There were harder weeks too. Weeks when I was behind on work and behind on sleep and when Owen would call to check on the kids in a way that felt like it was checking a box rather than actually connecting. There were weeks when I resented the intrusion on my life with a specificity that surprised me — I would be annoyed at a noise level that I wouldn’t have registered a year ago, or frustrated at the kitchen counter being covered with things that weren’t mine.
I was allowed to feel those things. Having complicated feelings about a situation doesn’t mean you resent the people in it.
I held both of those things at once, more or less, through weeks twelve to twenty. I was not a saint. I was also not someone who was going to take it out on a nine-year-old and a six-year-old whose parents were sorting out their lives.
## The Phone Call With Owen in May
By May, we were at week seventeen. I called Owen on a Tuesday night after the kids were in bed.
I had prepared for this call the way I prepare for a difficult payroll conversation with a department head: I had my notes, I had specific numbers, and I had decided in advance what I was asking for rather than hoping the conversation would find its own resolution.
I told him the arrangement had been going on for four months. I told him I had documentation of the costs. I told him I had a professional situation that was manageable but not indefinitely so. I told him I needed a real plan with a real end date, not another provisional extension.