The Happenstance

A quick note: The Happenstance is free, and most of it always will be. A few of the more intimate pieces will live behind a $5/month paywall, partly because I’d rather they not appear in my children’s Google searches someday, and partly because the money goes somewhere meaningful: every dollar helps buy someone an item from their Fresh Starts divorce registry. Use code BANJOBOY for 50% off your subscription to The Happenstance.

I Thought the Stranger Was the Baby

Olivia Howell — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:20:42 GMT

It will never not be strange to look at photos from the day my first child was born and know that I had absolutely no idea who the man standing beside me would become.

My oldest son turns thirteen this week.

Thirteen.

He wasn’t even supposed to be an August baby.

He was supposed to be born in September, but three weeks early, I woke up in the middle of the night to what felt very much like one of those scenes in a movie where a pregnant woman’s water dramatically breaks.

Except in the movies, she always immediately knows what has happened.

I woke up wondering if my water had broken or if I had just peed the bed.

The night before, I had fallen asleep craving a cup of tea, which was strange because it was the end of August on Long Island and very, very hot.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it.

Now it makes me laugh.

My son loves tea.

There are these tiny things about our children that seem to somehow exist before we know them.

Thirteen years later, I can look backward and turn a random late-summer craving into part of the mythology of who he has always been.

Although, if I’m being completely truthful, there has always been something slightly mystical to me about knowing my children.

Both of them.

But particularly my oldest.

I don’t really know how to explain this, but I have always had this strange feeling that I have known him in every iteration of history.

Like he was never exactly new to me.

I dreamed about him before he was born in ways that made very little sense at the time and make considerably more sense now that I know him.

Little details.

Bits of personality.

Things that felt random then and feel almost freaky now.

There has always been something about him that feels ancient to me.

Not old.

Familiar.

Like somewhere in the architecture of my life there was always a space shaped exactly like him.

Like he wasn’t added to my family tree when he was born so much as he finally appeared on a branch where he had somehow always belonged.

And yet, objectively, that August night, I knew almost nothing about him.

I knew he was a boy.

I knew the name we had chosen for him.

I knew the shape of him inside my stomach.

But I didn’t know his voice.

I didn’t know his laugh.

I didn’t know his sense of humor or what would make him furious or what would frighten him.

I didn’t know what kind of brother he would be.

I didn’t know what he would worry about.

I didn’t know what music he would love or what foods he would adore or what his face would look like at three or seven or ten or thirteen. It turns out we both love musicals and sushi. He looks astonishingly like my brother and my father, although sometimes an expression crosses his face and I see his father completely.

In all the practical ways that one human being can know another, he was a stranger.

The strange thing is that I felt like I knew his father completely.

I mean, it’s not strange, I was married to the man. I was deeply in love with my husband.

Deeply.

There was one night toward the end of my pregnancy when he had to go into New York City for work. I remember lying awake in our house absolutely panicked that something was going to happen to him.

Eventually I got out of bed and started pacing.

I was enormously pregnant, walking around our house in the middle of the night, imagining car accidents and disasters and all the ways the person I loved most in the world might suddenly not come home.

Looking back, I can see that there was probably some prenatal anxiety mixed into all of this. But the emotion itself was real.

I loved him so much that the idea of anything happening to him felt unbearable.

He was the love of my life.

And there was something almost primal about the protectiveness I felt then. I felt fiercely protective of both of them.

My baby.

My husband.

The two people I thought were becoming the center of my family.

I thought my husband and I were about to spend our lives protecting this child together.

This was our child.

We were supposed to be doing this together.

I thought I was standing beside the person who would protect him with me.

I also had absolutely no idea that thirteen years later, I would know nearly every mile between that hospital room and the boy he is now. I didn’t know that so much of the work of getting him from there to here would belong to me. I thought I was looking at the beginning of the three of us. I could not have imagined the shape our family would eventually take, or the version of motherhood I would have to grow into.

That’s important to say because sometimes when I look at those photographs now, I almost can’t access the woman who felt those things.

I remember her.

I know those emotions were mine.

But they feel so foreign to me now that sometimes I can hardly believe I once inhabited them.

The end of my pregnancy had actually felt like a particularly bonded time between us. We were excited about having a son together. We were nervous, certainly, but we seemed nervous in the same way.

Neither of us had ever been parents before.

We were waiting together.

I remember feeling like we were standing on the same side of something enormous, looking over the edge.

There had been hard parts of the pregnancy.

I had gestational diabetes, which, for somebody with a lifelong history of disordered eating, sent me into what I now understand was probably prenatal depression. Suddenly food was numbers and rules and blood sugar readings at precisely the moment my body already felt the least like my own.

My family carried me through a lot of that.

My stepfather drove me to appointments. My mother helped. My sister helped.

My husband was enthusiastic about the baby through most of the pregnancy, although most of the actual planning for what a baby might need fell to me. I didn’t think that was particularly strange at the time. I had been around babies much more than he had.

And I was the mother.

There were so many things I accepted because I thought that was simply how becoming a mother worked.

Then my water broke.

And suddenly the hypothetical baby we had been discussing for months was coming.

When my son was born, he came out slightly blue.

Apparently babies sometimes do this.

I did not know that.

I thought he was dead.

“Is he okay?” I asked immediately.

“Yeah, he’s great,” the doctor said.

Then his father held him.

And I can still hear the way his voice lifted slightly when he looked down at him and said:

“Hello, Weston.”

His voice went up on the name.

There was so much emotion in it.

It felt like a movie moment.

It felt like everything I had ever wanted compressed into one little picture.

The person I loved.

Our baby.

