Things Change. Make each change work for you.

I had been dating Howard for three months before he asked me to marry him. Well, actually, he told me that we were going to get married. It was more of a mandate than a proposal. I was eighteen at the time, and I married Howard for his financial potential. Back in the early 1960's I was like most girls I knew and got married for all the wrong reasons- namely, a false sense of security.
at nineteen, I sensed trouble literally as I was walking down the aisle during my wedding. I turned to my father and said " Daddy I don't think I want to do this. "He said, " Don't be silly. "Let's get you married."
Growing up I was very sheltered by my parents, and I always assumed that I was going to marry someone who would take care of me for the rest of my life. Those were the expectations set in my household. I thought I was marrying my white knight! I honestly didn't think I would ever have to worry about anything because I hadn't been raised to work in business or take care of myself.
When I married Howard, he was only four years older than me, but twenty years older emotionally. Howard was more of a parent to me than a husband, and he continued to shelter me much as my parents had. Consequently, our unbalanced relationship became my picture of what love was supposed to be, of what a husband and wife should look like. three months into it, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. I had become very attracted to somebody else, and though I eventually got over it, I thought to myself, If I was really in love with Howard, would I have experienced this crush? Something was wrong with this picture.
Howard worked at an investment group with my father. Howard was a very smart man who could put a deal together better than anyone around. And he knew the ins and outs of money and finance. After we got married, I went to work for him. I started out as clerk, and then I became his bookkeeper. Life was pretty uneventful for a while. I'd go to the office do my job, and go home with him, Our daughter was just three months old. This was the closet I go to "settling down", but inside I felt completely unsettled. I wanted to do something more with my life.
I had to find an outlet, something to express myself more full. Life with Howard was getting boring fast. One night we were in a nightclub with a girlfriend. She knew the vocalist, and he invited her up to sing. She invited me up, too, and I ended up doing a solo. My friends husband had told the club manager that my family and friends alone would fill the house, so he hired me on the spot. My repertoire consisted of only three songs, but they were enough to get me noticed. I sang in various nightclubs in the valley for five years, and Howard would come every time and watch the audience watching me, which was a little strange. Again, it was like he was more of a second father figure than a husband. Despite this dysfunction, singing at clubs felt like New Year's Eve every night. My musical delivery was much better than my voice, which wasn't all the great, but boy, could I sell a song.
After five years of dazzling nightclub audiences, it occurred to me that if I could sell a song, I could sell anything. I could sell a house. One day I said to my musical arranger. "I'm going into real estate."
He said "You'll be back."
He was wrong. I never went back. And I continued to run into people who underestimated me. Ironically, the man who ran my real estate school pulled me aside while we were preparing for the state exam and said, Sharyn, save your money, you're never going to pass the test."
Well, I passed that test with flying colors and went on to have a nice stint in real estate. But Howard continued to shelter me, and it made sense to work closer to home rather than to join a big real estate firm. Our daughter was now eight years old, and the demands of motherhood were growing, but in 1982 I started my own little brokerage company. Howard encouraged me to do this because he had a hidden agendas; it was a perfect way to save the commissions on his own real estate acquisitions. This put my first profession venture in a difficult position. It made matters at home even worse.
While my professional life was blossoming, my personal life was deteriorating. Howard and I weren't having sex- we had stopped being intimate after our eight anniversary. He barely patted me on the back anymore. Instead, he would tell me that he wasn't interested, or that he had health problems, or complain that I was bothering him. Myself-esteem was in the toilet. I needed someone to break into my life and steal me away and set me free.
Then out of the blue, when I was thirty-seven, we had a bizarre home invasion, a full-scale home robbery. I can still remember looking up and seeing the intruder standing in the hallways with a blue bandana over his face. He had wild eyes, and he was holding a hammer in one hand and a gun in the other. I thought, I'm going to be shot and pummeled with a hammer, I never thought I'd go like this. Howard was in the bedroom watching TV, and I screamed several times, "Howard, there's somebody in the house!" I got no response. As i was yelling, the intruder told me to shut up, the fired his weapon! at that point, despite the intense fear, something inside of me took over. I charged at him with a large book and forced him into the bedroom. He then approached Howard.
"Put the book down, Sharyn." Howard said to me. "I've got this under control."
Unable to calm down, I yelled, "Tell us what you want and get the Hell out!"
