Debbie is a Happy (99% of the time)…person who operates her business at home. She started out with a lap top and slowly grew out of that.Now she has expanded her business with a large desk top name “Oops”
Her goal is to share as much happiness with people as she can. She does not have the college degrees that others have, but she gets by with her good common sense and a lot of reading and research. Her happiness has evolved around life experiences. This is what she says, “You can read about happiness in many books, but until you have lived happiness can you really express it to other people”? She draws on her experiences life has offered her, through the ups and downs over the years and the willingness and thrill to keep learning.
Debbie motto is; “The past is lessons learned; the present and future are opportunities to practice those lessons.”
The five important things you need to find your happiness:
1. A desire to be happy.
2. Appreciate what you already have in your life.
3. Learn to enjoy the moment.
4. Have a sense of humor.
5. Be a child some of the time.
Debbie feels that life experiences cannot be taught in a class rooms like history, math, science, engineering or the medical field, etc. Everyone has a different set of circumstances and they react to them differently. Your happiness depends on you and who you are and how willing you want to know yourself. With sin in the world she feels that one has to learn to work around it, through it, or underneath it when necessary. Happiness cannot be handed to you on a silver spoon, but it is there if you definitely have a desire to choose happiness.
This is the short story of her life:
The first 20 years of my life was spent on a farm in western Nebraska. She grew up with 3 sisters and 3 brothers. Was the fifth child out of seven and the youngest of the girls, which can be a pain? The older sisters never seem to think she grow up and really know anything. This is ok, because in the end you grow up stronger for it.
Her family lived in a four room house without indoor plumping until she was 12 years old. Her father was a hired hand for a farmer, which in turn meant that they really didn’t have much money. Their mother would clean houses for people or clean the school house to make extra money. Sometimes she would take care of older people to earn that extra money. In the summer time when the children were old enough they did field work to help out. Debbie says, “Don’t feel bad for me, because at that age you really don’t know any better and feel it is part of life. “
Debbie went to a three room school that was from kindergarten to the 8th grade. When she was in the 7th grade the family did move to a house that had indoor plumping. She remembers this as being pretty nice. As she puts it, “It was really great sitting in a real tub and taking a bath and those out houses just don’t cut the mustard and the toilet paper can really suck.”
Right now you are probably thinking, “Man she was raised with the dinosaurs.” It wasn’t that far back, but she does remember those darn horse flies in the summer time. Boy, when they bite you it really hurt. Her and her siblings did have fun catching the lighting bugs in a jar. They didn’t have a lot of toys, so they made up their own fun. They would walk on tomato cans with strips of rubber tied on them, so they would stay on our feet. She says, “it was fun to take 5 gallon barrels and lay them on their side and played tag by rolling them and catching one another and then take the big tracker tires we would crawl inside and roll down a hill.” The corrals fence where part of their entertainment. Walking on them in hopes that if you fell off the fence it was on the clean side and not in the inside where all the cows and manure was. Debbie said, “That if you were unlucky enough to fall on the wrong side it met you were going to get hosed down, if you get my drift.”
Life was very simple and they did have a lot of fun. Even back then she learned to take the negative and make something positive out of it. She says, “They were rich with LOVE not things.”
The high school she went to was a small school. It was one that had kindergarten through the 12th grade. Her graduation class consists of 12 students. She says, “that she enjoyed those years, but at the same time she knew that if she had children some day they would go to a better school, because their wasn’t the opportunity for her that larger schools offered.” (She now loves these computer programs these days with spell check.)
This is what she says about living without a telephone. “The thing about that is you really don’t know what you are missing if you’ve never had it, so it doesn’t take away your happiness. When I see some of the children and adults in today’s world I feel a little sorry for them; they have trouble when it comes to being happy, because of all the modern convinces they have always had. It’s like they cannot be happy without all the frails. As for me I’m just happy having an inside bathroom and spell check.”
Here is the rest of her story in her words: Those early years in one’s life do mold you in many ways, but we always need to remember that as adults we can change the things we brought with us from those early years. One phrase I always found helpful is, “You are an adult when you forgive yourparents for what you think they did to you.” As parents we do the best job that we can in raising our children, but parents are never perfected and we all make mistakes.