Our family.

I always say that my son was born smiling.

He really was.

When they put him on my chest, he looked up at me with this little face, and I said, “Hey, buddy.”

And something happened.

I don’t know how else to describe it.

There he was.

This person I had technically never met before.

And yet there was no feeling of introduction.

It was recognition.

Oh.

It’s you.

That is the closest I can get to explaining it.

It felt less like meeting someone and more like finding someone.

Like somehow I had been waiting for a person I already knew.

I knew immediately that there was something particular between us.

And thirteen years later, I still feel it.

There is something about him that feels woven into me in a way that predates any actual memory I have of him.

Maybe that’s motherhood.

Maybe it’s biology.

Maybe it’s projection.

Maybe it’s something stranger.

I just know that while he was objectively the person in the hospital room I knew the least about, some part of me recognized him almost instantly.

The man standing beside me was different.

I didn’t have to recognize him.

I thought I already knew him.

And then, almost immediately, something strange happened.

There was nothing anyone would have looked at from the outside and thought, Oh. There. That’s the moment.

It was smaller than that. Almost imperceptible. Like a wisp of a breath.

My mother and sister were in the hospital room, and somehow we started talking about what we would do when we brought the baby home.

We talked about having a sound machine in his room.

This seemed completely ordinary to me. Babies in my family had always slept with some kind of white noise. You drown out the sounds of the house. The baby sleeps. When the baby sleeps, hopefully the mother gets to sleep.

I thought this was a logistical conversation.

Suddenly, my husband was vehemently against it.

He started explaining that because of his background and degree, he understood sound and audio safety and that a sound machine could be dangerous for the baby’s ears.

My mother and sister looked at him sharply.

In our family, they essentially said, this is how babies sleep.

And when babies sleep, mothers sleep.

I remember the feeling more than I remember the exact conversation. Something in the room shifted.

It wasn’t about a sound machine. At least, it didn’t feel like it was. I remember having this sudden sense that something I had assumed would belong to me—some basic authority over how I would care for the baby I had just given birth to—was being contested.

I didn’t have language for it. I just knew that it didn’t feel good.

Then came pacifiers.

I thought babies used pacifiers.

Apparently this was also up for debate.

Little things started appearing everywhere.

Things I had assumed were decisions.

Things I had assumed were mine to navigate as his mother.

Things I had assumed we would figure out together.

Suddenly everything seemed to have another layer beneath it.

Who knew more?

Who got to decide?

Whose judgment counted?

Who had authority?

And I was so newly a mother that I didn’t even understand yet that these were the questions being asked.

I just knew that something felt different.

That’s what I see now when I look at the photographs from that hospital room.

I see myself meeting one person.

And, almost simultaneously, beginning to question whether I understood another.

The baby was supposed to be the unknown person in the room.

Except some strange part of me looked at him and thought, There you are.

Thirteen years later, the equation has completely reversed.

The baby who I had never met is now one of the people I know most intimately in the world.

And the man I thought I knew better than almost anyone has become the stranger in the photograph. Often when I see those pictures now, I don’t even experience him as the same man.

And here we are, thirteen years later, I know that baby.

I know how he likes his tea.

I know his jokes.

I know the expression that crosses his face when something is bothering him.

I know when he needs reassurance and when he wants space.

I know the sound of his footsteps.

I know the things that make him laugh so hard he can’t breathe.

I know his softness.

I know his edges.

I know him in the ordinary, accumulated way you know someone after thirteen years of breakfasts and illnesses and car rides and bedtime conversations and school mornings and birthdays.

And underneath all of that ordinary knowing is still that strange, inexplicable feeling:

I knew you.

Somehow.

Before any of this.

The person I had never met before that evening became more and more recognizable to me with every passing year.

The person I had known for years became increasingly difficult to recognize.

Maybe that’s what photographs can never capture.

We think they document what happened.

Here is the day the baby was born.

Here are his parents.

Here is our family.

Click.

But photographs don’t capture what we believed was happening.

They don’t photograph our assumptions about the future.

They don’t record who we trusted.

They don’t show us what we couldn’t possibly know yet.

They cannot tell us which stranger will become familiar and which familiar person will someday feel like a stranger.

Hindsight has this nasty little trick where it makes the eventual outcome feel inevitable.

It wasn’t.

Not from the beginning.

Not to her.

When I look at those photographs now, I don’t want to reach into them and warn her.

I don’t want to ruin that moment for her.

I don’t want to tell her what happens next.

Mostly, I want to point toward the baby.

Look at him.

Because she has absolutely no idea.

No idea who he is going to become.

No idea how funny he will be.

No idea how complicated.

No idea how many conversations they will have.

No idea how fiercely she will love knowing him.

And also, somehow, she already knows.

Maybe that is the part I can’t explain.

Thirteen years ago, there were two people beside me whose futures I could not possibly know. One I had never met before. One I believed I knew better than almost anyone.

I thought the baby was the stranger.

Looking at those photographs now, I realize that was never quite true.

Somewhere inside me, I think I had been waiting for him forever.

Just so you know: The Happenstance is free, and most of it will stay that way. I’m putting a few of the more personal essays behind a $5/month paywall, both for a little privacy and because every dollar goes directly toward buying registry items for people rebuilding after divorce through Fresh Starts. Use code BANJOBOY for 50% off your subscription to The Happenstance.

You Don’t Actually Know Who You’re Marrying

Olivia Howell — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:39:38 GMT

I am going to say something that is probably a little horrifying to hear.

You do not actually know who you are marrying.

I know.

Very romantic.

But I think we need to say it.

Because we have built an enormous cultural mythology around the idea that if you date long enough, ask the right questions, meet the parents, take a vacation together, live together, discuss money, observe how he treats waiters and babies, determine whether he puts his shopping cart back in the little shopping-cart corral like a civilized member of society, you will eventually accumulate enough information to know exactly who this person is.

And I don’t think that’s true.

Yes, I think you can know a lot.

You should know a lot! You should absolutely pay attention.

But you cannot know another human being completely, because you have not yet lived every circumstance that will eventually ask something new of that human being.

And sometimes—

this is the part I think frightens us most—

he hasn’t met that version of himself yet either.

A person can tell you he wants to be a wonderful father and completely believe it.

He has never had a baby.

A person can tell you he supports ambitious women and completely believe it.

He has never watched his wife’s career become more successful than his.

A person can tell you he believes marriage should be equal.

He has never experienced equality when equality requires him to give something up.

He can tell you he is patient.

He has never been awake at 3:47 in the morning for the fourth time with a six-week-old who has decided sleep is simply not an activity for him.

No, but seriously.

He can tell you he will take care of you if you get sick.

He has never taken care of a sick person for six months.

He can tell you he will never pressure you for sex.

He has never experienced what happens to a sexual relationship after pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, grief, resentment, exhaustion, toddlers, hormones, body changes, or simply fifteen years of being alive inside the same two bodies.

There are parts of our character that remain theoretical until life asks us to use them.

Dating asks some questions.

Marriage asks different ones.

Parenthood asks different ones still.

And there is no way to administer all of those tests before the wedding.

There is unfortunately no marital simulator at Williams Sonoma.

You cannot add “See how he behaves after eight consecutive months of sleep deprivation and the death of a parent” to the wedding registry.

The scary part of this whole marriage experiment is that you have to live it to see what happens.

Everything else is hypothetical.

Which means, yes, you are making a decision based on evidence.

But you are also making a decision before all the evidence exists.

I think about this a lot when I look back at my own marriage.

If you had asked me at the beginning what I believed I was signing up for, I would have had an answer.

I thought I was marrying a kind-hearted musician.

A creative person.

Someone who was enthusiastic about me, about my family, about my ideas, about my dreams.

I thought I was marrying someone who came from what looked, from where I was standing, like a close-knit family.

And this wasn’t something I invented from fifty feet away.

I knew them.

I spent time with them.

I watched them interact.

His father had been a work-from-home father and, from my perspective, a very hands-on one. His parents were together. The family seemed woven together in all the ways we are taught to interpret as meaningful.

I thought I was gathering good information.

Because that is what we tell women to do, right?

Look at his family.

Look at his father.

See how the men in the family treat women.

Observe the marriage he grew up around.

Ask questions.

Pay attention.

I did.

On paper, it looked good.

In person, to me, it looked good.

I was not standing at the altar thinking, I have some very serious concerns about this man’s capacity for intimacy, grief, responsibility, fatherhood and family loyalty, but he plays several stringed instruments exceptionally well, so let’s roll the dice.

I thought I knew what I was choosing.

What I did not know was how this person would respond when I got pregnant.

I did not know who he would become in the middle of the night with a baby.

I did not know what would happen when someone died.

I did not know how he would respond when life stopped being hypothetical.

I did not know what would happen when the roles changed, when the needs changed, when my body changed, when our family structure changed, when the beautiful idea of building a life became the actual labor of building one.

And there were other things I didn’t know either.

Things about the larger family system.

Things I could not have known from the version of the family I had been shown and the interactions I had actually experienced.

I look back now and I have questions.

I have theories about why I fit so neatly into that particular family at that particular moment.

We can save those for another day.

But the point is that I did not have those theories then.

Then, I had the evidence I had.

That was all I could possibly work with.

And this is where I think we do something profoundly unfair to women after relationships end.

We take information she discovered in year ten and hand it backward to the woman she was in year one.

See?

You should have known.

Known what?

Known information she would not receive for another decade?

Known what somebody would do in circumstances that had never happened?

Known a family system better than the people inside it wanted her to?

Known how a man would react to fatherhood before he became a father?

Known how someone would behave once he finally believed she was not going anywhere?

At a certain point, “you should have known” stops being advice and becomes a demand for prophecy.

And women are not prophets.

We’re human.

There is another possibility here that we are even more uncomfortable talking about.

Sometimes people lie.

I don’t know why we make this so complicated.

People lie!

People conceal things!

People mirror!

People future-fake!

People learn what you want and become extremely fluent in the language of it.

Sometimes you think you are buying the beautiful artisan loaf in the brown paper bag, the one from the bakery where somebody named Jean Luca woke up at 3AM to lovingly mill the grain—

and then you get home and it’s Wonder Bread.

Which is fine.

Wonder Bread knows what it is.

Wonder Bread is not pretending to have fermented for forty-eight hours in a stone crock.

The problem is when the package says something different from what is inside.

That is what “choose better” never accounts for.

She chose according to the label.

She chose according to the ingredients she was shown.

She chose according to what the person standing in front of her repeatedly told her he was.

And sometimes there are questions along the way.

I can say that now about my own relationship too.

There were moments.

Little moments.

Things that did not entirely make sense.

A question mark here. A strange feeling there.

But I did not have the language then that I have now.

I did not walk away from some interaction in my twenties thinking, My God, I believe I am being future-faked!

Who was saying “future-faking”?

We were barely texting with one hand.

I had a flip phone for part of this relationship.

What I had were cultural scripts.

And those scripts told me what romance looked like.

He wants to see you constantly?

He really likes you.

He’s already talking about your future together?

He knows you’re the one.

He wants to move quickly?

Sometimes when you know, you know.

He’s buying presents?

How thoughtful.

He says he has never felt this way before?

OH MY GOD.

He is SO in love with you.

Maybe he is.

People do fall madly in love.

People meet and know quickly and live happily together for fifty years.

Intensity is not automatically manipulation.

But I do think we need to get much better at recognizing that intensity and intimacy are not the same thing.

Speed is not necessarily certainty.

Someone talking constantly about the future is not the same thing as someone demonstrating that he can build a safe present with you.

And because we have culturally romanticized these things so thoroughly, sometimes the very behaviors that look strange in hindsight were celebrated while they were happening.

Which is why I think women need to talk to each other.

Honestly.

Not in a paranoid way.

Not in a dump him because he texts with grammatical errors way.

But in a way where we stop being so afraid of disrupting another woman’s love story that we explain away the thing she just told us that made our stomach drop.

Maybe we need to be willing to say:

That seems really fast.

You keep laughing when you tell me this story, but you don’t actually look like you think it’s funny.

That’s strange. Has he done that before?

Are you okay?

Or even:

I don’t know what that means yet, but let’s not explain it away.

Because if the only rules you hear are the rules inside your own house, eventually almost anything can become normal.

Sometimes another woman is the first person who helps you hear your own life from outside the walls of your house.

We don’t have to diagnose every strange moment. Maybe we just become more curious about the little questions our bodies raise before our minds have language for them.

Not: this is definitely a red flag. Run, girl!

Just: huh, why did that make me feel strange?

And then tell someone.

Let another person hold the question with you.

This is why the phrase “choose wisely” bothers me so much.

Because I see it everywhere now.

Choose wisely when you marry.

Choose wisely when you choose the father of your children.

Your postpartum experience depends on the man you choose, so choose wisely.

And I understand what people think they’re saying.

A supportive partner can fundamentally shape your experience of marriage and parenthood.

Of course.

But listen to what happens when we keep repeating that phrase.

A woman has a baby.

Her body has just done something enormous.

She may feel as if her entire identity has been taken apart on the kitchen floor and she has been given exactly seven minutes to put it back together before the baby wakes up again.

And then the man she thought would stand beside her becomes resentful.

Or controlling.

Or frightening.

Or cruel.

Or absent.

Or sexually coercive.

Or he simply opts out of the work and leaves her drowning inside it.

And somehow the cultural response is:

This is why you have to choose wisely.

Really?

Now?

This is where we’re putting the emphasis?

Because postpartum is actually the perfect example of why this philosophy fails.

You can know someone for ten years and still never have known him with a newborn.

You cannot reproduce postpartum during dating.

You can’t do a trial run.

You can’t rent a screaming baby for a long weekend and simulate bleeding, hormonal shifts, sexual changes, financial pressure, identity loss, milk coming out of your body, three hours of sleep, and a mother-in-law texting all morning asking when she can stop by.

You don’t know.

And he may not know either.

He may genuinely believe he is going to be an incredible father.

Then fatherhood asks him to do things he does not want to do.

Again.

And again.

At inconvenient times.

Without applause.

That is different from wanting children.

Wanting children is lovely.

Parenting them is Tuesday. And Tuesday reveals a lot about a person.

What does he do when caregiving is boring?

What does he do when your body is unavailable?

What does he do when you need rest?

What does he do when your needs inconvenience him?

Those answers may not exist until the questions do.

So when a woman says:

He wasn’t like this before.

Maybe we should stop immediately translating that as:

You missed something.

Sometimes she did not miss anything.

Sometimes he hid it.

Sometimes he changed.

Sometimes circumstances exposed something dormant.

Sometimes he did not know that part of himself existed.

Sometimes all of those things overlap.

Human beings are inconveniently complicated.

We do not have to solve the mystery of which version was his “true self” before we are allowed to help her.

But I think a lot of women spend years trying to solve it anyway. I know I did.

There is a particular kind of disorientation in looking at the person standing in front of you and continuing to search for the person you remember.

I think that deserves its own conversation.

So yes.

Choose thoughtfully.

Ask questions.

Move slowly enough to actually observe somebody.

Watch what happens when you say no.

Watch how they repair after conflict.

Pay attention to how they respond when you have a need that competes with theirs.

Talk about money.

Talk about children.

Talk about sex.

Meet the family.

Meet the friends.

Keep your own life.

Keep your own people.

Please, for the love of God, have your own bank account.

All of this matters.

But none of it creates certainty.

There is no magical caliber of discernment that allows a woman to predict every future version of another human being.

Which means our safety cannot depend entirely on women choosing perfectly at the beginning.

It also has to depend on what happens afterward.

Do we have people we can tell?

Do we have friends who will listen without immediately normalizing?

Will somebody believe us?

Will somebody say:

That doesn’t sound right. Tell me more.

Maybe that is one of the most important things women can be for one another.

Witnesses.

Not fortune-tellers.

Not women standing outside the marriage with clipboards assigning points for red and green flags.

Witnesses.

Someone who remembers who you were before you started explaining everything.

Someone who notices when you become quieter.

Someone who doesn’t laugh when the joke isn’t funny.

Someone who asks another question.

Someone willing to risk the awkwardness of saying:

I love you, and something about this scares me.

I wish we stopped asking women to go back through their lives like forensic investigators searching for the exact moment they should have known.

Maybe there wasn’t one.

Maybe there were questions she did not yet understand.

Maybe there were things hidden from her.

Maybe life asked a question neither of them had been asked before, and his answer changed everything.

