Half a year

So it's now been half a year since Robin passed away.

A year since my life, the life of my kids, the life of so many around us changed.

Time marches on though. It never stops, and you either quit, or keep going. I kept going, because it was my only choice. I have the kids to look out for now, and I was pleasantly surprised by falling in love with an old friend.

 In our darkest times, sometimes everything comes out and surprises us. Which we'd never see if we quit.

 Which really makes me thing about the Tough Mudder I did yesterday. Some of the guys from work wanted to do it, so I tossed my hat in the ring. Not enough time to really prepare for it, no real idea what lay in store, and I'm so glad I did it.

 After Robin passed, I decided to stop putting off doing things that I wanted to do. So when the Mudder came up, I signed up. It was one of the best thing's I've ever done.

 Make no mistake, I hurt quite a bit. I am sore, I have road rash and that lingering feeling that I pushed myself past my limit because I couldn't quit.

 Like all the signs say, "There's no quit in here."

 Like the rest of life.

 So now I see where it goes from here. Lots of new things happening now. A new relationship when I gave up on ever finding love again. Looking for a new house for the kids and I. Learning how to be the parent, on my own.

 So there we go. All you can do is keep going. "There's no quit in here."

Getting Back to it

 Getting back to it. That seemed like a good title for this when I sat down to write today.

 All in all, that's what I've been doing across the board lately. Getting back to running, getting back to things I liked to do in the past. Getting back to living. Now I'm getting back to writing.

 For a while, every time I sat down to write, I ended up reading through old stuff and remembering. It was good for growing, and moving through things, though bad for productivity. Now I'm at the point where I am really embracing moving forward.

 It had been six months now since Robin passed away. There are still a lot of emotions, and they mostly hit me out of the blue lately. My greatest progress here has been embracing the emotions, embracing the memories, but still looking forward at this point.

 The turning point here was accepting my lot in life. I was a single dad now. I'm in my thirties and I have a lot on my plate. I decided that at some time in the future, I'd have to think about getting out and doing things, seeing people. Dating.

 I decided I really wasn't into that scene. I decided that the fairly dark road I was beginning to head down did not interest me that much. I had really decided to give up on love, since I never expected to find it.

 In a fairly uncharacteristic way, I sat down and made a list. Now, I don't usually make lists, I should, but it doesn't really work with the organized chaos that is usually the way I do things. I rarely remember to make a grocery list. I should work on that.

 But I did. I sat down and listed the exact things I want in another person. Personality traits, hobbies, style, looks, family life, other stuff I'm not going to mention. It was pretty detailed, and I had in my mind what I was looking for. At the forefront of it was someone that had do understand the place I was at in my life. Someone who could understand that my kids are the most important thing to me, and that they take precedence.

 Someone who would love my kids. They have been through so much, and I wasn't going to parade girlfriends past them as I made my way through life. I wasn't going to let someone who did not deserve them even meet them.

 So I basically decided that I would never find someone like that. I figured I had my soulmate, and God took her from me, and that was that. All I had left to do was get the kids off to college, live alone in my house for a while, and then, at some point, I'd check out.

 That's what I was going with.

 But life tends to happen while we are making all of our plans. I'd gotten the kids to bed, and was getting ready to play video games when I noticed a friend of mine, someone I'd only talked to briefly in passing since we were stationed in California was on Facebook chat.

 I'm surprised I'd even stopped to look, actually, as orcs weren't going to bring the Emperors Wrath on themselves. But I did. And I wondered what she was up to. So I asked.

 I believe my exact words were, "What's up girl?"

And with that, it started. When I had just decided not to look, I started talking with her, and like it always is with people who served together in the military, you pick up where you left off. Where we left off was as close friends who had both recently gotten married. We had always had a lot in common, and had flirted with one another, but nothing had ever come of it. We remained good friends, and with everything we had both been through in the years between, we actually had more in common now.

 The first night we talked, that phone call lasted about three hours. Twelve years of life and pain is a lot to condense. At the end of that phone call, I knew there were feelings, though the timing was unfortunate. There are always people that will say something about the timing when you start moving on. The truth of it, though, is that grief and living afterwards is an open ended thing.

 It doesn't ever go away, you just learn to live with it. So we talked. We talked about our children. We talked about the pain in our lives. We talked about healing, and how we both need it.

 So in the end, after a lot of overthinking, and wondering, and talking with my oldest about how she even felt about her Daddy dating, we decided to move ahead and become official. The only other choice was to run from how I felt, and hope it was still there when a "better time" came around. I learned, though, that there rarely is a "better time" for anything. If we wait too long, we miss things. I didn't want to miss this.

 I am happier than I have been in a long time. And, I guess, at the end of the day, that's what I want most out of life. I want my kids and I, and those that I love to be happy.

 So now, I am really getting back to it. Back to living. The next step in my life now if finding a house. I'm talking to a realtor now, and have everything started for my home loan, so I am bravely venturing into this new life of mine.