{By Megan of Undomestic Diva}

Today is one of those days – one of many recent and one of many more to come – where life’s new twists and turns have me walking out the door of several years of fond memories and unthought of heartache towards a future of Who Knows.

It isn’t a fancy place, this house. And while smaller than many, it was enough; certainly more than many others hope for and at the end of the day it wasn’t just stucco and wood and cement and shingles – it was our home.

This is the house that broke us, in many ways, though of course it’s not only to blame – not one single thing is. But it was also the house of much happiness – where two of the three boys were born, where many Halloweens and birthdays and summers were spent, where Easter eggs were hidden and found, where dinners were concocted and birthday cakes created, where oranges were picked and eaten in the yard, where swingsets were built and ignored, where gardens were planted and bloomed, where Christmas trees sat (and fell), where life moved at a speed quicker than we could register – all inside these walls that were being fixed and patched and painted as we fell apart.

I slowly circle one more time in the living room. It still feels oddly full, even in its bareness. Though the smell of cardboard boxes and laundered clothes and nostalgia has left in trucks and U-Hauls, a vaguely familiar scent remains – the way the house smelled the day we got the keys – of vacancy and emptiness. It sinks in. The truth is, this house didn’t break us. We did. And this house isn’t haunted. We are.

It’s hard to fathom that I’m taking one last look around our house and leaving it to go to my house. The newness of everything is jarring and yet exciting and the adventure of it all has its moments of hope and its share of fear.

I shut the door. I pause on the porch step, taking in this very moment, soaking in this change like sunlight on my skin, breath in my lungs. There’s nothing left here for me anymore. Today is another reminder of moving onward, this time, literally. I remind myself: A house is a house but a home is what you make it so I have not just packed our clothes and photographs and books and toys but our memories too. They, though the heaviest of all the things to carry, are the easiest to move.

{by Jennifer Schmitt from A Road With a View and originally featured here on September 17, 2009}

I was in the middle of nowhere, but I felt as though I had arrived at someplace important and pivotal. A place that should show on some map of my life with the words Go here.

Heavy and golden, the moonlight sank to earth on a parachute of stars and brought everything around me out of the shadows – the hulking shapes of mountains, open space, a black ribbon of road. Far away, the light of one house.

I stood in the middle of a road in northwestern Montana, shivering with the wind that ran through me like a hundred ghosts. I had stopped to get out, to look. No other car would pass by while I stood there. The night was big. The world was big. How many times had the wind that filled my lungs traveled along the curve of the earth? I breathed in, sure it told me secrets of what my life could be, how big it could be, now that it was all mine again.

Back home in Connecticut, my job waited for me and my husband did not. Our separation was new, no older than a month. With less fuss than it took to plan our wedding, we decided to break apart the marriage, each of us taking uneven halves of the whole, pieces that had never quite fit together and always left a space between two people who tried.

I settled into a new place and then took every vacation day and every bit of cash I could, and I drove – this time, from Connecticut to the western side of Montana, 5000 miles in 12 days. It was the middle of September – now, almost to the date. This time every year, I give myself over to nostalgia for that trip and for the person I was then. Brave. Unafraid to go as far as that, alone, to see something beautiful, to be changed.

And despite the disappointment of a marriage that ended, I still thought I could see ahead and predict the future, or shape it.

The joke was on me, of course. On her, on the person I was that night, eight months before I would learn that I was pregnant with my first child. Whatever I thought was brave or scary before hitched a ride to somewhere far away.

But she learned. You want scary? I told her. Having a baby is scary. Cobbling together a life with another person, with a new life between you, takes guts. Believing that it will all work out? Harder still.

At times, it’s hard for me to look at the photos from that trip. In them, I see how formed she thinks she is, how much she cushions the ache of her want, how tender she is with her hopes. How she still believes that there are answers to be found in a kiss, or on the curve of the moon.

I want to tell her what’s coming, and that she will get through it. That what is scary just might save her. That having children, though she didn’t plan it, will root her to her place in the world, no matter where or how far she goes. That she won’t want to go alone, always, and that she won’t lose herself completely, even when she is sure that she has. That one, I would tell her over and over and over. Or, I will. I do.

{by TKW of The Kitchen Witch}

Three weeks before her third birthday, Miss D. starts seeing monsters. My fierce warrior child, who fears nothing, now cowers in corners and under covers. Monsters usually appear around 3am. I wake with my heart pounding in my throat, hot with the strength of her scream.

“Monsters! Help me Mommy! I scared!”

I fumble for lights, footing and child simultaneously in the night and realize that I’m just as scared as she is.

**

I was almost in my third trimester with Miss D. when the newspaper was late. This drives my part-German self crazy. I need coffee and the paper to make me human in the morning; without them I am foul. Sourly, I resorted to the television. Mornings suck hard enough without some perky anchor with teeth too good to be true telling you what traffic’s like Out There.