Sometimes a woman looks at the person she has shared a home with, a bed with, children with, a last name with, a million mundane Tuesdays with, and thinks:

I didn’t know this about you.

I don’t think we should be afraid of that sentence.

I think we should make room for it.

Because sometimes it is the beginning of seeing clearly.

And when another woman finally says it out loud—

I thought I knew him.

Maybe the most useful thing we can give her isn’t a lecture about who she should have married.

Maybe we pull our chair a little closer and say:

tell me what happened.

The Happenstance is free, and most of it will stay that way. Every once in a while, I put one of the more personal essays behind a $5/month paywall—partly because some stories feel like they need a smaller room, and partly because every dollar goes directly toward buying registry items for people rebuilding after divorce through Fresh Starts. If you want to join me there, use code BANJOBOY for 50% off your subscription.

Who Told You That You Were Controlling?

Olivia Howell — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:28:36 GMT

There’s something funny that happens when you start writing a lot again.

It’s like the universe starts handing you stories on a silver platter and putting you in exactly the right places at exactly the right times, so that later you can sit down at your computer and think, Oh. This is why I was there. I needed to tell this story.

The other night, I went to a wellness event at a local bookstore here on Long Island. It was hosted by Molly, one of our amazing Fresh Starts experts, and I was thrilled to have an excuse to get out of my house for a little while and mingle with other women in a bookstore, which is basically my ideal social situation. If at any point I want to stop socializing, there are books and Diet Coke and coffee.

I was really exhausted from working all day, but I settled into a big, comfortable leather chair and listened as Molly led us through different mindfulness activities.

Of course, because of the way my brain works, I was also watching everyone else.

I have always been that little girl at the top of the slide, watching everybody.

Even when I am technically participating in something, there is another part of me standing slightly outside of it, observing the room. That’s always been who I am, since before I can remember.

I watched the women write in their notebooks and on pieces of paper. I watched them close their eyes. I watched them think about their lives.

And I kept wondering about them.

What are they writing about?

What are they getting supported in?

What are they not getting supported in?

What are their hobbies?

I look at a woman and wonder: What has she endured?

And maybe even more interestingly: How would she tell the story of what she has endured?

Because we don’t always tell our stories using the words that actually describe them.

Sometimes an entire marriage is hiding inside one little sentence.

Toward the end of the event, Molly had us separate into three groups based on what we wanted to create a SMART goal around.

If you don’t know what a SMART goal is, I didn’t either until I became certified as a clinical hypnotherapist.

A SMART goal is basically a goal that has enough structure around it that your brain cannot just toss it into a giant doom pile.

It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, which, as someone with ADHD, I really appreciate.

We could choose between three groups:

Women who wanted to activate their voices more.

Women who wanted to work on accepting themselves.

Women who wanted to live more in the present.

Can you guess which group I chose?

Yeah.

The present one.

The woman sitting in front of me turned around when it was time to share our goals with somebody. She was probably around my mom’s age, somewhere in her mid-sixties. She had these gorgeous long blue nails and was dressed boldly and colorfully. She was the kind of woman you notice immediately because she seemed very comfortable occupying visual space.

She had wide eyes and a warm face, and she smiled at me.

She seemed like a kindergarten teacher.

I later found out that she did, indeed, work at a school.

“So what was your goal?” she asked me.

I told her mine was to put my phone away earlier at night.

“I get sucked into it,” I said, “and then I get emotionally attached to everybody I’m reading about.”

Which is unfortunately true.

I can open my phone at 9:45 because I want to check one thing, and suddenly it’s 11:17 and I am deeply invested in the divorce of a woman in Iowa I have never met.

“That’s a good goal,” she told me.

“We all probably need to do a little more of that,” I said.

Then I looked at her.

“What was your goal?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Well,” she said, “to be less controlling.”

And she kind of laughed. A nervous little laugh.

I tilted my head.

“Huh. Less controlling about what?”

And because I really wasn’t in the mood to talk about myself anymore, I just kept asking questions.

Thankfully, years of hosting podcasts have made this something I’m very good at.

You learn how to ask one more question.

And then one more.

You learn how to leave enough space after someone answers that they often tell you the thing underneath the thing they just said.

People will tell you remarkable things if they feel like you are actually listening.

“Just the way things are,” she said, kind of shaking her head.

“What do you mean?”

She told me that her husband was retired, but she was not.

She worked full-time at a school.

He was home all week.

She said he should be able to do more things around the house, like go to the supermarket on his own.

“Yeah,” I said, and laughed. “He should be able to.”

She nodded.

“But I need to be less controlling about how he does it.”

She told me she had to let him go to the grocery store and accept what he came home with.

“I can’t complain about a bad apple,” she said.

I understood what she meant.

There is definitely an anxiety that comes with handing over something you’ve done yourself for a million years. I told her I’m somebody who likes to control those things, too. I have my whole life. And I’ve found that sometimes control is really a mask for a lot of anxiety.

“Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably right.”

And I do believe that.

Sometimes control really is anxiety.

Sometimes uncertainty makes us grip things too tightly. Sometimes we convince ourselves that our particular way of doing something is the best way of doing something, especially when it’s something we’ve been doing for years.

Or something we’ve been doing for years while also being criticized about how we do it.

Listen, there are absolutely times when we need to let people do things differently.

But I’ve also become increasingly interested in what happens when women are asked to “let go of control” in situations where what they are really asking for is competence.

Because those are not the same thing.

And I started wondering where she had gotten this idea about herself.

Had somebody called her controlling?

Had her husband called her controlling?

Had she heard herself complain about the groceries enough times that she eventually decided she must be the problem?