"I want cash and credit cards and I want your diamonds,"
The intruder said.
I felt something running down my leg, and I pulled up my robe to look. the shock had numbed the pain of the bullet wound.
"You son of a bitch! You shot me!" I was so angry. "Take what you want and get the hell out of here! Gathering our valuables, the intruder disappeared.
That night, at around 4:00 a.m. after we had been to the hospital(thankfully the bullet had not hit any bones) Howard and I arrived back at the house and crawled into our king sized be. We always slept on opposite sides, but on this night I tried to cuddle with him, to feel safe after one of the most disturbing nights of my life
Howard looked at me like I was crazy. " What are you doing?'
"I'm so scared, "I said.
"Don't be silly," he said. " The alarm is on now. You'll be fine. Nobody's going to come back here."
That's when it hit me: If Howard no longer wanted to protect me, and it was the one and only thing he offered in our marriage, then there was no reason to stay together. It was time for me to be strong and protect myself. And it was time for Howard to go.
Living in his shadow no longer did me any good. Sometime during the next year, Howard moved out of our bedroom and began sleeping in the guest room. Our daughter Julie's bat mitzvah was planned for February of 1982, and we decided that we would separate when it was over.
As it turned out, I didn't get a chance to properly and legally divorce him. Howard was indicted for racketeering the day the invites for the bat mitzvah went out, and it was no longer a decision I had to make. The law took him away for me.
Howard's indictment centered around working for a publicly traded company based in Chicago. He was managing four offices and seventy-eight employees. At some point, the company was computerized, and it was discovered that someone had been misappropriating a great deal of money. Everything pointed to Howard.
Around the time litigation stated, I was having Breakfast with a girlfriend in a restaurant. She looked up at one point and said, "Oh! Here comes my neighbor!"
I said, "Cute Neighbor!"
His name was Jack, and he sat down with us just as my Friend had to lave to pick up her son. Jack said, "I have time to stay a little longer. Do you?"
He told me that he didn't have much time to say, and that he was a pretty quiet person.
"Don't worry, " I said. "I talk enough for two people."
Three and a half hours later, we stood up and left the restaurant. I have always felt that we fell in live with each other that day. Although we were both married, he was as unhappy as I was, and we began our storybook love affair. I had met a new white knight, but this one loved, respected, and adored me.
Meanwhile, Howard had been begging me to stay with him for purely business reasons. "If you stay with me, we can save the properties and you'll have some money." He tried to entice me with all the trappings of our inflated lifestyle. We were living in a 5,000-square-foot home in the best neighborhood in the Phoenix. I drove a Mercedes and shopped regularly at Saks fifth Avenue. He had spoiled me for sure, but Howard, the great protector, had put our family in a really vulnerable position. I had to get out even i it meant losing it all, but with all of his legal troubles, there seems to be little space to conduct a separation or divorce proceeding.
Howard was fined $1.8 million and sentenced to six years in prison. The day he was to report to prison, he asked me to pick up our daughter from school and then meet him for lunch. He told me that he was terrified of prison, and since I had Jack in my life, he was skipping town. He deposited two thousand dollars in my checking account and disappeared. To this day, I have no idea where he went or how he survived, but almost five years later the police found him at his mother's house. I don't think he'd been there long. He served almost four years in prison, and when he died in 1999, at age fifty-nine, he claimed he was innocent.
The 1.8 million in Howard's plea bargain was considered taxable income. As his spouse, the taxes became my responsibility. This meant that I owed approximately $900,000 of federal income tax and $350,000 of state tax to the government!
I was not going to let his mistakes screw me over. Howard had left me with a financial mess. the first thing I had to do was find the best tax attorney in Phoenix, and that meant the most expensive! My father flew in from Texas with a check for half the retainer, and Jack, now divorced himself, came up with the other half. In the end, I was given "innocent spouse" status, but I lost our houses-including our primary residence-when I declared bankruptcy, Julie and I moved into Jack's small town house. My daughter was sixteen, and she handled the entire situation with maturity and dignity. She was just amazing though this awkward transition.
I was forty-two years old, and my life was suddenly and radically changed. Until Howard left, I had never seen a bill, let alone paid one. Life was very different with Hack. We share everything- the good, the bad and especially the passion. For the first time in my life, I felt truly loved and I loved him equally in return!
