On Friday nights, I would load my sad belongings into a lumpy duffle bag and kiss my children, whom I had never been separated from before, goodbye. It was a wonderful, miserable proposition. On those weekends where I was displaced from my home, my mother graciously offered to allow me to return to the home of my youth. My husband moved into his father's house and I stayed with the children during the week, but nearly every weekend he would come and stay with the kids at our house, so that they would have the stability of being in their own home, around the things that made them feel the calmest. Only when it was finally cold and lifeless on the floor, did we decide we needed to have an exit plan. My husband and I had let our marriage die a slow, insidious death. We made love, we made children, and we made a huge, gigantic mess of our lives.įifteen tumultuous years after I bode a fond farewell to the four walls of my childhood bedroom, I found myself back home once again.
I married the boyfriend, we moved from small apartment to a feral cat ridden street just outside of Detroit. The story goes like many young love affairs do. "I know what I'm doing!"īut - and I know you'll be surprised by this – it turns out, I did not. "For God's sake, people!" I countered confidently, tossing my New Kids on the Block scrapbook into a half-filled moving box. "Is this really want you want to do?" questioned my mother, as she watched me untack my Van Gogh framed art and my Sarah McLachlan poster from my walls. "Are you sure this is a good idea?" my friends whispered as they helped me lug a hand-me-down sofa up two flights of stairs. One day, I lay dreaming in a twin bed in my mother's basement, the next I was playing big girl pretend in a one-bedroom apartment in a boxy building complex. I moved out of parents house and in with my boyfriend at the ripe old age of 19.