Single parenting over the past thirty years has taught me a lot. Not having ‘Dad’ around to tell one of my sons to just punch the guy out when he was approached by a bully left me to try and figure out a solution to that problem when it arose, one that perhaps ended up with less blood on my towels!

One thing I noticed early on was that when my sons were bullied by some one, they were often taunted with name calling that was unfounded….like “You’re a liar!” This threw them on the defensive and made them angry, often just screaming back “I am not”, which escalated the interaction, often to the point of them just wanting  to hit the other guy to shut him up. This being basically the response the other person had counted on to goad them into a fight, it worked until we figured out the basis of the problem.

I noticed over time that if they hadn’t been guilty of the taunted name they were called, (in this case, they hadn’t lied),  the bully was in fact giving them the main clue to his own behavior, i.e. that he was a liar. He was in fact lying about the fact that my son had lied. Once my sons knew to look for that as a clue to another’s taunting behavior, they ceased to be drawn into a fight with such a person, seeing right off the bat that they were dealing with a liar made them less likely to worry about what they thought about them anyway! End of conflict, as they walked away with a somewhat smug look on their face.

I find I am often using this same perspective dealing with the vicious attacks that have come upon former presidents and candidates for vice president. There is no reason to enter the fray. No response certainly does not confirm my agreement, as the attacker might hope, but only my acceptance of the clue they may have just revealed about themselves. Enough said.

I think we all need to look deeply into our own behaviors right now and question the truth of anything we are passing on because it stirs the pot. This pressure cooker is going to explode in our faces if we don’t look for the real basis of our problems and disagreements and find “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” I am not saying I know what that is, but I am willing to look at ALL the evidence , not just that which suits my particular bias. Having more people agree with us doesn’t make something true…..mob rule is not always “just” and many men were hanged who weren’t guilty, only to temporarily prove someone was “right” and had plenty of angry supporters to agree with them. We need to remember that in this time. Truth will eventually surface, but we need to try and assist in finding it without personal prejudice. We are all in this together. One thing I learned from being accountable to my children…if I was going to call someone a name, I had better do some soul searching first and see if it had any home within me before I thrust it accusingly on someone else….

This has been an amazing month… it is a month today since the auto accident that totaled my car. I think it takes a good thirty days to get back on track (providing only minor injuries) with the groove of your life. It is as if you are suffering from a temporary mental fog and have also lost muscle memory. I found that almost every day I forgot where simple things like car keys, cell phone, house keys, purse, had been put down,resulting in my frequently leaving without at least one. I found that driving the car felt like when I was sixteen and in Driver’s Ed…..I had to think carefully about every light, every stop sign. Nothing seemed automatic, and if it did, I immediately questioned its authenticity.

The positive part is, a month later, rental car returned, new(used) car in my driveway, I am back to doing what I do….showing houses and working with customers. I am back to mowing my lawn and complaining about the humidity. I am back to real life and sitting at the computer several hours in the day, and none of these seem as taxing as they did in the past 30 day period. I am certain that I will make up the lost income in some form by the end of the year.

What I learned again is how I hate doing life as a “victim”. I guess that works for some people, and there are those who may feel they have no choice, but we always have a choice! I kept reading books that gave me knew ways of looking at the same situation with a different mindset. A new way of thinking that gave me new ways of acting, within the same circumstance. All I know is that power returned to me and positive things started happening everytime I chose to change the lens I was looking through.

Perspective comes usually as we are looking back on our life at previous events. But when you see that all previous events, even those you felt so negative at the time they happened, always turned out to be used toward your greater good. I think that is true for me and will always be true. So if I can just choose to believe that in any circumstance that arises, it ceases to have a negative hold on me. I can choose to respond to it from that position, and I will make a far better choice, involving a lot less worry and self-defeating energy, and arrive sooner at the perspective I have decided to have.

“Are you sitting down…?” That was how my Broker greeted me on Saturday morning. Saturday not usually being  a “bank day” for anything to do with housing sales, the last thing I expected her to say was “They accepted our short sale offer on your house!”

Wow, what is that about doing your best but then turning the outcome over to your higher power? That is exactly what I have been trying to do this past week. Live in the present, not the past or the future. Try not to worry about things that you don’t know the outcome of (like what if the foreclosure pushes me into bankruptcy?). And allow new data (perhaps they will accept the offer) to penetrate your thoughts, more than the negative ones that keep trying to resurface!

The book I finished last week was a Neale Donald Walsh called When Everything Changes, Change Everything! And I must admit, so far I am liking the results of getting “out of my mind!”

I will keep you posted, but I had a contract accepted and found a car I could afford also this weekend, so I am going to keep trying to stay present and await the positive results. This is such a draining experience in so many ways, that it really does open one up to the possibilities of changing the way you look at everything. More on that subject later….

