I was ready to escape the loneliness, my children had given me their permission to date, and I didn’t have a clue how.

And then impulsively, late one Friday night, I checked out an online singles website. Websites (heck, even the internet!) hadn’t been invented the last time I’d been single and I admit, over the years I’d been very suspect of those types of things. And then unexpectedly I became like the many others I’d heard about–I signed up! I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I only knew I planned to keep it a secret.

You had to provide information about yourself, information about the type of people you were interested in meeting, and you had to post a picture. My plan to keep the whole online a secret was already blown. I didn’t know how to load a picture onto the site! So when my oldest got home that night, I had to ask him to help me. He handled my request with absolute class, grace, and not a single comment…until he had finished loading the photos and was heading to bed. He couldn’t resist teasing me a little bit, and with a wink, wished me “good luck” in my “internet dating.”

I was mortified. Internet dating. Is THAT what I was doing?

Shaking my head at myself I went to bed. I didn’t have high hopes for “internet dating.” Simply having to resort to that made me feel like an even bigger loser and I added “internet dating” to the list of failures: formerly married to a criminal, hadn’t had a clue about His Ponzi scheme activity EVER, divorced, single mom, credit ruined, financial devastation, starting over at 42, etc… In some ways, the list was growing. Not exactly the direction I had hoped to be heading.

But the next morning I woke up to quite an unexpected surprise. I’m still not sure why I thought to check my email on a Saturday morning, that wasn’t my usual habit. (I guess maybe in part it was to see if I’d really done what I thought I had.) Nope. It wasn’t a dream. I actually HAD signed up online. And I discovered I had an inbox FULL of messages. I certainly wasn’t expecting that! I bravely clicked on the first one and opened it.

But before I could even read it, a man from the online site opened an IM window and began to chat with me.

WHAT had I done, I thought to myself. And my next thoughts were even more brilliant: How did that screen get there? What do I do? What is this IM thing? I’d never done anything like that before. But out of desperation, I became a quick study. (Thank goodness years ago I’d seen a movie, “The Perfect Man.” I remembered they’d IM’d in that movie, and THAT was how I figured out how to answer the man waiting expectantly for my reply.)

Hang on! The roller coaster of my life just took ANOTHER unexpected turn!