I flicked the screen on just in time to see the second tower of The World Trade Center descend into rubble and smoke.

I thought it was a joke at first, or some weird movie stunt. Everybody did. You just don’t believe things like that can happen, particularly if you’re my age and have missed most of the good tragedies like JFK and World Wars and even Lennon, who I was too little to know.

I spent the rest of September 11 like most Americans did, grotesquely tuned-in. I channel-surfed maniacally, looking for answers or truth or the latest horrible picture, but it was a one-handed quest. The other hand was glued to my swollen belly,and I remember looking down at it and and thinking, “What on Earth have I done?”

{Originally Published on Sweetney}

When I made my list of the best 25 songs of the last 25 years a few weeks back, I burned, just for my own private listening enjoyment, a mix CD comprised of those select tracks. Since that time its been on heavy rotation during the 20 minute commute to and from M’s camp each weekday — I’m lucky enough to have a kid who’s tolerant of Mommy’s need to CRANK THAT SHIT UP — and in that time she’s absorbed all the songs and picked her favorites, notable among them the well-aged Oasis tune Wonderwall. It’s a song that for all its obvious magnetism and hookiness I’ve never fully understood. I mean, what’s a Wonderwall, anyway? And what, if anything, does it mean for a person to be that to someone else? Still, questions of signification and metaphor aside, each time the spare guitar strum of that track begins to play on our car stereo I see the joyful recognition wash over M’s face in the rear view mirror, and when the lesser of the brothers Gallagher begins to sing she does too, word for word.
. . . . .

On Sunday, we finally told her about the split.

For those of you who’ve never gone through a separation (and seriously, here’s hoping none of you ever have to), the awful, soul-rending anticipation of having to break this news to your child — the tiny, blameless person who you’ve made it your life’s mission to protect and shield from all hurts and pains — is psychological torture of a magnitude it’s difficult to fully wrap your head around. Over the course of the past few weeks I’ve said to friends, relative to the crushing dread I felt about having to do this, that I now understand why people stay together for the sake of the kids (or, rather, tell themselves that’s what they’re doing — it’s probably closer to the truth to say they’re staying together for the sake of not having to deal with the anguish and guilt of having to tell the kids). It is the worst thing I could ever imagine having to do, and believe me, I can imagine having to do a lot of pretty awful things. Like having to attend a Celine Dion concert, or watch the complete filmography of Paris Hilton, for example. YES, THIS IS EVEN WORSE THAN THAT.

So Jamie came over Sunday morning with the idea in mind that this was the day. No way out but to barrel through it together, however ineptly, and hope to god we don’t have to look back on this as The Day We Shattered Our Daughter’s Identity, Crushed Her Spirit, And Destroyed Her Self Esteem For All Time. I think some of my generalized terror about this event can be traced back to having known a few very seriously broken human beings who pointed to the cataclysm of their parents breaking up when they were a kid as the hot molten core of their volcanic screwed-up-ness. And when I say “human beings” you should read “people I dated.” This is definitely NOT how I want my daughter to turn out.

{Originally published on Thursday Drive}

I was in the middle of nowhere, but I felt as though I had arrived at someplace important and pivotal. A place that should show on some map of my life with the words Go here.

Heavy and golden, the moonlight sank to earth on a parachute of stars and brought everything around me out of the shadows – the hulking shapes of mountains, open space, a black ribbon of road. Far away, the light of one house.

I stood in the middle of a road in northwestern Montana, shivering with the wind that ran through me like a hundred ghosts. I had stopped to get out, to look. No other car would pass by while I stood there. The night was big. The world was big. How many times had the wind that filled my lungs traveled along the curve of the earth? I breathed in, sure it told me secrets of what my life could be, how big it could be, now that it was all mine again.

Back home in Connecticut, my job waited for me and my husband did not. Our separation was new, no older than a month. With less fuss than it took to plan our wedding, we decided to break apart the marriage, each of us taking uneven halves of the whole, pieces that had never quite fit together and always left a space between two people who tried.

I settled into a new place and then took every vacation day and every bit of cash I could, and I drove – this time, from Connecticut to the western side of Montana, 5000 miles in 12 days. It was the middle of September – now, almost to the date. This time every year, I give myself over to nostalgia for that trip and for the person I was then. Brave. Unafraid to go as far as that, alone, to see something beautiful, to be changed.

And despite the disappointment of a marriage that ended, I still thought I could see ahead and predict the future, or shape it.

The joke was on me, of course. On her, on the person I was that night, eight months before I would learn that I was pregnant with my first child. Whatever I thought was brave or scary before hitched a ride to somewhere far away.

But she learned. You want scary? I told her. Having a baby is scary. Cobbling together a life with another person, with a new life between you, takes guts. Believing that it will all work out? Harder still.