It has been one year today since Tom and I decided our marriage was over. Actually I decided I had enough and he agreed. It was a Sunday and I wanted to go out and shovel the front walkway. I asked him to watch Keegan. Almost the entire time I was out there I could hear him crying. I knew he was only crying because he was hungry and Tom didn't want to leave his man cave and get him a bottle. By the time I was finished he had brought him upstairs and was feeding him. I wasn't going to say anything but I was tired of biting my tongue.
"If I wanted to have him cry the whole time I would have left him alone." He responded with, "I don't need any comments from YOU."
I froze in the kitchen and thought despite everything I've put up with I'm not going to stick around while he tries to tear me down as a mother.
So I stopped halfway across the room and turned to look at him.
"Don't think that I am saying this out of anger. But I don't want to be married to you any more. I think we should get separated."
He finished giving Keegan his bottle and then put him in his crib for a nap. Then he went downstairs and I heard the garage door open and he drove away.
He eventually returned that night and we didn't say anything to each other for the next three days. I remember moving through the world in shock. Numbly going to work and taking care of Keegan.
On that Wednesday I started feeling something. I realized what it was. Relief. That is when I knew I had done the right thing. I could stop living my life on the edge. Stop waking up everyday and making two plans. One for life with him and one for life without. We talked that night and we started making a plan for dividing the physical parts of our marriage. It would be five more months before we sold the house and moved out on our own. It would be three and a half months after that before we were legally divorced.

I called him last night because there were things I wanted to say to him. We spoke for over an hour. And it was a good conversation. I got to say and hear things that I needed to. We agree our marriage was not a mistake. We agree that we are better off now. We agree that we don't want our divorce to be another horror story in a sea of bad divorces. We agree that our relationship now is a kind of friendship but it is important to maintain the appropriate boundaries. We agree that we'll always be bound by our history, our mutual affection, our son. We agree to keep working to make sure that we can communicate and do what is best for him.

It feels so good to know that my feelings for him are over. I look at him now in the context of what was. I look at him as a person who made a leap of faith in marriage with me. A person who cared about me enough to go through all of the infertility processes because we wanted a baby so badly. There are a thousand things I can tell you he fell short on. But he really came through on some of the most important ones. And now he is what I need him to be.