Living Alone E-Book

Peter Mulraney

• Herausgeber: Peter Mulraney
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Living Alone

Leseprobe

Living Alone

Information for men who find themselves on their own.

Peter Mulraney

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 2015 Peter Mulraney

ISBN: 978-0-9924269-9-6

Created with Vellum

Contents

Preface

After She's Gone

Introduction

Process the ending

It's your place now

Keeping the place clean

The mysteries of the laundry

Outsourcing

Money management

Cooking 4 One

Introduction

Some basic stuff

Preparing meals

Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

Sample menus

Entertaining

Over to you

Sanity Savers

Introduction

Reading

Writing

Learning a new skill

Exercising

Growing things

Serving

Having fun

Staying connected

Befriending yourself

Summary

A note from Peter

Also by Peter Mulraney

Preface

For those of us in middle or old age, finding ourselves living alone after the end of a long-term relationship can be a bit of a challenge. Not only is there all the emotional stuff to deal with, there is also the need to start looking after ourselves, sometimes for the first time in our lives.

When the woman in your life has gone, for whatever reason, all those things she did in the kitchen and around the house are suddenly no longer secret women's business. Now they're your business; and your health and well-being depend on how well you master them. Most of us can't afford the luxury of outsourcing all or any of it, so we have to learn to do it for ourselves.

It's easy to be discouraged when you first try and work out how things work in the kitchen, especially if you've never done any cooking or food shopping. It's tempting to take the easy way out and live on takeaways. From my perspective, it's best not to go down that street.

Keep in mind that if you can boil a saucepan of water on a stove or cooktop, there are a lot of things you can drop into that boiling water and turn into a meal in minutes. I share some of the ways I use a saucepan of boiling water in the section: Cooking 4 One.

When you're doing the cleaning, remember, if it appears to be overwhelming you can always chunk it. If chunking works for project management, it will work for cleaning a house or an apartment - just do a bit at a time. That's how I do it. I break the cleaning down into manageable tasks and do them regularly. You don't have to fall in love with cleaning and keeping things in some sort of order - you simply have to do it.

I don't know anybody who loves ironing. I know I don't, and I know how to do it. My best advice is to buy shirts that don't need ironing if you can, and remember to let then dry on a hanger. Stay away from any idea that you have to iron sheets and pillowcases, or tea towels and tablecloths for that matter. If you're stuck with cotton or linen tablecloths, do yourself a favour and buy something that doesn't need ironing or use place mats.

Apart from looking after yourself physically, you need to look after yourself mentally and emotionally.

In the Sanity Savers section I share nine strategies for finding constructive ways to fill in your time and maintain your sanity. You don't have to embrace them all but I do encourage you to stay connected and to befriend yourself.

A lot of us put off doing the personal growth stuff, because we're afraid of what we'll find if we start looking 'under the hood'. I can only tell you that it's therapeutic - it's good for you - if you're prepared to spend some time doing it.

In the end, life is what you make it, so be kind to yourself and enjoy this new way of being.

The content of Living Alone is taken from the three titles in the Living Alone series: After She's Gone, Cooking4One and Sanity Savers. Although those names appear as section headings, the content of each section has been edited to remove duplication and consolidate material for the purposes of clarity.

After She's Gone

Introduction

Doing those things she used to do for you

Sometimes it feels like life happens to you, especially when your journey intersects with death, divorce or desertion; or you find yourself temporarily separated from the woman who had been taking care of business at your place.

It happened to me. Around five years ago, my wife, who had been looking after me in Adelaide, Australia, for thirty something years at that point, decided she wanted to broaden her horizons by becoming an educational consultant in New York. Yeah, you got it, the one in the United States of America. That's a tad more than a cut lunch and a water bottle trip from my place - by 747.

For reasons associated with financial commitments and maximizing my retirement savings plan, I chose to stay at my job in Australia.

No need to feel sorry, it's working out fine. We're still married and we get to spend time together in two different cities, in two different parts of the world, in two different time zones, and I found out about Skype.

But, I found myself living on my own again, for up to four or five months at a time.

There's only so much stuff a woman can leave behind in the freezer, and if she's left for good, she may not have left you anything in the freezer, and she's certainly not going to be on Skype, telling you how to cook whatever it is you want to try this week.

In a way, I was lucky. Being a country boy, I'd had some experience looking after myself when I was at university. We country kids had to leave home and come down to the city to study, and I ended up living in an apartment with a couple of my brothers. So, I had some basic cooking skills I could fall back on. And, having been one of those collaborative husbands, who shared the housework while we were raising our kids, I knew how things about the house worked.

