At that time I finally read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” I had thought my suffering was making me a better person, like Christ suffering for us, but Viktor Frankl writes,

“But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning… If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

At that point I realized that staying in that marriage was not heroic, that my suffering in it was indeed masochistic, and that the children were also suffering because of it. I made up my mind, the kids and I would have to leave.

My ex-husband did get a job back in Seattle. He left the kids and I to finish the school year, and to stay until the sale of the house was complete. The house sale closed five years exactly from the day we purchased it. The whole house, four stories with five bedrooms, was packed onto a truck. We cleaned the home and packed up my new Honda Odyssey with four kids and our cat Emma, and we set out to drive from the east coast to the west coast.

We could almost see our new life ahead of us. We were ready for all the craziness to be over. But like Odysseus, it never goes quite like planned. Not even when you can see home on the horizon.