Dolly Tatume

Dolly Tatume

Member for 24 weeks 4 days

Real Name

Debra Waibel

Bio

My life has changed so much! I am a 45 year old woman starting my life over from the ground up. I will try to be brief and just hit on the highlights or my bio will be a mile long (ha). I have been an outside sales rep for a corrugated manufacture for years. I sold B2B to other manufactures who needed to package there products for the retail market. When you go into the store everything you buy almost is in some sort of a box, that’s what our company made and what I sold. I worked with marketing depts., product development people and the CEO's of the company. Life was good and I was making 6 figures. My parents and my sons lived with me and my boys were almost done growing up. The year of the start of my decline was 2005. My mom was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and I turned into her primary caretaker of course. It is a 24/7 job taking care of someone dying. I was very emotional and can remember each of the steps, when she lost her word recognition, when she couldn’t walk on her own, sit on her own and finally the diaper stage. At the same time I was caring for my dad who had Parkinson’s for years. My mom use to care for him but now of course she couldn’t so I had two parents at the same time while trying to finish raising my two sons. My mom finally passed after 4 months and I barely got her buried when my dad started flying downhill. So for the next 7 months I cared for him and he just got worse and worse and eventually into dementia. I can remember all his steps down to. Yes finally also to diapers. The only peace I got from all that was they both died at home and I was able to help them. Well if that wasn’t emotional enough and cracking my career at the seams I have the topper for you: Its 2006 now. My mom just died 2 months ago, my dad is into the second month of dying and my boyfriend of 5 years tells me he met someone else and is leaving me! I work with him; I got him the manager position of our design dept and through several moves for him raised his income by 30,000 in 3 years doing his negotiations. However I am so broken now with everything happening at once I stay on the sidelines and become the other woman because he is not sure if he really wants to leave me all together. 6 months into this new ordeal, I quit my job, my career and shut down. My dad dies; my career is over, I’m lying in bed and can barely stop crying enough to even function. This goes on with him until Sept of 2007 when he says he finally made his decision and he doesn’t want me back. I am just beside myself by now. The parents are gone, the boys grown up , the career over and now he's not coming back either. I start writing and drawing and thinking and a new career path was born. Something so unique, so new, so exciting that you will see as women we can heal ourselves. We can find our own closure and we can do it without becoming bitter. We can laugh at life or we can sink in it. I chose to laugh again. He will never give me the closure I need. That I have to do on my own. That is what I am doing now. So in this new process, I have learned, I have taken steps backwards and am moving forward again. I would love to tell you more about the business and post my links but I am building a website now so I want to wait until that is completed in the next month. I look forward to sharing that with all of you!!! So now my boys are grown (20 and 23). The oldest has his Bachelors of Science, his own computer networking company, married for 3 years and a 1 year old daughter. That’s her with me in my profile pic! The youngest I am still guiding to get somewhere. I have faith and time!