Being a die-hard cock-eyed optimist, I have felt very beaten up lately by the convergence of so many stress related obstacles showing up in my life. Being an avid self-help book devourer, I have taken to buying the used versions of anything I can find I haven’t already read. Point being….all the ones I have read got me to here and now, but I am overloaded with trying to deal with two pre-foreclosures in my own life, and an almost fatal car accident (but not, thanks to an old Buick that I was driving that took the hit for all six people!…..This, of course, is the vehicle that now has no value and is deemed a total loss by the insurance companies). Needlesstosay, since I was just crossing an intersection at a green light, not expecting a red-light runner, I am having some trouble staying “in the moment” and waiting for the best outcome the insurance companies have to offer!

OK, so back to the new self help books. I am sure they are writing new ones as fast as they can, but I am noticing that since I live in a social niche of persons who have been trying to hold on for dear life to the gains they made that almost brought them into the middle class financially, I am really needing a new kind of support right now. I seem to  need to learn to disregard the obvious and still be able to focus on the possibilities that may emerge as opportunities of this downward economic turn. Also, I will need ‘opportunities’ that require no investment upfront! To even be able to create those thoughts I need positive energy and a certain lightness of being that has been seriously missing from my past few weeks!

I do find I have very little room for the negative energy of those who would give up and cave in to all the possible excuses that are so handy to clutch at right now. I know that I have to keep bringing myself back to being accountable on so many levels for the life situation in which I presently find myself. By doing that, however, I am still recognizing the responsibility I have to find my way out of it as well. So, keep those books coming! I actually get a lot of encouragement out of them.

We all struggle with some dark corners, areas of our lives where we feel that we “should” do better, where we are just not making the grade. The problem is often our own judgment of how we are doing. We tend to be our own harshest critics.

Often if we are willing to forgive ourselves for avoiding the situation or conversation we need to have, the rest starts to fall in place rather easily. Big things can often be broken up into smaller pieces. I know this sounds like self-help time management 101, but we rarely apply it.

There is a way out, following one breadcrumb at a time. And often we begin to see how much the other people in our lives are there for us, and how much their support means.

It is amazing how a possibility of a positive outcome can summon up more energy than a negative one does for me. For a moment yesterday, I was in a space to believe that my two homes with short sale contracts were going to sell, and it totally reversed my feelings about impending bankruptcy, and therefore about my future. What contributed to this was my Broker saying she wanted to pay for an appraisal on the home we had just received a good contract on.

We proceeded with that, retained an FHA approved appraiser, and did not offer any info to him as to what the contract intended. He did the appraisal immediately, and when we received it we found it was identical to the offer we had received. The BPO, done by a Broker the bank paid last week, was over $30,000 more than the appraisal! Of course, based on the BPO, the bank would have (and may still reject) the offer on the table. But in terms of my feeling much more empowered to defend my position that I was doing everything I could to obtain a fair market offer, it definitely went much further. If in fact, the bank rejects this offer, and allows the property to drift into foreclosure, I will be able to have a record of the possibilities the bank had to avoid losing so much time and money. Also the neighborhood would have been able to recover much faster, had the bank permitted this sale, or a Deed-in-Lieu.

This mere validation of what I know to be the truth of the market here, has allowed me to go forward with a more positive feeling that the banks are working against their own interests, as well as those of the country, and certainly against the local market and buyers, sellers and Realtors, when they refuse to put a realistic price on these properties at the outset, instead of wasting everyone’s valuable time and money in a three month procrastination which results in loss all the way around.  It did, however, give my Broker and I the assurance that in the world of short sales, this investment may be well worth it if the seller will take it seriously. If not, we will know soon. Either way, I feel better!

I remember in December getting a call from a woman who was in the pre-foreclosure frustration process, and she was trying to find a place to rent (hopefully to later own) where she could bring her two dogs and three cats. Her husband had lost his job, they were behind on their payments on their home, and now they had to find a place to move to….most had rules about animals and she was really getting worried. What the place looked like and even where it was located meant far less than if she could keep her family together.

The shelters are seeing most of the evidence of this problem. What do you do when relatives have offered to take you in but their children are allergic to your animals? You are grateful and heartbroken at the same time. Some people have larger animals whose care and feeding has now become too expensive, or the caretaker has had to go back to work. Although I did find feeding the dog a lot less challenging to my confused mind than feeding myself. Open the bag, pour it in the bowl. There were times I wondered….could it possibly be palatable for humans?….It would make life so much easier right now! Often I would get home from the store with a bunch of ingredients that didn’t even make a meal, and I found I really craved comfort food….homemade mac and cheese, pot roast….things I couldn’t possibly have time to make. I had to worry every day about trying to happen upon a buyer who was looking for a home in the near future, or I wouldn’t be able to pay for anything shortly. This was a time I wished I had a job where I could just show up, do the work and get paid. Being creative and upbeat about new business was a stretch right now!

