‘Look!” shouted my older daughter, Daphne, then 2 and a half , as she pointed to a cow. “Mooooooo.”

“Moo is right,” I said, squeezed between car seats on the way to our new home. “And goats, too. So many goats.”

“No, Mama. Sheep,” Daphne corrected me, her pigtails snapping side to side.

She could differentiate farm animals better than I, a native New Yorker dropped from the clouds onto Texas soil. I had agreed to leave the Northeast and move to Dallas for my husband’s advertising career, an enterprise that was more profitable than my writing — alas, the greater good. The view out the rear window was identical to the one ahead. Were we coming or going, it was hard to tell.

I clung to Daphne and her newborn sister, Cooper, gripping their teensy hands and babbling about chickens, remembering that babies sense trepidation and dread, the kind that wracked my body just then, on a March afternoon in 1998. Feigning maternal hope and cheer, I imagined turning back, swerving around in our Cowboy Cab and hopping the guard rail. The locals did it all the time, I was sure, on this lawless frontier. No one would raise a brow.

But the exile would be short, I told myself. Just two years. My Boston-born seedlings would spend half of it napping. No “y’alls” would have a chance to register on their Yankee vocal chords. Nothing would be indelible.

It was with this encouragement that I woke up each day in the Lone Star State and slumbered at night, having marked off the calendar boxes with huge and definitive X’s. We lived first in an apartment near the football stadium in Irving and later in a pretty house in a respected school district. I continued to write while taking care of my daughters, ultimately securing a syndicated column and contributing to numerous publications.

We did what young families do anywhere. I tried to embrace my whereabouts, tapping the explorer’s spirit, attending rodeos, overlooking the politics. A person can do anything for two years. But two became three, which became four. The advertising company wasn’t ready to move us back. But it would happen soon, I was assured.

My husband, Bob, and I never truly got along. Our temperaments clashed, mightily, even when we chose to marry a decade earlier. In Texas, the fifth state I moved to for his career, our resentments went haywire. We lost respect. We were mean. We led separate emotional lives. Contemplating my children’s ages in August 2002, I weighed the consequences of staying or going. Then, I found a subpoena in the mailbox.

My eyes flew over the pages. Bob had filed a motion for divorce; fault grounds were not required. I must say that I wasn’t alarmed until I landed on the words “geographic restriction” and “within county lines.” Section 153.001(a)(1) of the Texas Family Code would restrain me in Dallas until my children left for college. That was 14 more years. As in certain other states, the “noncustodial” parent (the one with whom the children reside a minority of the time) — in this case my daughters’ father — is protected by a policy that supports easy access to the kids. Bob could allow a relocation beyond the physical limits set by the court. But if he chose not to, the children had to remain.

Bob chose not to.

I felt dizzy and nauseated and went into the yard. Wooden planks fenced in the lawn, a gated door locked with a bolt. The air heaved with August heat, and ripples rose up from the stone. I walked the perimeter, turning the corners like a wind-up soldier, the sun burning me up. Texas was a flaming hell right then.

“You’re going to imprison me here?” I remember asking him, standing in the kitchen.

He said nothing and went upstairs. For work at that time, he spent nearly half of the month in New York or Boston. I believed that he would have seen our daughters as much as he would have in Texas, which was the law’s intent. Confining me felt like punishment. In time, it felt like incarceration.

Despite these conditions and even a landmark state Supreme Court victory for someone like me just months earlier, my lawyers said that Dallas judges restricted parents automatically from leaving the county. Worse, they said that if I contested the limits, I could face a countersuit and perhaps lose my children all together. In 2004, I stopped thinking about going home.

Of course, the attorneys reminded me that the constraint only affected the children and that I was free to go by myself. Is there a mother who would consider that? They also said that if I fled with my daughters, I’d be rounded up and tossed into prison in an orange suit. Under the Texas Penal Code, I’d be charged with parental kidnapping, a felony, and be sentenced up to two years in prison and fined $10,000. My children would come visit me and sit on the other side of the glass, talk through a telephone. I dreamed that their father would smirk in the corner near the guard. Friends around the country consoled me.

Bless your heart, the Texans said.

I was afraid to tell my daughters about the divorce, and I delayed the conversation. Finally, one day when they were playing catch, I told them that sometimes parents live in two different houses and that is what we would be doing and everything else would be the same. They said OK and asked if they could go back to playing catch. I realized at that moment that if I could, in fact, keep everything else the same, or close to it, their lives would be as good as any other kid’s.

When I lived in Texas, I hated Texas, and I said it out loud, even to my kids

Within weeks, their father rented an apartment a mile away. He paid for the house for six months; after that the girls and I moved to a home one-third the size. In Texas, assets are generally split in half, monthly child support is determined by income ($800 per child in our case) and alimony is rarely awarded.

As the primary parent, I knew that I needed to be home when my kids were at home, so I wrote from a spare room, tutored, took any assignment available. Three times, for a reliable paycheck, I tried full-time positions out of the house, but each time my employers couldn’t tolerate the fact I needed to take my kids to school or be back for dinner by six.

In 2005, my ex-husband remarried, but nothing changed. I viewed my continued reliable presence as critical for my girls, anticipating that they might need extra attention, extra conversation, extra monitoring. Every other weekend, I packed a green tote bag with schedules, instructions, medicines, regimens for the continuation of a project or pursuit and sent them to their father’s house. I do not know how often the baton was carried forward. Just taking the sack from the closet fired my neurons with worry and sadness and anger. Every time.

