As you know if you’ve been reading me for a while, I believe in the importance of being open and honest about the everyday struggles of parenting. This spring and summer have been especially difficult for our family, and today I’m going to share why. But because I’ll be sharing personal details, I’ve included a paywall pretty high up. This isn’t because I don’t trust my free subscribers; it’s because I want to be careful about respecting my family’s privacy and don’t want our story all over the internet. Thank you for understanding and for supporting me and my work, as always. Honesty, I’ve been wanting to share this news with you for a while, because I know that you all will be wonderful, but I had to wait for the right time.

Some of you may remember my (very popular!) newsletter from early December in which I shared about my ongoing emotional struggles. I was unhappy and had been for a while, and I was desperately trying to understand why and what aspects of my life were playing a role. It was hard for me to decipher whether my sadness was rooted in work-related stress, peri-menopausal hormones, my marriage, a general mid-life crisis, or a combination of all the things. As I explained in that newsletter, my therapist gave me strategies to help me listen better to my feelings in order to understand what the root causes might be.

In early February, I began to recognize that while there were probably several contributors, my nearly 15-year marriage was almost certainly one of them. By all appearances, my husband and I had a wonderful relationship. We were excellent co-parents. We rarely fought. We shared similar values. We treated each other with respect and kindness. Although he was gone long hours for work, he stepped up in the evenings and over the weekends and we split many domestic duties fairly evenly. 

But over time, I came to realize that there were big things missing.