Once I got out on my own and became aware of who I really was and what I really wasn’t. It seemed as though I was trying to break every record there ever was when it came to making mistakes. First of all when my heart got broken, I just took the next thing that came around and married him. Thinking this would help me forget about my heart being broken. The term for that is REBOUND. We all know that does not work and it lasted only 2 years.
After that I decided to get out of the small town and move to the city. Now this really was a good move. The only trouble was that those busy freeways where nothing like the dirt roads that I was use too and there was a real fear of getting lost. That fear is still with me, but not as bad as back then. Let me tell you when you are use to one lane going one way and another lane going the other way and then you get on a freeway with all the lanes and roads going off in all different directions that can be very fearful at first.
Realize that the fear of being lost came from when I was 3 years old and got left in the car by mistake after going to the drive-in as a family. My parents didn’t realize I had fallen asleep in the car. They went into the house without me.Upon waking up a few hours later knowing that staying in the car wasn’t an option.Little old me at 3 years old managed to get to the house in the middle of the night. That one still feels like yesterday. This is good though, because it helped my understand fear.If you look fear straight in the eyes you can overcome it.
Things were good in the city. Found myself a job and made new friends. Finally after a few years I met my husband to be. When it came to this person all the warning signs were there for another big mistake, but I just wasn’t listening to them. He was the type of person that was pretty cold when it came to emotions. Being the a loving person I decided that there was a lots of love, so this would change him. After 3 kids and 13 years I realized that he was who he wanted to be and there was nothing that I could do about it. You never can change anyone; they are who they want to be unless they decide to change.
This is when thinks got real serious about finding out why I kept making mistakes and wrong choices.
It was obvious that the marriage had been a complete mistake, but with 3 beautiful daughters, it couldn’t have been a mistake. At the same time when it came to my choice of men the record was not looking good. What was really important was not making the same mistake again.This needed to be investigated.
When things don’t seem to be going right in a person’s life before you go blaming others or circumstances in the situation you have to take a look at yourself. This sure seemed to be one of those situations where the same thing kept happening, so I must be the problem. I was responsible for my situation.
Why was I making this same mistake over and over? After running to the book store and finding some books on relationships and self improvement, etc. I read and read some more. Soon it all became clearer to me. When I was a child my father did a lot of drinking. He was a weekend alcoholic. Being a child my thoughts were; maybe if I loved him more or did something he would stop his drinking. Because of this the men of my choice always needed help. Wrong thinking!
When something isn’t right I look for the reason and see if it is me and in my control to change it or if it is not in my control walk away from it. This could be changed now that I was aware of my own short comings and wrong choices.
Things were rough after my divorce. The 3 girls and I didn’t have much, but we had each other and a lot of LOVE. And we had the Good Lord with us. That was one wonderful thing that my mother gave me when growing up. My faith; this is why I do not have any trouble when it comes to being happy regardless what shape my life happens to be in. That’s one thing nice when it comes to the Lord; when the same thing keeps happening to you; he has a way of letting you know you need to do something different if you want it to stop repeating the same problem.
We got through those rough years after my divorce with child support coming once in a while and the girls were wonderful through it all. The nice things about hard times, is that if you handle them right it can bring people together even more. Everybody finds out what they are made of and what really counts in this life we’re given.
I finally did find the right man. He is wonderful (most of the time) not perfect and that goes for all people. It would be rather boring if we were perfect, don’t you think?
I have gone through some other really tough times through these last years, but with the Good Lord, my family now and my happy attitude I get through them. It’s really neat how our attitude can really make a big different in our lives.
With change remember; when one door closes and better door opens.
After losing my job and having no success in finding a new job what was really important to me was to help people find happiness in their life. To me life is very short and we do not have time to waste being unhappy.
Life is to be enjoyed and grow as a person. When my husband ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I told him that I wanted to have a website that helps people be Happy… he thought I had lost my mind, but he didn’t tell me that.
With my personal HappyBLOG,I hope to inspire individuals to find their own Happy... and get more of what they want out of life. I invite individuals everywhere to come here to get ideas and inspiration and hope that you will read my blog and submit your comments.
No matter where you are in your life right now, remember happiness is a choice.Make it your choice you deserve it.
With my best wishes and much happiness,
Debbie, Happy Maker creator
