Confessions of a Mom Who Doesn’t Fit In with the Neighborhood Moms Anymore
Maybe I never did
When my two youngest kids were 3 and 5, my then-husband and I moved into a beautiful neighborhood with big oak trees and oversized yards. I’d wanted to live in this neighborhood for years. It was highly sought after and ‘the place to be’ in my piece of suburbia. So when a fixer-upper came onto the market in 2012, we jumped at the opportunity to buy it and renovate.
Though I didn’t realize it at that time, this was also an outward attempt to keep a marriage together that was inwardly imploding.
Tucked into the back of this neighborhood was a cute little elementary school that all the kids in the neighborhood attended. My son was in Kindergarten at the time, and my daughter would eventually go to the same school and spend all of her elementary years there, too. So naturally, with the kids growing up together— the parents in the neighborhood got to know each other, too.
Well, most of them — anyway.
When the exhaustion of trying to maintain the happy marriage facade finally got the best of me — my ex-husband and I separated less than two years after we moved in. I had no interest in keeping the too-big house with the too-big yard and the 40-year-old pipes that liked to burst in the ceilings unexpectedly…
