Nonfiction

I’m Traveling Cross-Country with My Ex- & Current Husband & Two Siamese Cats.

Do you think we’ll make it?

June 30, 2022. Today, a newness begins. In it, some return to the old. Maybe. Yet, nothing’s the same.

That’s the thing with do-overs. There’s no such thing, really.

Separate, connected moments in time. Collected for now, on a single strand.

Randy and I first married on July 13, 2013. Our second marriage was August 13, 2020.

Divorce and a world of hurt lives between those dates. Also, healing.

Two anniversaries. We celebrate both.

Now, another date. Another phase of will this work.

Since our divorce, we’ve lived apart. More precisely, I’ve refused to live with anyone.

It was too awful, living with another. Living alone is…too much better.

Of course, there are my Siamese cats. And birds. And trees. Mostly though, there’s blessed solitude and blessed silence. Mostly, there’s space to truly listen and truly feel.

So, post-reconciliation and post-marriage round two, we’re together, living apart. We’re together, reimagining relationship.

Living arrangements are but the most tangible, obvious thing. There are others as well. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing this. Otherwise, I’m done with do-overs.

Our story is a big one, Randy’s and mine. I wrote 80,000 words of it during 2020, in an unpublished memoir.

That book changed in the writing. That book changed me and so us in the writing.

The story is still unfolding. Now at a pivotal juncture.

On June 30, 2022, we left our homes in British Columbia for a 33-day trek to another coast and another home.

We are traveling by car, with cats, staying in cheap hotels, trying to…make it work. Trying to…see what we’re like now.

Upon reaching the other side, we’ll move into a lovely house on land with old-growth forest and a stream and the Atlantic nearby.

Rural Nova Scotia. A slice of a world I’ve never seen and can barely just imagine.

There’s a detached cabin out back that I’ve claimed as my own. It’s rustic, with a wood stove. I’ll have space and silence there, I think.

We’ve signed a two-year lease. Another leap. Post-divorce and upon remarriage, I’ve insisted on financial sovereignty.

So, two years.

Time to see whether it will work.

Time to see whether we will work.

Again.

We’re such different people now. So different, from what came before.

Our relationship also, I have to believe. Otherwise, I’d never do this. Otherwise, there’d be no hope.

July 2, 2022.

A couple days in.

A long ways to go.

I think we’ll make it. I think there’s enough newness and oldness strung together, in this story we share.

Connected moments in time. Still held, on a single strand.

Find similar reads, right this way:

Thank you for reading. I’m a doctor of Chinese Medicine and write about sobriety and soulful living. Find all my links here: