Going Down the Reconciliation Path: When Do We Admit We're Lost?

Going Down the Reconciliation Path: When Do We Admit We're Lost?

It ain’t no secret when I left my marriage a few years back, it was all me going and all Sam not letting go. For weeks at the end of it he wrote me a haiku every morning and stuck it to the bathroom mirror on post-it notes. One by one they filled the mirror, but I couldn’t pull them down, they spread and covered until there was just enough glass exposed to see myself and nothing else.

He said don’t go and it will be different and he met with a mortgage broker about buying our house. We lived in a little rental with a big back yard. Roxie was tight with her friends on the block. He couldn’t stop crying and he couldn’t eat and he lost his job because he couldn’t think.

If I could choose, I’d take being dumped over dropping that kind of hurt on him any day of the week. But no one was happy in our house and when it came to leaving, it was me or no one.

My U-Haul wasn’t even out of the driveway and he was begging me back into counseling. And I don’t know why. Why pursue what makes you miserable? But he kept at it.

And after two years living 10 miles apart, we consolidated our family and two households worth of our stuff into another cute little rental. Still, I’m always evaluating, scrutinizing how we are together and how we are in the world alone when we’re together.

I did an eight-month state of the union on our renewed relationship, and I’ve got to say, if this marriage was a business it would tanking.

But I’m not ready to liquidate just yet; there’s still enough here. I’m just afraid of not knowing when to say to when, scared of staying until there’s nothing left of me but desperation.

These last few months feel more and more how it always felt.

If we have to split again, relive all the agony of coming apart a second time, how do we simply step back and say:

I love you and this isn’t working.

I love you and I want more than this for you, happiness.

I love you and I want you to thrive, to soar, to smile the way you did when we were separated.

I love you and we will always be our daughters’ parents together, but let’s step away and be healthy, too.