though I am proud to say we are good friends now, we just could not see eye to eye when it came to marriage. I am a very strong woman who definitely has a mind of my own, my own opinions and things don’t ever seem to go so well when someone tries to “control” me. Though I don’t consider myself controlling, I absolutely do not like feeling as if I am being controlled or manipulated.

I met my current husband at work and we began dating only two weeks after I left couldn’t really fathom having more than three children as I was a single mother of three as it was. But, I did remind my husband that my body was capable should we ever decide to “get serious”. It is pretty obvious that we did indeed fall in love, get married and it was every exciting once I got my mind around it to have two more children.

We have now been married for almost ten years, our oldest daughter just turned 9 and our youngest will be starting Kindergarten in the next few weeks.

Needless to say, my life is very busy and “hectic” seems to be my middle name. I actually think I know no other way of being/existing. It is just who I am and what I do…so all is good in the world…or at least in my universe.

I mentioned that I am a very strong woman and I am also a very strong believer in life teaching us lessons as we go through it. I believe that every challenge I face is meant to teach me something that I will need as I move forward in life. Though I am no most likely no different than the next person as far as life’s challenges and I certainly don’t look forward to them, I do choose to look at them as lessons I can learn from instead of having pity or “why me” parties. I choose to see things as “it is what it is” and worrying about it, crying about it, stressing about it will not change my situation, only take energy that I need to conquer and learn from the situation so I can move forward in life. I can’t think of a time in my life where I have found stress or worry to serve any other purpose than making me sad, stressed and unable to problem solve.

In 1996, only about a month after leaving my husband I was blessed to loose my job, which I absolutely LOVED! I really did love my job, the people I worked with, the experience I had gained and even appreciated the boss I had which consistently aggravated me and pushed me far beyond my own limitations. I got to travel to England, I had a great salary, I worked with my boyfriend (now husband) and I was able to support me and my children with a very nice salary of $90,000 annually. Life was good…but about to get even better and I KNEW IT….I COULD TASTE IT! God never closes one door without opening another if you just have faith…and I had a lot of faith that even though life was good,

it really was about to get better. I had been trained to train sales people how to sell and I knew that I would be able to take the training I had received and earn and even better living AND be able to work from home, be with my children and have the freedom of working for myself, never having to report to someone again! I was right and that is when my career really took off. I had a career doing what I was meant to do, teach people, I made more money than I had ever made before AND I got to see my kids all day when I was working outside the home at a training, which was usually only about 4-6 days per month.

While all this was going on, I was also going through my divorce which I really believed would be cordial as I had no need or intention to fight with the man I had fought with for way too long and was the father of my children. A good father, and I didn’t want my children to pick up for our relationship gone bad, so I tried hard…really hard to stay as far away from a messy divorce as possible. That really wasn’t what my ex-husbands attorney had in mind. I was the main bread winner and my ex-husband’s attorney had planned to make sure I suffered financially for leaving and so did my ex-husband. Things did get ugly and as I mentioned being thankful for having lost my job, this was another great reason to not have a job. I couldn’t be sued for child support and spousal support when I didn’t have the job I had just gotten laid off from. God always has a plan, what is meant for my bad is always meant for my good!

One of the reasons my husband and I couldn’t see eye to eye was because I was much more of a dreamer than he and willng to take risk to achieve my dreams of something bigger and better. I wasn’t sure exactly what the bigger and better was to be, but I knew it was out there somewhere waiting for me to arrive. As my husband and I went through our divorce, he was awarded child support and alimony, BUT his support was awarded to him based on what he believed I could achieve being the self-employed dreamer he often made fun of. I knew he didn’t believe in me and I used that to my advantage as we came to financial agreements and he really did sell me, well himself short on what he was able to get from me. I would never allow my kids to suffer and I always made sure to make up for the things my ex-husband couldn’t afford to provide for. I had no intention of letting my ex-husband suffer or my children suffer, but I didn’t like being taken advantage of either with the lies and deciet of what was happening every time my husbands attorney would contact mine. Long story short, my father has always said, the best defense is a good offense. I had a great offense and would not allow myself to be outsmarted or manipulated. I also learned a very valuable lesson during that time. “it’s just money!” Money is like energy, it comes and it goes and I would not allow myself to become a slave to the evils that were presenting themselves at the hands of my money. I knew I would make more and was about to make much more money than I had did care a lot about would be fine too. I also knew that we would be able to be friends if I never gave up on it, I didever made before. I knew that my kids would be fine, I would be fine and that my ex-husband who I really n’t and we are friends I am thankful to say. We made an agreement to get along for the sake of our children who we both love so much and have managed to keep that agreement for the last 13 years. Yes, we have had our differences of opinions as well as our share of arguments, but managed to come through the other side of those tough times friends. He is a good father and I am thankful for that, more than anything.

