One early summer day, we sat on the deck, fingers greasy from Popeyes, watching our older girls chase our little boys. My husband was working late, and I didn’t tell him we wouldn’t be there when he got home. I told Matthew about my misery and how I wished there was another woman. Something I could point to, some event I could hold on to and say, “This! This! Is why I am allowed to go.” Something that would justify my act of selfishness.

Instead, I was just unhappy. I was so unhappy. I had dreams I was drowning, pulled under a green murky water by his hands.

“Is it enough to break my life apart just to be happy?”

“Yes.” Matthew said this so simply. So clearly. As if it shouldn’t even be a question.

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.