In Texas, I raised my children and myself, I like to say. Being stuck first in a bad lonely marriage and then held by law in a bad lonely place turned me to steel. For 14 years, I believed that I could withstand any assault and resist weakness of any kind. I could do anything, say anything, fight for anything. I was independence personified, a show of strength that my daughters could rely upon and emulate.

Although our divorce was finalized in 2003, for a stretch of years after that, there were additional lawsuits over custody and visitation rights, one after another.

Spooky men ambushed me on the front lawn. They flapped yellow envelopes overhead, taunting me and yelling that constables would handcuff me or take our house away if I didn’t accept the papers in my hand. I picked up speed and covered my face, feeling my heart explode and fingers tremble and body sweat. I came to anticipate the men and lived for years waking in the dark, screaming out and swatting, thinking that they were hovering on my bedroom ceiling, throwing down the yellow envelopes and swooping toward my head, cackling.

The petitions threatened changes in our visitation arrangement, the aspect of the divorce that scared me most. Ultimately, I represented myself in court, shielding my kids from all of it, until they were 12 and 13. Then, I told them what I thought they needed to know. I told them that we had enough money and that they didn’t need to give me theirs, from their piggy banks, for my birthday. And I told them that when they were of age to pick a boyfriend, or a spouse, certain qualities were more critical than others.

“Don’t worry, Mom, we know,” Daphne said, her voice steady and clear.

When I lived in Texas, I hated Texas, and I said it out loud, even to my kids, who didn’t know of a different home. I shouldn’t have done that. Then, I was hard on the place, on its heat and its country music, its fixin’s and guns. I despised it for being too far for my family to visit enough, for having to miss college reunions and meetings with editors and walks to nowhere on Manhattan streets. It is that way, I suppose, when a legal document restrains your freedom because you married the wrong man when you didn’t know how to pick the right one, when you didn’t know that there were residential restrictions in Texas divorce decrees or that there were even decrees.

Finally, in 2014, Daphne left home for the University of Missouri. A year later, Cooper headed to Hendrix College in Arkansas. And one week after that, in September 2015, I got on a flight back to New York.

The plane sped down the runway. I gazed out the window. This is it, I said to myself. Goodbye, Texas. See you.

It felt peculiar to finally do something significant for myself, even though my children knew since pre-school that this would happen. For nearly two decades, I had expected to feel nothing but relief, tucked into the airplane seat, our family dog pressed against my shins. I had climbed the mountain. I had sent my babies into the world and was going home.

The plane lifted up, and Dallas felt like forever ago. For some time after landing, I felt that I was moving through fog, or whipped cream, something that slows you down, fuzzes up your view. My kids seemed a planet away, and I didn’t feel that I was, in fact, home. For months, both places seemed alien; I felt suspended between the two. Girl without a ZIP code.

That first Thanksgiving, in 2015, we all descended on Dallas for a holiday dinner with my ex-husband, his new wife and two stepsons. With the decree expired and miles between us, he and I are now cordial though he has never directly acknowledged what I endured. In the hotel where I stayed with my daughters, I looked at my sleeping kids and realized that the place, with its cows and cornbread, its disappointments and its strife, had a hand in nurturing my girls, and doing it well.

Afterwards, they headed back to college, and I to East End Avenue, from where I continue to write. But it wasn’t until they arrived for Christmas break a month later that I found my footing in New York City, just 15 blocks from where I was born. During the two weeks, we walked to Rockefeller Center and went to museums, and we played with our dog and popped popcorn and sat and talked and saw cousins, aunts and uncles and friends. Home happened here. Just like that. When they left, our bond remained and still does.

I’m now 57 and in the two years since that first visit, I’ve thought a lot about my daughters’ childhoods and what could have gone wrong. But they are remarkable people, something I knew from the start and fought to preserve. I am proud of the fight.

Editor’s note: In response to this story, Pamela’s ex, Bob Chimbel, 63, told The Post: “The statute is designed to put the welfare of the children ahead of anything else. I was the president and chief creative officer of an advertising company and I couldn’t give up a job . . . that allowed me to support my family. It’s a two way street: I had to turn down opportunities to move and advance my own career for the sake of the children. Nobody was unjustly punished.” In response to the process servers he sent to Pamela’s home, he said: “Any process servers were sent basically to protect what the court had already determined was in the best interests of the children.”

What is the Texas family code?

The Texas Family Code is a 1,500-page document that delineates state laws regarding such issues as marriage, divorce, adoption, child abuse, spousal abuse, foster care, grandparent rights and paternity. The Code defines a state policy of “assur(ing) that children will have frequent and continuing contact with parents who have shown the ability to act in the best interest of the child.” As a result, standard divorce decrees typically include limitations on the child’s residence so that it is easy for the noncustodial parent to maintain such contact. If a party objects, he or she must show that the restriction is not in the child’s best interest, which is difficult to do.

For decades, judges routinely denied pleas for relocation. After Lenz v. Lenz, a 2002 Texas Supreme Court case that acknowledged the idea that the financial, emotional and employment needs of the parent seeking to move may affect the best interest of the child, some Texas judges have lifted limitations on a case-by- case basis. Residential laws vary by state. In New York, courts assess each case on its merits but are reluctant to allow children to be moved when a non-moving parent objects. In New Jersey, the law favors the legal rights of the custodial parent to relocate.

For a state by state guide: http://www.famlawconsult.com/reader.html