We’re separating, which either means we’re resetting a bad cycle of anger and recrimination, we’re ending the marriage, we’re hanging on for dear life, or we’re merely hedging against inevitable divorce. The meaning and implications vary from minute to minute. The only clear thing is keeping life as regular and predictable for the three girls as possible, keeping them busy with school, and their familiar surroundings, and apart from the turmoil in our relationship.

There is no question in my mind this arrangement has long since become a source of familial anxiety and untenable stress. Add to that new sobriety and the usual challenges of raising three young children, and the family pot is boiling over, burning, and setting off screaming fire alarms.

Should our marriage ever recover from this and our family reconvene, it will be a heartening and inspiring story. It will give people power over their sense of futility and courage in the face of doubt.

But right now we have no such story.

B will leave for awhile, still seeing the girls regularly. I will stay with them in our house, which is warm and safe in the winter, spacious and light with pretty colors and double-paned windows.

I’ll watch them run around the kitchen island, the familiar pattern tracing an invisible path on the silly fussy hardwood floors. We’ll talk over the matters concerning 5 year olds at breakfast — the Christmas play, whether the tooth fairy will leave another $2, what they want for their birthday — and I’ll look at them closely and see this time as a flicker that I cannot grasp or cling to but merely watch float by, already gone. If I close my eyes and open them, they’ll be beautiful laughing 16 year olds rolling eyes and avoiding my presence, but knowing I’m there. They’ll talk on the phone, they’ll argue about curfew, they’ll treat me like beloved wallpaper.

But will they love themselves? Will they feel that they’re beloved? When I look at their sweet faces with small traces of their babyhood still visible around the soft chins and chubby hands, I can see that this is the most important thing I’ll ever do. That failure here will haunt me. I have been given these amazing girls.

What riches!

And how would someone treat such a gift…

I’ve so often joked and pattered on about the problems and challenges of parenting… the drag of it all. But in the last weeks, I really understand that all that hip chat is hiding the essential truth of my life today. I love my daughters more than myself. More than my husband. More than life.

But it is also true that I am completely blinded by the instinct to protect and could be overreacting and using this as an exit strategy for a marriage about which I’ve had ambivalent and negative feelings for a long long time.

Whether this is courage or folly will be revealed…

#44

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