Had she spent so many years being the person who noticed everything that she had started interpreting her own vigilance as a personality defect?

We were quiet for a minute.

Then, before she turned back around, she said something else.

“If he did more things during the week, we would have more time on the weekends.”

She shrugged.

“What do you and your husband do on the weekends?” I asked.

Her whole face changed, and she smiled.

“Oh, my husband just loves coffee.”

She told me her husband is a huge coffee drinker, and somewhere along the way he had gotten a directory of Long Island coffee shops.

Every weekend, they pick one to try.

They drive there.

He tries the coffee.

They explore the town.

“That actually kind of sounds fun,” I said.

She smiled.

“I guess I’ve learned to like coffee,” she said. “Sometimes I drink tea.”

That sentence has stayed with me.

I guess I’ve learned to like coffee.

She explained that the outings give him something to do. Otherwise, he gets restless.

“Does he really need to get out of the house on the weekends?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Big time.”

I laughed because I know that personality.

I was married to someone like that.

There always needed to be a plan or a place to go or something to do, and then I was the one who had to manage the expectations around what was actually possible.

We can’t just drive five hours on a Saturday morning to go check out a new banjo because we have two little babies.

Which, of course, made me the bad wife.

The villain of the story.

She told me that before they started doing the coffee shop outings, her husband would sometimes just drive aimlessly around the island because he needed something to do.

“With gas prices,” she said, “this is better.”

We laughed.

And honestly, none of that sounded particularly terrible.

Let’s be honest, right? It sounded like marriage.

You do learn to accommodate another person in a marriage.

You watch movies you maybe wouldn’t have picked. You learn music you maybe wouldn’t have learned. You eat at restaurants you don’t necessarily care about. You stand in stores dedicated to hobbies you barely understand while someone you love explains an object to you with enormous enthusiasm.

Although, ask me if I could tell you all about the history of the guitar now.

I definitely could.

That is part of loving another person.

Sometimes you learn to like coffee.

But then I stopped.

I looked at her.

And I asked the question I cannot stop thinking about.

“What would you want to do on the weekends?”

She didn’t even pause.

“Nothing,” she said, laughing.

“I would want to rest. I work all week. I’m exhausted.”

And there it was.

The whole story changed.

Because suddenly this wasn’t really a story about coffee.

Or apples.

Or control.

It was a story about rest.

This woman was still working full-time while her retired husband was home all week.

He could theoretically take on more of the household responsibilities.

But the goal she had written down at a wellness event was not:

Ask my husband to take on more during the week.

It was not:

Make more time for myself to rest.

It was not:

Spend one Saturday doing exactly what I want.

Her goal was:

Be less controlling.

And that has not left my mind since.

Look, I don’t know this woman from Adam.

I really don’t. I sat behind her for less than an hour. We barely talked.

Maybe she does alphabetize the canned goods and send her husband photographs of the exact apple he is allowed to buy.

Sure.

There are entire marriages happening behind closed doors that none of us will ever understand.

But I desperately wanted to ask her a question I learned during my clinical hypnotherapy training:

Who first told you that you were controlling?

Because women absorb descriptions of themselves very easily when those descriptions explain why everyone else is uncomfortable.

Controlling.

Nagging.

Particular.

High-maintenance.

Impossible to please.

Too much.

Sure, maybe sometimes those descriptions are accurate.

But sometimes a woman looks controlling because she has learned, over many years, that if she stops paying attention, something gets dropped.

She remembers the groceries because nobody else remembered them.

She remembers the permission slips.

The new shoes.

The appointments.

She figures out what everybody is doing on the weekends.

She notices the toothpaste.

The toilet paper.

She notices when somebody else needs noticing.

She manages the boredom of a grown man.

And then eventually everyone looks at her and says:

God, why can’t you relax, Mom?

Well.

Can she?

Can she?

Because I keep coming back to something I wrote a long time ago:

If someone will not let you rest, they are not safe to build a life with, because your nervous system will pay the price for years.

And I don’t mean safety only in the dramatic ways we usually discuss it.

I mean something much quieter.

Can you put something down?

Can you stop noticing?

Can you say, I am tired, and have that be enough?

Can you spend a Saturday on the couch without another adult’s discomfort with inactivity somehow becoming your responsibility?

I did not take a nap for the entirety of my marriage.

I didn’t even lie on the couch and watch TV.

Honestly, I did not lie on the couch and watch TV for so long that when I got divorced, I forgot that lying on the couch and watching TV was an activity adults were allowed to do.

We have to remember that actual rest for women is not a scented candle.

It is not a bath.

It is not a massage.

It is not a girls’ weekend.

Stop buying another room spray.

Yes, those are lovely gifts.

But that is not the kind of rest I mean.

Rest is being able to release responsibility because you trust somebody else to pick it up.

I think a lot of women have experienced breaks without ever experiencing that kind of rest.

In fact, I used to hate getting a break when I was married because I knew the break would come with consequences.

I knew I would return to exactly where I had started, except probably a few steps behind.

The break itself created work.

So yes, women have gone on vacation.

They have gotten their nails done.

They take yoga classes.

They sit in beautiful leather chairs at wellness events and practice mindfulness.

But they have never experienced the deeper relief of knowing that another competent adult is also paying attention.

Their nervous system never clocks out.

And then we hand them a worksheet and ask what they would like to improve about themselves.

And they write:

Be less controlling.

What bothers me most about this is how easily one person’s preferences can quietly become the architecture of an entire relationship.

He gets restless, so they go out.

He likes coffee, so they visit coffee shops.

He’s retired.

She’s still working.

