Several weeks ago, my younger brother invited me on a snowboarding weekend with some of his friends.  The condo charges were extremely reasonable and his crew of buddies was a group I’d known and liked for years.

“Money’s tight,”I said, frowning,”And what about Nolan?”

I’ve nailed down a bit of a schedule with my ex: he has our son Wednesday and Friday nights and for a bit of Sunday afternoon.  But due to his sports schedule, he won’t commit to full weekends once a month anymore and so - I haven’t had a weekend away in months.  The Friday nights are fantastic and so I don’t want to complain - but really, to truly decompress: to empty my brain and re-open my relaxation valves, two full days of pure de-mommification are required.

“Mom and Dad will help with Nolan,” my brother replied,”You gotta come.  When’s the last time we went riding?  When’s the last time you took a snowboarding trip?  2004?”

It was 2004, yes.  I remember because I had been three months pregnant with my son.  That was five years ago.  Five years too long.

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The crushing pain of the dissolution of a family unit is one of life’s inexplicable mysteries. I don’t think it can be fathomed until experienced first-hand: like labor, like the vice-grip horror of the loss of hope. It’s a death, of sorts: of a family unit, of hope, of the purity of those moments in the hospital with a first born child when you couldn’t imagine anything but the eternity of your overwhelming, deep love. Your little family unit, together forever.

It took me well over a year to be able to get through the day without physically mourning the loss of my son’s father in my daily life. I didn’t let the tears flow in front of my son, or my immediate family who had supported me so unflinchingly during some very heavy days. But at night, when my head hit the pillow in the silence of the night, memories infiltrated and I let tears drop silently, unnoticed, until my pillow was soaked through to the the side. I was pretty sure my heart would never heal.

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I arrived home from four nights in San Francisco, bedraggled and more than slightly crotchety. The flight had been delayed, the man next to me had some serious garlic breath, and I somehow lost an awesome little organic shirt I’d bought as a gift for my son. It was the longest stretch of time I’d ever been away from my son.

My Mom had sent me little updates, of course, as she always does. She titles them “Dear Sweetpea” and provides little details about the toasted tomato sandwiches she and Nolan ate for lunch, how he thrilled to touch a white jellyfish at the beach near the house. She tells me he is mostly happy and just gets a little teary at night, when he asks how many sleeps till I come home. I had a fantastic time at the BlogHer Conference - professionally and personally - but my heart was left in the hands of a little boy searching for skittering crabs under barnacled rocks and I couldn’t wait to get home.

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I recently had to can my Nanny.

It was awful and heart wrenching because my son truly loved her, and god knows he’s had enough change in his short life in the last two years, you know? But I had few options: my caretaker had lost her driver’s license for too many speeding tickets, and then asked for a five hundred dollar a month raise. She texted me to inform me of her dilemmas when I was sprinting to a meeting in San Francisco.

At first I went into shell-shock mode, furiously scribbling numbers, trying to determine just how many more freelance jobs I’d have to take on to pay her what she said she needed to survive. It was absurd, I didn’t have enough hours left in the day to take on anything else. I pondered and stressed and watched Ridiculous Late Night Shopping Channel to combat the insomnia that took over while I figured out what I was going to do.

In those first aftermath mornings, I’d drop my son off at her house, and sit in traffic on my way back to work, at my home office, stewing. She couldn’t come to us, you see, because her boyfriend had just given her a new puppy, and she had to be home with him.

I guess I’m trying to illustrate that I didn’t have much of a choice in changing my childcare arrangements. It was time. I think she was telling me that, too.

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