This Used to Be Us

by Renee Carlino

The amount of thought we’ve put into divorce is exponentially greater than the amount of thought we put into getting married in the first place.” “That’s how it always is, because divorce is final and everyone knows marriage is not,” he said.

How do kids break our hearts, put them back together, and then teach us how to be good human beings again just by virtue of their own virtue?

I’m looking at her and thinking about how beautiful she is. How she’s always been beautiful, inside and out. How she’s the best kind of pain in the ass. How I’m going to miss being frustrated with her. How I’m going to miss everything.

“I know for sure that loving your people well will make your life better, but you have to practice it every day. It’s a skill to refine…a craft to perfect.

I love that Alex and I realized we could be our own people and still be in love and it was better that way. That we could have autonomy and many loves in many different ways. We were not just a husband and wife, a mother and father, we were Dani and Alex. And Dani and Alex love each other.

Marriage is a verb. You have to keep working.

happy is not a continuous state. I’m not going to reach the state of happy. I’m going to be happy and sad and sometimes somewhere in the middle. And that’s normal.