Chapter 2: Phases
My life is getting more stable, my children are doing better. This year is the first year when things feel somewhat normal since the one-two punch of pandemic lockdowns and separation in early 2020: my troubled children are going to school most days, the twins are in extra-curricular activities, Sarah just started her first job, David graduated from high school and is now in college. I have adequate and reliable after-school care for Damien while I work and I am not on the phone with the schools every day to manage classroom issues and absenteeism. I’ve also had the joy of providing a home base for Colin between travels and I truly cherished every minute with this smart, headstrong, generous, self-aware, completely one-of-a-kind human that I made. Colin left home to go to military college 10 years ago at age 18. Having him home was not only a treat, it felt like catching-up and getting to know him at the same time. He now works as a logistics manager for Médecins sans frontières on the Sudanese border in Chad.
Éloïse is in Halifax finishing her master’s degree in organizational psychology at St-Mary’s. She is a military officer studying in a civilian university. She made Halifax her home in ways that only Éloïse could, striking meaningful friendships and relationships, connecting people around her. She hosted her first Thanksgiving dinner with Marie and Colin while they visited her in Nova Scotia.
Marie graduated from Algonquin College last June as a registered massage therapist and started working at the physio clinic where she was a receptionist. She lives with me in Stittsville and I really enjoy having her around.
I don’t have a lot of news from Clara and David, who are out living their lives and pursuing their dreams. We have a good relationship within the boundaries they set. This makes it sound like we’re estranged but it’s not the case. They are busy people with full lives. Clara and her husband Nathan own a semi-detached bungalow adjacent to Paul’s house in the Ottawa Valley. David is studying culinary arts at Algonquin and lives with his girlfriend’s parents in the rural west end of Ottawa on the river. On New Years Day, I had the chance of having all my children at my house for the first time since I moved there in 2020.
That said, the comparative stability of my life in early 2025 is not reopening doors that life circumstances closed in the last 5 years: the time and space freed up is immediately taken up by rest. I can see that things are better. But every time I try to take advantage of a newfound minute of free time — volunteering, going to the gym, taking music lessons — I get sick and have to reel it back in. It’s a phase of rest and energy conservation, where I try to let the people I love and care for, love and care for me.
This phase of life “after” separation feels like an identity crisis. I am settled in a new life where I have love, financial stability, a meaningful job, and a good relationship with my children. It feels like home. I feel settled. Yet this life still feels foreign, not mine. Although I had complete agency into all the decisions that lead me here – the decision to separate, where I moved afterwards, the career I pursued, the man I live with, what to do with my money, my child custody schedule – it still doesn’t feel like the life I chose. The life I chose is a married life, as stay-at-home mom working on the side, with a church community, with all my children under one roof. It’s a life where I am not vulnerable to an employer or a landlord’s whims. It’s a life where my husband leads and the children and I follow. I had to choose between pursuing the life I wanted or being myself. And I still struggle with having to make that choice after pouring 25 years of my life into the life I wanted.
My daughter Ève, always the inadvertent truth teller, summed it up for me recently. We were talking about something the family used to do together. The conversation trailed off and she said: “That was then. But now things are better… I think? I have to assume.” Sure, things are good. But on the whole, are things “better” for all the devastation they unleashed, all the trauma they caused?
We have to assume. But we’ll never know.
When Paul and I moved our family to the Lanark Highlands in 2014 we often went on dinner dates at the defunct Heirloom Cafe in Almonte. We talked about our life, our hopes, our problems and how we planned to solve them. We had children in university and I was trying to homeschool two high schoolers and two kids in elementary school, with 3 year-old twins underfoot and a nursing infant. Paul was driving an hour into town every day for work in Ottawa. I worked a few hours a week for his company to allow some income splitting. Days were long, physically and emotionally demanding. The vision we had when we moved to Lanark — a closer family, a slower pace, chickens, friendships, community — always felt within our reach, yet it kept taking a step back every time we tried to touch it. Something I said often during those dinner dates was “this is the life we chose.” Ironically, it was a life I had chosen reluctantly, in the full knowledge, born of experience, that it was not a life I would enjoy or be any good at. But this is where my husband and children were going, and I chose to go with them. My point is: I always chose my family over myself with eyes wide open. In the full knowledge of what I was doing. I never pretended to be someone I wasn’t, but who I was included an unequivocal prioritization of what I thought was best for my family over what I thought was best for me. And the tragedy of my life is that we couldn’t make the circles meet.
The life I live today, with eyes wide open, innocence lost, in a small house I can afford, without a car I can’t afford, with my predictable routine, my work, my travel plans, with my love and our funny little dog, surrounded by books and plants, not worried about all the weight I put on, fully connected to my children’s lives and suffering, valuing rest and down time, this life feels a lot more like me. But I wish I could have been all that *and* stay married to the father of my children.
It’s an unsolvable mystery of course because I could not have been “all that” while I was married to the father of my children. He didn’t want “all that”. My marriage started falling apart when I started struggling to keep “all that” contained. When I no longer wanted to go where he was taking us.
Glen took this picture of me in December 2019. It’s the first picture of me I ever saw and liked immediately. I had never seen myself like this before. At the time, we were still working together and Glen was giving me a ride home. I asked if we could stop at Long & McQuade to pick up my new guitar.
We stopped at L&M, I picked up the guitar and tried it to make sure all was good, Glen pulled out his phone and snapped a picture, and that was that. You can see that it’s a little out of focus. When I first saw it, I thought “Is this what I look like?” It was me as a capable, competent, beautiful woman. We are different people to different people and I was suddenly seeing myself through Glen’s eyes. It looked nothing like what I saw through my husband’s eyes.
A few months later, when Paul and I separated, that image of me as a capable, inspiring woman came to play a crucial role in giving me the courage to say “ok, I’m done.” I was scared and committed to stay married, no matter the cost. But the capable, competent, beautiful woman in the picture was not. That glimpse of who I could be, seen through someone else’s phone camera, was the spark that lit the way out.
I don’t know where that woman is nowadays. I sometimes tell Glen “I’m a shadow of the woman you met in 2018” but he still sees her in me. And through his eyes, I can see her too.
Beautiful photos with an eloquent narrative. Thank you for sharing your vulnerable observations like this. It helps me to reconsider my choices and today I'm pondering whether I'm a passenger or a driver of my own life. :)