Sleeping Solo: One Woman's Journey into Life after Marriage Read Free

kids.   One with different energy and better separation of space, and one
that would drain our finances less.
    I didn’t actually expect such a house to materialize.   But even as I tried to figure out how to
erect emergency shelter in the home I had, I began to look for an alternative.
    The first couple I toured had possibilities—if we had
still been an intact family.   It was
a spiking, terrible sadness to know that we weren’t.
    And then I found the brand-new listing for a small, freshly
renovated ranch house with big windows and a separate suite downstairs.   It was tucked away in a nearby
neighborhood I hadn’t even known existed, four blocks from the beach.
    That’s the house where I left my son and husband sitting in
the car outside.
    It only took about ten seconds to know I’d found
refuge.   Maybe two minutes longer
for my brain to agree with the certainty in my ribs.
    In this house, I could breathe.   Here, I could create a home for my
family in whatever form that took in the coming months
and years.  
    A nest, cozy and full of light.   That was the promise of the tiny dining
nook with windows on two sides and the old, gnarled tree just out the window,
glistening with shiny drops of winter rain.   The home stager had put a high table and
bar stools in the small space, and it was exactly right for perching.
    There were lots of good reasons to like this
house—practical, sane, rational arguments for uprooting us all from the
place we’d barely landed.   My lawyer’s
daughter brain marshalled them all, and finally
agreed with my ribs that this was a smart decision.
    But it was my ribs that knew the most important thing.   When airplane disaster strikes, put on
your own air mask first.   A house is
a pretty oversized air mask, but I could tell, even then, that it was going to
be a rockstar one.
    The outlines of a space where I could
breathe.
    Air masks aren’t panacea—they don’t fix
everything.   I was still really cold
on a dismayingly regular basis, eating was hit or miss, and I still spent every
night dozing fitfully on a couch in a house full of ghosts and sadness.   But every time I felt all the air
squeeze out of me, I pulled up the pictures of my little ranch home on my laptop.
    The universe didn’t make me wait long.
    The house was vacant, the realtor and seller were motivated,
and I had enough dollars to juggle to somehow make it work.   And my ribs never wavered in their
certainty that no matter how fast and furious and possibly insane this looked
to the rest of the world, it was absolutely right.
    And if I hadn’t been convinced, the universe wasn’t quite
done showing off yet.
    Buying a house requires a lot of help.   Lawyer, bankers, home
insurance agent.   I’d worked
with these people six months previously, closing on the original home I’d
purchased here.   They’re the kind of
people you want on your team—competent, personable, and obsessive about
doing things right.
    I had no idea they were also fairy godmothers.
    It started when I stopped in to ask my banker how fast they
could do the mortgage paperwork, so I could pick the date I wanted to close
when I put in my offer.   I had
visions of paperwork vanishing down the black hole of the Christmas holidays,
and I wanted to be realistic.   She
asked me how fast I wanted the house—and I was shell-shocked and bruised
enough to tell her the absolute truth.
    As fast as humanly possible.
    I won’t bore you with all the logistical details of this
circle of women who rose up to deliver my holiday miracle.   I’ll only tell you this—they had
me in my new house in just over two weeks.  
    TWO WEEKS.
    Fairy.   Godmothers.
    I didn’t move in right away—it was a few days before
Christmas and I didn’t want to disrupt the kids until the presents were opened
and the tree came down.   But I spent
time there every single day, painting, turning in slow circles, sweeping.   Sitting in the middle of an empty