She’s exhausted.

And somehow, she is the one with the personality trait to work on.

Maybe that’s the question I want us to start asking more often.

Not just:

Am I being controlling?

But:

What happens if I stop controlling this?

Does another adult step in?

Does the task get done?

Does everyone survive?

Or have you learned that “letting go” is simply another way of saying that eventually you will be responsible for cleaning up whatever happens next?

Because that was very, very true in my case.

I barely left the house alone for most of my marriage, especially after I had kids, because I knew I would be responsible for cleaning up whatever happened while I was gone.

The few times I went out alone were usually for a funeral.

And I still had to prepare everything ahead of time.

Look, maybe she does need to loosen her grip on the apples a little bit.

Maybe she needs to let him bring home the bruised apple once in a while.

But maybe what she really needs is a Saturday.

No coffee shop.

No destination.

No managing somebody else’s restlessness.

No resentment.

No eye rolls.

No scoffs.

None of those man grumbles.

Just nothing.

Maybe she doesn’t need to become less controlling.

Maybe she needs someone else to notice the bad apple.

Maybe she’s just really, really tired.

Maybe she just needs to take a nap.

How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?

Olivia Howell — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:08:38 GMT

I was three years old when it first dawned on me that someday she was going to die, and there was a good chance I’d still be here.

Without her.

In this world.

Of course, my three-year-old brain didn’t process it exactly that way. But I vividly remember holding her hand, which was soft in all the right spots and rough where her fingers sewed and gardened, and looking down at it. Her hand seemed so much older than mine.

And then, as if I’d been struck by lightning, I looked up at her and thought: Holy shit. Someday I will be here without you. How will I survive that?

I was three, so I probably didn’t think holy shit exactly. But it has become one of those core memories that feels almost too detailed to be real. I was wearing my red peacoat. We were stepping across the threshold and up the wooden steps into her kitchen.

And I just kept thinking: I’m supposed to live without you someday? How will that even be possible?

From that point on, for the next thirty years, the thought was always looming somewhere in the back of my brain, like a shadow on everything around me.

I wanted to look her in the face and ask, how am I supposed to live without you, Mommom?

But every time I tried to get up the courage, tears would fill my eyes and I’d back down.

I don’t believe I ever asked her.

I didn’t want to bring up her mortality. I didn’t want to make her sad. But based on the many, many handwritten letters and notes I have from her, most of which end with some variation of I am always, always with you, sweet girl, I know what she would have said.

It is a cruel trick of nature that grandparents often die long before your life is over.

Right now, I am sitting awake at 5:27 in the morning on what would have been her 99th birthday.

She died in April of 2017, just shy of a year after my second son was born. One of the greatest gifts of my life is that she knew my sons.

It has been almost ten years since she’s been gone—which, I need you to understand, from the deepest part of my soul, is wildly unfathomable to me.

How I am still here, without her in the world, is one of my greatest feats.

And yet.

Here we are.

The other day, I sat at my laptop and requested so many books from the local library that eventually a little message popped up telling me to please contact them if I needed more books.

Immediately, I felt like I was in trouble.

Naturally, I told this story to everyone who would listen.

“I got in trouble for requesting too many library books!” I giggled to my mother and sister.

There was something deeply rebellious about this for me, as if I had somehow discovered a previously unknown boundary and slammed directly into the walls of the public library.

Such a rebel.

When I went to pick up the first batch, I sneakily glided over to the holds section and quietly made my giant pile of books next to the scanner, moving stealthily so no one would catch me doing the extremely illicit activity of borrowing books from the library.

And then, from the corner of my eye, I saw a book by someone I know from the internet. ’ new book, I Belong to Me.

Ohhhhh.

My heart wanted to read it.

But I hadn’t requested it. It was simply sitting there on the New Books shelf.

I had already requested so many books that I had apparently hit some kind of limit. This particular book was not on my hold list.

Would I be allowed to take out another book?

I thought about it as I scanned my hold books and put them into my tote bag.

You don’t even have time to read right now, I told myself, which was true. Most of the books I’d requested were graphic novels for Wyatt and history books for Weston.

On the other hand, I told myself, Tia Levings is someone you admire greatly, and checking her book out of the library is supporting her work, even if you don’t have all the time in the world to read it right now.

Still, I left it there.

I gathered my tote bag and walked outside to my car, feeling the way-too-hot Long Island sun on my face. I put the bag in the car, and before I walked around to the driver’s side, I thought of my grandmother.

I thought about all the afternoons we spent at the library and how she encouraged us to get anything we wanted.

And I thought about her as a little girl who grew up during the Great Depression, who went to bed hungry, and who somehow became an adult woman with absolutely no qualms about asking for things to be done her way.

Actually, she didn’t even really ask.

She simply knew there was a way things should be done, and that was how it was.

When her cell phone bill came, she used to write her checks out to Singular instead of Cingular because, as she explained, the word is singular, not Cingular, and she would not stoop to their level of spelling it that way.

This was Mommom.

Years ago, I picked her up to go to the supermarket, and on the way she told me she wanted to make a quick stop at a very expensive gardening nursery because she needed to talk to them.

I didn’t think much of it. I had a sleeping baby in the car.

Sure. We’ll stop by.

We pulled into the gravelly parking lot, got the baby out of the car, and I followed her inside.

She marched right up to the counter and politely asked to speak to the manager.

A woman came out.

“I need to return a tree,” my grandmother said.

The woman looked at her.

“Excuse me?”

“I bought a tree here a few weeks ago, and it has since died. I need to return the tree.”

“Well, we don’t return trees. Do you have it with you?”