Anyway, the animal dilemma is another one that is gut-wrenching for many families, and involves looking for another home for the beloved pet at a time when the kids are going through so much upheaval that snuggling with Fido would really be a blessing. Some of us are fortunate to be able to keep them, but for those who cannot, I have incredible empathy for you right now, and I also hope that those who can, reach out to their shelters for these loved and achingly surrendered pets.

There comes a point where you just know it is time to move out of your home. The first three months they pretty much treat you as delinquent. In fact, even though I knew I would be moving out into one of my rental properties so I could homestead it and possibly afford it, they told me I had to be behind three months in payments and have it listed for sale three months before they would talk to me about a Deed-in Lieu. So I moved after two months, leaving the house empty.

My son flew in to help my other son move me in a weekend and with the help of a U Haul we got most of me out. The residue that didn’t fit took me several months to move out and some i just left. My intentions were good, but it was so hard to go back and actually debilitating after awhile. Cleaning a house you are abandoning feels very different than fixing up a house you are selling. Either way it goes, in my case, was going to be a big loss. The house I was moving into was a wreck, and I was worried everyday about earning enough money to pay my bills with real estate. I had to pretty much block out what was happening as I went about showing excited first time buyers potential homes.

That was a lot like going to a friend’s wedding when you are separated yourself. You feel somewhat conflicted with your value system. You still believe in marriage, yours just isn’t in the best of shape. I also found it really difficult to have my home on the market during the time I was there. I didn’t feel as good about showing it as I had previous homes, and it was a bit chaotic as I tried to pack.It was time to leave.

When the time comes to move, you have to start choosing what you can take with you. Often our first move is to a family member’s, a smaller house or apartment, and there may not be room for everything you have in your home now. Is there already a washer and dryer? Can you take the piano your son has been learning to play? What to do with all the extra furniture you spent years accumulating? Worse than that are things you bought that perhaps are still on your credit cards? I don’t even know what happens with Rooms 2 Go or furniture paid on time….do they come and get it?

You have no money for storage spaces, you are wishing you had joined the neighborhood garage sale a month before, but you were still hoping you could stay at that point.More things get tossed in huge garbage bags to be sorted later. Its the most disorganized packing you have ever done.Perhaps because you are losing your mind in the process? How can you stay organized when life is upside down and topsy turvy at the same time? Multiply this times the number of family members looking to you for calming answers….I only had a dog but was constantly aware of how much more painful and difficult this would have been had my sons still been under my roof!

And people wonder “why did they leave all this stuff in the closet?” It’s kind of like what would you bring if your house caught fire and you only had minutes to grab the important stuff. If we look around and the people that matter and the animals are with us it’s a success….we just pray we will never remember or need all the things that didn’t make it.

I have to admit, being in Short Sale Hell and the whole ‘losing my home’ process has sent me through the roller coaster stages that I am sure everyone in it has been going through. I started a real estate blog last year at the prompting of my oldest son, and he had me practicing offline. I enjoyed it, and contributed weekly or so, but somewhere around November, as I hit the wall with dealing with the lender and moving and trying to arrange a speedy Deed-in-lieu (which of course never happened), my life got complicated and emotional and I could barely focus on staying in my job….which is real estate on commission.

With houses stuck in short sale limbo, I was hit from both sides. My own house of cards was falling, as first I lost my home, then one at a time my three rental properties as renters moved and the rent no longer was there to cover the mortgage. These rental properties were purchased during the three previous boom years and I had counted on them being my retirement and 401K plan. Shattered dreams are part of this whole mess for everyone and I got lost for awhile, wishing there were a support group for people going through this. As a full time Realtor, I also had no income for four months, as everyone waited for the market to hit bottom and the new administration to fix things.

Last night I happened to go look at my blog, and noticed someone had commented on an entry from November about this nightmare I was just beginning to live. She said only “Thank you for writing this”. I went to bed and couldn’t get that out of my mind. How she found me under joanreynolds.com I will never know, even my family doesn’t know I have been practicing blogging there. The fact that she did find it got me thinking. Instead of writing in my diary every night about my journey, why not enter some of those journal snippets into the blog, get a couple more .com names and see who else is out there who needs a fellow traveler on this road. I am hoping to hear from lots of you about how you are feeling as you transition thru this life change. I will try to keep in touch more frequently, but if you see a bunch with the same dates, they weren’t all just written. I do occasionally remember things from a few months ago as they get cemented in my heart when a second or third  home I have worked very hard on gets added to the mix.

We can educate, encourage, support and lead each other through. I thought divorce had prepared me for most everything, but this is a new and different place than most of us have ever been, and we will find our way together. Stay tuned, and tell a friend if you know one who is also experiencing this; not feeling alone and knowing where to find other survivors is a really good thing.