Ten Days - Ten Years

Unraveled: One Woman's Story of Moving Out, Moving On, and Becoming a Better Mother
by Maria Housden

As a twelve-year-old girl, Maria Housden's vision of a happy future included everything that society expects girls to yearn for: a home, a husband, and, of course, children. Life had other plans.

Unraveled is Housden's riveting and thoughtful story of how, after the death of her young daughter, she found the courage to break away from her role as a wife and stay-at-home mom and strike out on her own in search of a more fulfilling life. Leaving her three surviving children in the primary custody of her husband, Housden faced down the disbelief of friends and family and began a journey that would ultimately lead her not only to the truth about herself, but also to a deeper and more loving connection with her children.

Housden writes about the emotional reckoning that led to her decision and the ways in which she has become the best mother she can be while no longer living with her children full-time. With fierce honesty and the same gift for poignantly beautiful writing that she demonstrated in the bestselling Hannah's Gift, Housden makes a valuable contribution to our collective conversation about mothering, marriage, and the assumptions we make about the way life is supposed to be. Unraveled is the remarkable story of one woman's choice not to live every girl's dream ... and instead to find her own.

Summer 1998
Sunday

The only light in the room came from a single kerosene lamp. I ran my hand along the wall beside the wide-plank door, found a switch, and flicked it on. A copper lamp with a fringed shade made a circle of light on the small wooden table next to the bed. I stood in the center of the room and felt a sense of excitement growing in me. Although I had dreamed of this moment for years, envisioned this place many times before, I hadn't ever truly believed it would happen. Looking around now, anything felt possible, as if something new was coming alive in me, a sense without form, poised to take shape.

The idea of a retreat had been planted in my heart in the first months after Hannah's death. Holding her lifeless body in my arms, part of me had released itself; something in me had irreparably changed. I had known then that I would have to get away, to immerse myself in a silence that was only mine, if I were to ever understand fully what had happened, if I were ever to know what I was supposed to do next.

The Hermitage, the center where I was now staying, had been established years ago by an elderly Mennonite couple who had converted a huge barn into several floors of small bedrooms, libraries, and a kitchen-dining room. For a modest fee, guests were given their own rooms and bath and encouraged to spend their days quietly on their own, reading, painting, writing, or walking in the fields and surrounding woods. All meals, except for breakfast, were prepared by Mary and served to guests around the farm table in silence. It seemed the perfect space for my retreat.

Now, gazing around the room, I felt as if I had been transported into another, timeless place, far from any life I had ever known. The walls were paneled with knotted pine boards that climbed horizontally to the beamed ceiling. Two screened windows on wide hinges were open to the warm summer evening, their white lace curtains catching the breeze. A well-worn plank floor was partially covered by a brown braid rug, and along one wall, facing the largest window, was a double bed with a carved, wooden headboard and muted patchwork quilt. A small teddy bear with button eyes and suede paws leaned against the pillow.

I laid my suitcase on the bed and began to unpack. I stacked my folded clothes in the drawers of the simple bureau, placed my new journal alongside a silver pen on the small desk that sat beneath the window across from the bed, and slid several photographs of my husband, Claude, and our four children, Will, ten; Hannah, who would have been seven; Margaret, three; and Madelaine, two, under the edges of the window frame above. In the drawers of the desk I put pages of drawing paper, a few pencils, and a deck of cards.

Beneath the second window, next to the dresser, was a small kneeling bench with a wooden shelf nailed to the wall above it. Here I placed a votive candle and the gold cross I wore around my neck during the last year of Hannah's life. When I had finished, I slid my suitcase under the bed and sat down in the large, upholstered reading chair in the corner. From my vantage point, I could see fireflies blinking in the dark outside the windows. I sat quietly, not moving, feeling myself breathe. Mary, the caretaker, had told me when I checked in that one other guest was scheduled to arrive in a day or two; other than that, I would be on my own. Having shared a room with two younger sisters until I was eighteen, and never having lived on my own, the idea of so much solitude and silence seemed too good to be true. And, as a wife and mother, I had become so acclimated to constant interruptions that I couldn't help thinking now that this peaceful feeling couldn't possibly last.

Sitting in the light of the flickering lamp, I heard a rustling noise, just outside the window, and felt a shiver up my spine, suddenly frightened of being alone. Quickly I stood up and, with a running start, leaped across the floor onto the bed, just as I had as a little girl, afraid of monsters that lurked in dark corners. Undressing beneath the covers, I dropped my clothes onto the floor and burrowed beneath the soft sheets and thick quilt. Closing my eyes against the dark and silence, I fell almost immediately into a deep sleep.

Winter 1988
Slip, sliding away

My body was not my own; every pore was yawning open. Even the air particles felt charged with anticipation, poised for what was about to happen. The nurse, standing on one side of the bed, was anchoring my foot in the stirrup. Claude, his eyes wild with excitement, held one of my outstretched hands in his.

The whole of my life, twenty-five years, I had known this moment was coming with the same sense of certainty in which we draw our next breath. What I did not know was whether this baby, my first child, was going to be a boy or a girl. Claude and I had chosen to be surprised at the moment of our baby's birth. I felt grateful, in this breath between contractions, for the sense of excitement I felt, already loving this little person so wholly and completely without knowing for certain whether this baby was a Hannah or a Will.

The next contraction gripped my body, and all my attention was sucked into the sensation as I felt the weight in my pelvis bear down. I imagined the muscles around my cervix expanding and lengthening, the head of the baby, our baby, being pushed through. Dr. Menon, a petite, Indian woman, smiled encouragingly from between my legs at the foot of the bed.

Copyright © 2005 by Maria Housden.

About the Author

Maria Housden is an author and lecturer. She and her husband, Roger Housden, live in New York and New Jersey. Her first book, Hannah's Gift: Lessons from a Life Fully Lived, has become an international bestseller, translated into more than fifteen foreign languages.