Birds chirp. The neighbor’s dog lopes wolf-like across the open space field I see over the peeling white picket fence. It’s September 15, meaning my daughter turned 17 yesterday and my insurance bill is due. Last night, at her birthday dinner, my ex exploded and it turned into a nightmare meltdown. I cried and cried afterward in the parking lot before I felt collected enough to drive home. Today, the sun rounds out from atop the tall cottonwood trees to shine on my face. It’s a bit much all at once and yet splendid also. I am healing. I am letting Steve go on a whole new level and it’s making room for the light that was my destiny all along.

Last night my Perelandra Medical Assistance Team team worked with me to “excavate” Steve from my being…it was that dramatic. Bulldozers were involved, as was surgery. I believe I am learning that even if I’ve agreed to love someone—and to do my best to help them in this lifetime—there are limits, and my own wellbeing comes first. And anyone who isn’t a trustworthy heart ally doesn’t get to stay in relationship with me. I know it seems obvious—most of the important lessons do. And yet they can take us layers and layers until we finally understand.

And so, I’m bedraggled, which I am sad to say just isn’t bedazzled, though I wish it were. I feel so much safer and lighter and more blessed since letting all that go. I don’t think I realized how much psychic energy was still wrapped up in the old. My body feels wholly different—so much calmer. I do feel like I’ve returned to my home skin and life again. My energy seems uncluttered, clear. I don’t have to carry all that extra weight around. The sun can find me through the trees.

The invitation I’ll make to Steve will look something like this: Of course I’ll stay in amicable contact with you as we co-parent and as we discuss the assorted completions to fully separate our lives. But if we are to remain friends, actual friends, I have some needs that I’d like to make as requests. They aren’t demands, just what I’ll need to remain friends.

I pause. I was told to let myself calm all the way down before we addressed this. Like to take 7-10 days of space before doing anything. I think that means I’m supposed to let my heart and mind rest also.

But I am a writer and I finish my sentences! My requests may be that a) you stop drinking again and at least don’t drink about me or Hannah (because that explosion had a 90 percent chance of not happening without the alcohol), and that you do therapy or whatever you need to do to always, without exception, treat me with kindness and respect and that whatever it is that blinds you where you go into a rage and lash out, that you do whatever it takes for that to never happen again.

Never.

I value our friendship—who else in my life can remember holding baby Harmony on his chest? We’ve known each other well through so much—but I am not feeling like you value me or our friendship in return and I won’t do it anymore unless I feel like you value our friendship. And these are my requests to feel valued.

It’s always been so hard for me to leave relationships unresolved, and yet this is a case where boundaries and space matter most. I do not have to remain Steve’s friend, and the amicability can happen if anything better right now allowing space like a wide-open sea to come between my ex-husband and me.

And it feels so right, you know, like letting the giant battered fish go.

Everything seems so sad. The levels of this grief have been as the sea too. We’re just so human and it hurts so much to stay that way. And it hurts in my quads and fresh tears melt me. And I know I deserve better. The sun burns hot on my chest now. Everything we love changes. And it is beautiful, bedazzled. I move into the shade and the sadness accompanies me. And yet, with it, the light that blasted me a minute ago remains and washes everything clean.

Thank you and Amen.