"You and Daddy yell at each other all the time," my 6-year-old son told me, leaning into the bathroom where I was brushing my teeth one morning. "I'm afraid of the fighting." I spit the toothpaste into the sink and watched it swirl in the water. I wanted to slip down into the drain with it.

"I know. It's not fair to you." I told him. I wrapped my arms around his small shoulders. "Daddy and I love you very much. We need to find a way to make this better."

And so, after I walked my son to school, after I waved goodbye to his small retreating figure and walked the four blocks back to my little house, I picked up the phone and told my husband I wanted a divorce.

We had been married for 12 long years. For the last six months there was a pale white circle where I had once worn my wedding ring. For the last six months, we circled around every conversation, we lied to each other, and threw words like weapons. I wish I'd never married you. I don't know who you are anymore.

And the truth was, I didn't know who I was anymore.

I didn't want to be angry at the man that I had loved, the man that I had made children with and worked to build a life beside. I didn't want to leave my children at the dinner table to take the conversation to another room, where the heated words splintered out under the door, across the hall and into the dining room of our little house. I didn't want to see my daughter's face when I slammed the door behind me, her eyes a mix of confusion and fear. We weren't hiding anything, we were only hurting everyone.

And even though we had failed in our careers as husband and wife, we had to still do our job as mom and dad.

And so my husband moved out, one dark day in May.

And it was harder before it was better.

And at first, we all cried. A lot.

I cried when my husband left the house, because I was afraid of being alone, as a mother and as a woman. I cried when I had to say goodbye to my children the first weekend they went to daddy's house. They cried to be away, to be back, because they were always missing someone even when they had one parent close.

I cried when I was by myself in the house, walking from room to empty room, counting what I had lost and what I would never have again on the fingers of my ringless hand.

Every night, after my husband moved out, the children would tiptoe down the stairs one by one in soft progression, to climb into my bed, until we were sleeping all together, limbs on limbs. And I liked this madness, because it covered the space where my husband used to sleep. The place where he was missing.

We all missed him, we missed each other. It was very, very hard.

But after a while, we all noticed the biggest thing that was missing in the house after my husband moved out: the anger.

There was no more fighting. My children and I woke in the mornings, sunlight streaming in the kitchen. And we were so unfamiliarly calm, as the day stretched out lightly before us. The air in the house was new. I was a better mother, even if I had failed as a wife. I was not anxious. I listened harder, I was more patient. There was no longer the weight of the arguing in the house holding down our joy.

We learned a new routine. We found a new space.

The children smiled more. When I brushed my teeth, I looked into the mirror over the sink and saw my face. Even I was smiling.

Divorce is never best. You never start at the beginning and think, or hope, or believe a marriage will end. But when the anger overtakes you, when it reshapes you into something you do not want to be, divorce can be better.

Divorce made me a better mom. It closed the door of hurt and opened the window of peace in my tiny house.

My husband doesn't live here anymore.

But hope moved back in again.

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