My wife would say that I was well trained. I might not have mastered much in the kitchen, but at least I'd done some sort of an apprenticeship over the years. I might not make the bed the way she wants it made, but at least I know how to make a bed, and I've done enough supervised cleaning to know which end of the vacuum cleaner is the business end.

Having looked after myself successfully for a while, I thought it might be useful to share what I know, so that anyone finding himself in a similar situation, would have access to a basic survival guide written by a fellow traveller, one who had survived by acquiring the basic skills required to look after himself.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert. I'm simply a practitioner, who has relied on the ideas discussed in this section and lived to tell you about them.

Process the ending

Before we move on to the skills you need to master to look after yourself, let's take a moment to consider processing the end of your relationship.

The macho thing is to tough it out, to pretend it doesn't hurt and soldier on. That might work on the battlefield in the short-term heat of the fight. Anywhere else in life it's bullshit.

All relationship endings, whether through death or divorce, involve emotional pain you need to deal with. Grieving is the name we give to that process.

Grieving

The end of any relationship is painful. Most of us think of grieving only in terms of death, but grieving is simply a process of working through a sense of loss.

I'm not a grief counsellor, but I've had some experience with grieving:

people in my life have died,relationships have ended before I was ready, andfriends have moved away to different parts of the world

- and you probably have too.

No matter how your relationship ended, it's important for your mental and emotional well-being to grieve appropriately.

A useful resource, that will not cost you the earth, is Good Grief 50th Anniversary Edition by Granger E Westberg, which you can buy on Amazon. If you don't feel like buying the book you can ask our friend Google about the grieving process - he's got lots of resources you can read for free.

One thing you should be aware of is that grieving is not done well with alcohol - or any other mind numbing drug for that matter.

Another is, it's okay for a grown man to cry.

Something else I've learnt about grieving is that it's good to have someone to talk it through with, someone who will just listen - without judging or telling you to pull yourself together and get over her.

Give yourself the time and space to grieve. Trying to pretend it doesn't hurt doesn't work. You might think you can fool yourself, and everybody else, into believing that you're okay, that you're over her, but unless you've done the processing that grief will surface later, when you least expect it.

So do yourself a favour - be honest with yourself about how you feel.

Legals

At the end of any long-term relationship there will be a few loose ends.

If you're dealing with moving on from the death of your spouse or partner, there will be a pile of legal stuff to deal with to finalize her estate.

The level of detail required to finalize an estate depends on the country you live in, and the number and type of assets involved. Some things have dollar amount thresholds and timeframes attached to them. In some countries you have to pay death or estate taxes, so go online and find out what the tax obligations are in your country.

Hopefully, if she had a lot of assets, she left a will with instructions for how her things are to be distributed. If her estate is complicated, get help. That's why we have lawyers and accountants.

If you're moving on from a divorce, follow through with whatever you agreed to with your ex or with what the court imposed. That way you'll avoid any unnecessary fees from her team. If you need to get things transferred into or out of your name or hers, get it done. Now that you are no longer a couple, you don't want to continue any joint and several liabilities you undertook as a couple either.

If you're getting over the end of a long-term non-matrimonial or de facto relationship, you might still need some legal advice, especially if you live in a country like Australia where, from a legal perspective, a de facto relationship is treated the same as a marriage.

If your split is not amicable and you have lots of assets, don't put off speaking to your lawyer or accountant.

You can ask our friend Google but, in the end, you'll be better served by talking to a lawyer and a tax accountant if you need advice.

My advice is don't put it off.

Her stuff

If you're moving on from the death of a spouse or partner, at some point you need to do something with her personal items, like clothing and jewellery.

This can be pretty hard emotionally, so if you have children, you might want to consider asking them to help you.

Stuff that you can't use can be given a new life with someone else. Some stuff you have to throw out. Your children might want some items, like her favourite pieces of jewellery.

There are lots of organisations, like the St Vincent de Paul Society or the Salvation Army, that can make good use of clothing and other items. Give them a call. Some of them collect, others will ask you to bring things in or drop them off at a specific location.

If she was a journal writer, you might be faced with the dilemma I gave one of the characters in my novel After. If you read her journals you could find out some things you'd rather not know. A tough choice, but if you ever want to write the story of her life, don't throw them out. Perhaps you can share them with your children or save them to pass on at your death.

Remember, when you clear out the old you're making room for the new.

It's your place now

I don't know about you, but [...]