Divorcing someone who couldn't be served papers wasn't an easy task, but one and a half years after Howard disappeared, my divorce was final. I did not waste any time- in fact, trying to make up for lost time, I married jack in 1986.
As a newly wed, Jack took a sales position with an aerospace fastener company. Six months later, I said to him, " I think the business is something we could do together." He agreed, so I went to my mother for a start up loan. My father had passed away, but he would never have agreed to lend me the money. He'd thought that businesses should be run by men. He'd raised his daughter to be a wife and a mother, That's it. In his book, signing and selling real estate was a far cry from running a business.
Thankfully, my mother believed in me, in Jack, and in the idea.
Jack and I bought a franchise with the funding. We did a great job with it at first, but unfortunately, seven moths after we bought the franchise, the company we'd bought it from went chapter 11. My cousin Jim had also bought a similar franchise with the same company, and he was also in the red. One morning, the three of us put our heads together over breakfast and talked about what to do next.
In May 1989, through the help of another family cousin, Ben we started an Arizona- based fastener company called Aerofast, Ltd. When were were still growing the business, I worked at a trade school to make money, and Jack did drywall  repairs at night. We took no salary and lived hand to mouth for a year and a half. Jack and I even rolled quarters, and we occasionally went out to eat, indulging in tuna salad sandwiched with a basket of fires, washing it all down with water, not wine, so we'd have enough money for a tip. Once in a while, we went out to a movie. It was such a simple life compared to what I had with Howard, but I had never been happier. Being in love conquered being broke.
But then the unthinkable happened. Two months after we drew our first real salary checks, Jack died of a brain aneurysm.
Life was dealing me a hand of cards that seemed completely unfair. I tried to make sense of it all, but I was devastated and unsure of how to go on.
I had always felt that Jack was on loan to me from God, and I really believe he was sent on a mission to teach me unconditional love. He protected me better than anyone I knew, because he guarded my independence. He changed me form a sheltered woman to a capable businessperson, but most of all, he helped me live up to my highest self. But those shitty cards kept coming.
Four month after Jack died, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I completed Chemotherapy a year later and was blessed with a clean bill of health. For the first time in a long time I felt like I was turning a corner. My cousin begged me to return to work at Aerofast. He wanted my help because the company was suffering. In my heart I knew that staying in business with my cousin ultimately wouldn't work. I feared that I would be under his thumb, the same way I had been under the thumb's of Howard and my dad.
I needed money and an opportunity, and I needed the wisdom to recognize when both arrived. In July of 1995 one of my customers offered to support a small business of my own, On a handshake, I went into business with him and his brothers. I would own 55 percent, and three brothers would share 45 percent. Later, they told me that the money they had put up for me to start the company was the best investment they'd ever made!
I walked out the door of Aerofast, Ltd. on July 16, 1995, and on the morning of July 17, 1995 with only a phone a fax machine and a Rolodex of vendors, and my knowledge of the industry, I started Millipart Fasteners my spare bedroom. Four and a half years later, my business was shipping two and a half million dollars a year with 37 percent gross profit margin, and I was having the time of my life. I had a knack for business that men like Howard  and my father never acknowledged or encouraged.
Four and a half years later, my business was more profitable than my cousin's. In June of 1999, I was approached by the owners of WG Henschen Co. a distributor of Ring-Lock products. They wanted me to buy the company. Financially, I knew I could do the deal and sales would be a slam dunk for me. I also knew that my cousin and Aerofast, Ltd. had the quality certifications I needed to really move the company forward. I called my cousin and said, " We went into this business together, let's buy this company, merge the three, and go out of it together!"
Today, WG Henschen Co. has thirty-two employees, grosses thirteen million dollars a year in sales, and has offices in tow states. We specialize in aerospace fittings, fasteners,nuts, bolts, and rivets. When I first got into this business, people would say to me "Sharyn, it's not a very glamorous industry." I would always tell those people, "You know what? I find a two-hundred -dollar twelve-point nut very glamorous. In fact, I find it sexy as hell."
I'm nearly sixty five now, and what started out as a life predicated on relying on others has turned into a life of self-reliance. I taught myself how to be strong, how to support my family, and how to protect myself and my businesses at all costs. One truth, I learned along the way;men fail,die,leave,and disappoint;I am my sole protector.