In All of This, Rebecca Woolf writes of her own marriage, which ended when her husband died of cancer, “At the time, I thought I was being brave by sticking it out. By staying together for the kids. But it isn’t brave to sit passively in your misery…. The bravest women I know are not widows. They are divorced.” I’d spent over twelve years asking for someone to give me my happiness. Finally, I stopped asking. I just took it.

This is what people call being selfish. After all, I am a mother, I was a wife. It is my duty to think of others over myself. But what Matthew’s simple answer gave me permission to do was to think about myself. And think how, perhaps, if I was happy, if I did every desperate thing I could to grasp for it, maybe I would show my children that life is not misery, and their happiness belongs to them. That their freedom is worth fighting for.