AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“She’s just trying to help. She wants to be a blessing to people, and I think maybe she feels like she’s stuck in the house with Miss Malone, changing bedpans and cooking vegetables and not really living life at all.”
“But what she’s doing is a blessing. Sometimes it’s just hard to see it when it feels like only one person is benefiting.”
“Plus, you grow a lot when you have to take care of someone else.”
Lena nodded. Sunday sometimes was wise beyond her years. “It was a great party. I’m a little bit disappointed that Eleanor isn’t here so I can congratulate her on it. She did an excellent job of organizing it.”
“I didn’t help her nearly as much as I wanted to. With the wedding and then just settling into married life, I just didn’t find time. Eleanor didn’t complain, and whenever people couldn’t help her, she just went ahead and did it herself. If this is a success, she definitely deserves all the credit.”
Lena nodded, glad that Sunday could give credit where it was due. Her children, perhaps because of her husband leaving, had grown up close to each other, without the typical jealousies and rivalries that siblings sometimes had.
Maybe that was another blessing of her husband leaving. She supposed the loneliness that she’d endured had been worth it. Worth the lessons her children had learned, the work ethics they had acquired, and the compassion for other people that they displayed.
If her husband hadn’t left, maybe her children wouldn’t have been like that.
“You know, Mom, you should probably consider yourself lucky that you aren’t the one she was trying to kidnap. I’ve heard Sally saying that she needs to find a man for you.” Sunday bumped her arm and winked before she strode off.
Lena didn’t have a chance to reply, as she wasn’t sure what she would say anyway.
Go ahead and kidnap me?
She chuckled to herself. No. She didn’t want to have to sleep on the hard floor or be uncomfortable. After all, she passed fifty a few years ago, and her bones weren’t as flexible as they used to be.
But maybe she wouldn’t mind if someone wanted to match her up with someone.
That probably wasn’t true. One thing about getting older, she had higher standards than she used to. She wasn’t interested in just any old person. It wasn’t even that she wanted to find someone who was perfectly compatible to her. That might have been more important when she was younger, but now, she wanted someone who had character and integrity. Who had a solid relationship with the Lord, and who wasn’t easily offended. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with someone she was always tiptoeing around trying not to make him angry.
She wanted someone who was going to love her the way she was. Not expect her to be a model on the cover of some magazine somewhere. She wanted someone who...thought about others more than they thought about themselves.
Where was she going to find such a paragon of virtue?
She laughed again. She probably wasn’t going to find that. Any man who was like that had already been snatched up. Plus, she wasn’t sure that she had matured to the point where she would be a good wife to someone like that. After all, if he was as good as she wanted him to be, he deserved a wife who was on his level, not someone like her, who still had so many rough edges that needed to be shaved off and filed so that she was more like Jesus.
She certainly had a tendency to think of herself more often than she should and to worry about things that she didn’t need to. She got offended over things as well, although not like she used to when she was younger. And she had the baggage of having her husband cheat on her and leave.
Probably a person never really got over something like that, and it would be hard for her to trust again. She would want her husband to let her know where he was and what he was doing, and at her age, a man probably already was set in his ways and didn’t want to have to answer to his wife for everything that he did. She wouldn’t want there to be any secrets between them. Not on his computer, not on his phone, not on any piece of electronics. They would share passwords, they would know what each other was doing, at least in her perfect world.
Yeah, she was better off not being trapped with anyone. Her standards were way too high, and she would never find anyone who met even some of them. And she wasn’t going to get married only to be miserable for the rest of her life.
She might as well be alone.
