Lesson Learned

Towards the end of September, the townhouse that I am living in now, sold. My dad didn't realize it was still on the market (he owned it) and when he got an offer for his asking price, he took it. After he agreed to sell it, he thought of us 4 girls living here and wanted to make sure we were safe and have us sign new contracts first, but by that time it was too late. Allyson was the only one who had a contract until April and the rest of us were month to month. If we tried to change anything it would have been a breech of contract and my dad would have had to pay a lot of money. Feeling bad about the situation, my dad did the best he could to make this easy on us girls. There is a family living in another one of my dad's townhouses across the street and they had been talking about wanting to move, so my dad gave them a 30 day notice the same time we received ours. It was nice to know we always had a place to go and be able to stay in the ward and stay together. Although we had a plan, I was still upset about the situation and the girls that were moving in and how it was being handled, after all... it is not like we were not cooperating. I became very bitter at the girls taking over and one of them moved in with us. I have already been having a hard time lately with my emotions and missing Brent more and more everyday and I was not my happy normal self. So I just ignored the new girl and did not make her feel welcomed at all. Everyone around us has been nothing but sympathetic and offered service and one girl I visit teach even brought all of us a bucket full of candy and a sweet note. While I appreciated all of these gestures, I continued to be bitter towards these girls kicking us out of our home. I am so grateful to people like Ashlee and Allyson in my life who have such a good attitude towards life and trials. On Sunday they suggested to us that we invite the new girl down to have our fall dinner with us. So we did. We got to know her and she is a really sweet girl. She got to know us and figured out we were not so bad either. I felt good about this and thought it was enough until today. Today (without mentioning too much detail) something happened where someone was only thinking of themselves and not about the whole situation. Of course it affects me more when it happens to a member of my family... you get defensive for them. When I heard I sat there thinking "I can't believe they are only thinking of themself and not even considering everything my family member is going through!" Then it hit me.... I was being a hypocrite. I was doing the same thing. I was only thinking of myself with this whole moving situation. All month long I have been thinking poor me, I can't believe this has happened to me, the timing of this is horrible. What about the girls that are moving in? I have no idea what they are going through. I know the new girl staying with us doesn't come out of her room because she feels uncomfortable around us, because we have made her feel that way.
You better believe as soon as soon as I got home I went up to her room and apologized for my actions. Come to find out, their Realtor had lied to them and said we were moving out in October, and he told us that only one girl was moving in and she wanted roommates when all along he knew there were two daughters moving in and had friends coming too. Because of this, everyone living here didn't think we would have to move and the girls moving in thought they would get to move in right away... since they found out they couldn't, they were mad and two of the girls have just been living out of suitcases this last month at someones house. Now I know... their month has been as crummy as ours, and the girls are actually really nice. And because I decided to be nice and apologize, the new girl called her dad and told him to give us a break and give us two full more days to get our stuff out and clean. I can't tell you how amazing that is given Saturday is Halloween and I have to help with the huge stake party and it is busy at work right now for all of us. I just thanked her and told her to thank her dad and when I see her sister at church on Sunday... I am going to apologize to her too.
I defiantly learned (re-learned) an important lesson today... I need to look outside of my selfish world and look at the whole picture, both sides of the story, because you don't know what the other people around you are going through. And what good does it do anybody to just be upset anyway? It keeps you and everyone around you down. I will really try and be better about this.
I also want to thank my dad (even though he doesn't read my blog). He really came to our rescue in this situation. He has provided us a place to live, he is taking time out of his busy schedule to come up to Utah, hire a few guys to help and to fix our new place up so it looks new after a family with 7 kids has been living there for 3 years. He is paying for it all out of his pocket (and with travel, it ends up being a big chunk) and missing Halloween with my homeward and grand kids to make this happen. Thank you so much dad, I love you so much and hope you know that I REALLY appreciate all that you do for me and others. You are so service oriented and giving, you are such a great example to me. I am so lucky to have such an amazing dad.