My life today also has its share of challenges and those challenges/lessons have made who and what I am today. Strong and a strong believer in what the Universe/God has in store for me and my family. When my husband and I married 10 years ago, we were both making a really good living, we owned two homes one in the Bay Area and one in Lake Tahoe which we visited often, we went skiing, ate out a lot and really lived a good life. We had new cars, a 4000 square foot house, and were enjoying life. Other than the common fights that husbands and wives have along with meltdowns, the challenges of my children having a step father with a strong personality along with a bunch of other “crap” that is just part of daily life in my mind. My husband had lost his job due to lay offs a few different times and decided to try the self-employed life that I had been living himself in the mortgage business. He did amazing in the mortgage business and made really great money, which allowed us to continue living the “lifestyle” we had become accustomed to for several years. Then came the “housing crisis” and everything went BUST for us. The worst career you could have when all this came about was a career in any sort of real estate related job. Our income came to a complete halt at this point, and there is no unemployment benefits when you are self employed so when I say a “complete halt” I mean it! Our monthly expenses were somewhere around 17K a month, which is an awful lot, but we were managing. I had quit working and for the first time in my life was trying my hand at being a “stay at home mom”, so I was not making any income for our family either. We were burning through money like crazy and had none coming in. We were borrowing from our equity line to keep up with the bills and stay out of foreclosure. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Two homes, four cars and five kids. Do the math, it is a lot of outgoing expenses and we had to start trimming wherever possible. The equity in our home was all we really had left and we needed to make it go as far as possible by trimming and trimming and trimming.

This was one of those life lessons that I again chose not to feel stress about or loose sleep about. My husband and I had many arguments about my not getting stressed, breaking down, crying, losing sleep or whatever else he expected of me and my reactions to our current situation. I kept telling him “it is what it is and how is getting stressed out and worried going to change anything?” I really felt that feelings those feelings would attract nothing but bad and more doom and gloom so I refused to participate in it. I desperately believed that once again, I would be okay. We would all be okay, somehow, someway we would make it through this difficult time and learn the lessons that life had in store for us. We just needed to keep reducing expenses wherever possible and try to keep our heads above water while using our problem solving skills to move forward. I at this point had gone back to work, but kept my word to myself never to work for someone else again. I knew I needed to do something I felt passion for as I bore easily and that when you follow your heart, things will work themselves out. I started a printing business called PritnerBees with much resistance from my husband. I feel confident in saying that he thought I was crazy as I had no experience in the printing business. I thought I didn’t have any experience at anything else new I had tried before either, but I managed to learn what I needed to learn to get where I needed to get, and this would be no different. The other thing I was sure about is that the Internet was my “golden ticket” to the freedom I so desire and almost “ache” for. I knew nothing about the Internet, how to build a website, how use Adobe programs, but when there is a will, there is a way. I have to this point in my life, taught myself everything I needed to know to succeed by reading and educating myself on wherever my passions take me. This time would be no different than the rest of the times I needed to learn new things and so off I went on my journey to learn anything and everything I could about the Internet, how to build websites, blogs, HTML, necessary databases, etc.

I feel blessed to have been introduced to great authors and speakers like Dr. Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Norman Vincent Peale, Zig Ziglar, Echart Tolle, Mark Fisher, Manual Ruiz, the Bible and many more who have had a profound impact on my life and my over all belief systems. I have been told many times in my life that “I couldn’t do it”…whatever “it” is and I simply refuse to believe that way of thinking. After all, I didn’t attend college other than a few classes when in my early 20’s while working full-time and being a mother of two at the time. I just couldn’t seem to fit it all in and my family was my top priority. Thanks to the gifts from these great philosophers, I have never put limits on myself as far as what I am capable of achieving. Rhonda Byrne wrote what became a very popular book called “The Secret” which really brings this whole subject home, which I also enjoyed reading. Positive thoughts lead positive results, negative thoughts lead to negative outcomes.

Though I have many things in my life that have frustrated me, made me cry, yell and scream and could lead me to a feeling of defeated, I choose to see these “issues” as life lessons to prepare me for what life has in store for me next. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!

That which doesn’t break you, only makes you stronger…at least that is how I see it.

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