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A Bettina Host Family’s Reflections
“After reading your blog on Rev. Gomes and looking at my own life – this may be a morbid post, but it is where I am at the moment and I think it needs to be said.
It is great being a host family in the Bettina Network. Bed & breakfast has focused my life and used all of my talents. Sometimes, I really didn’t understand why I was going through so much upheaval and unhappiness as I tried to get life together. I tried several careers, but none seemed to fit. Each one didn’t like me – so I moved on to something else. With bed & breakfast, its different. I like this career. It allows me to use every talent I have.
Funny thing about that – I started with a very different set of lifestyle values. I needed to have a perfect house and garden. I knocked myself out 24/7 trying to make sure the house was absolutely spotless. If a guest came along who knocked into the wall with their luggage going to their room I was right there within an hour with a little sandpaper and paint to take away any indication that humans had passed on that stairway. I was a nervous wreck.
Now, I am thoroughly enjoying myself and understand this business a lot better. Guests are returning at a higher rate and we are all a lot better off because of my epiphany.
I realized my home is not a funeral parlor. It is a place for real-live-functioning-people, who want most of all to find ‘home’ away from their actual home. There is enormous stress in traveling. We all experience it and want it to stop, but then we travel again and have high moments of enjoyment, but the stress is never very far away.
My home has become that ‘home’ away from home – if I can be a bit immodest. My focus has changed. My concern is about the guest and not the house. The Bettina people told me to make that my focus when I joined the Bettina Network. And, they said, I would have a much fuller and better experience than if I made the house the focus.
Probably because I didn’t understand what they meant I said – yes, yes – and went about making the house the focus. I now have a bed & breakfast HOME, which is different from a bed & breakfast house and everyone is happier for the transformation. It is still clean and looks very nice, but not the hyperness of yesterday nor the fussiness of how I used to be.
Thanks folks – Bettina folks and guests too! You have changed my life for the better and I look forward to a long career as a bed & breakfast host family in the Bettina Network and a researcher (which is what I do in my spare time). I owe all of you for enriching my life beyond what I expected.
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Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.
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