“No. It’s in the ground. Dead,” my grandmother said, calmly.

The woman explained that they couldn’t refund a tree. They couldn’t control what happened to it after it was planted. There were no returns on trees.

My grandmother looked her directly in the eye.

“I’ve been planting trees for a million years. I’ve never had a tree die this quickly on me. I would like a new tree.”

The woman asked her to hold on and disappeared into the back of the store.

I looked at my grandmother.

“Mommom, you can’t just ask for a new tree.”

She looked at me like I was new on this planet.

“Of course I can. They sold me a tree, and it died, and it wasn’t my fault. I want a new tree to plant.”

The woman came back and apologized. They would give her a new tree.

My grandmother smiled.

“I didn’t even really need the new tree. I just wanted you to know that it was dead. But that’s wonderful! I’ll have my husband come pick it up later this week.”

She had such balls and gumption.

She had such balls and gumption.

I remember standing there looking at her, thinking that this woman had just requested an exchange of a tree that was currently dead and buried in her yard, without producing the tree, a photograph of the tree, or any proof whatsoever that the tree had ever existed.

And she got exactly what she wanted.

I was embarrassed standing next to her.

She wasn’t.

She knew what she wanted, and she asked for it.

She knew there had been a time in her life when she didn’t have anything. And now that she had the money to buy herself the things she wanted, if one of those things died on her, she was going to say something about it.

She knew it wasn’t her fault.

She had been planting trees and flowers and ideas forever.

That was just the way she was.

She knew what she wanted, and she found her voice, especially after her divorce. She realized that she could simply ask for the thing she wanted.

She was never mean. She was never cruel. She just made her case.

And, usually, things ended up the way she thought they should.

So there I was, standing next to my car outside the library, thinking about the book I hadn’t taken out because apparently I believed the Huntington Public Library was going to send the book police after me for excessive reading.

And I could feel her.

Not in some dramatic movie way.

Just that familiar little nudge.

Go back inside.

I had miraculously scored a parking spot directly outside the library. I still had time on the meter.

So I re-locked my car and went back inside.

I walked over to the New Books section.

And before I knew it, I had six or seven more books in my hands.

I was still a little nervous. I wondered if they would actually let me take them out. I already had so many books checked out.

But I carried the stack over to the scanner.

One by one, I scanned them.

And then I walked out of the library with another armful of books.

I thought of my grandmother.

For thirty years, I carried around this question I was too afraid to ask her.

How am I supposed to live without you, Mommom?

I think maybe this is how.

You live long enough that one day you are standing outside a library, afraid to go back inside and ask for more of something that is literally free, and suddenly there she is.

You hear her telling you that of course you can ask.

Of course you can go back inside.

Of course you can take up a little more space.

Of course you can get the book.

Of course you can ask them to replace the goddamn tree.

Maybe this is the strange hope tucked inside the cruel trick of loving someone who dies before you do.

You spend your whole life terrified of the day they will leave you.

And then they do.

And somehow, impossibly, they don’t.

She is always with me.

Well, she told me she would be, didn’t she?

Let’s take a little field trip through my divorce settlement.

Olivia Howell — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:47:44 GMT

A quick note: The Happenstance is free, and most of it always will be. This piece is one of the more intimate ones, so it lives behind a $5/month paywall — partly because I’d rather it not appear in my children’s Google searches someday, and partly because the money goes somewhere meaningful: every dollar helps buy someone an item from their Fresh Starts divorce registry. Feel free to use code BANJOBOY for 50% off your subscription to The Happenstance.

I just wrote an entire piece about my theory that maybe the girlboss wasn’t burned out.

Maybe she was married.

And almost immediately after finishing it, I remembered that I have something even better than a theory.

I have paperwork.

So, welcome, paid subscribers, to a little field trip through my divorce settlement.

There is a paragraph in my divorce stipulation that I have thought about many, many times over the years:

What Happens When Divorce Happens to a Girlboss?

Olivia Howell — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:24:13 GMT

In recent years, there have been countless conversations surrounding the death of the girlboss, but there seems to be a missing factor in most of these girlboss chats.

Maybe the girlboss isn’t dead.

Maybe she just got divorced.

My own marriage blew up on Tax Day in 2019, which feels almost too painfully on the nose for an essay about women, money, marriage, and work.

That year, for the first time, I had earned roughly two-thirds of what my husband made.

He had a well-established career, a salary, benefits, and health insurance through his company. His job existed outside our house and was therefore treated like a real job, with real hours, real responsibilities, and an actual place he needed to be.

I was working from home, running a marketing agency I had built completely from scratch while raising two children and managing literally nearly every detail of our domestic life.

The story of my career is really the story of several careers I had no qualifications for on paper but was somehow remarkably qualified to do in real life.

I started working as a Latin teacher at a private school when I was 23 years old. I had been a Classical Studies major, but I had absolutely no background in education. The school needed a teacher, I was eager to get into a classroom, and apparently we all decided this was enough qualification to hand me a room full of middle schoolers.

I loved teaching.

I was single when I started. I met my future husband about a year later.

There is another story about my first year of teaching and the fellow teacher I dated, but we will save that particular disaster for another day (and most certainly a paid post).

From the beginning of my relationship with my husband, our domestic life was not on equal footing. At the time, the explanation seemed perfectly reasonable: he had a much longer commute than I did.

So I cooked the meals, cleaned the house, did the laundry, and made sure the bills were paid. Before we owned a washing machine, I would gather all our clothes, drive them to my grandmother’s house, wash them there, and fold everything with her.

I also had summers off, which meant it was simply understood that I would take care of everything during the summer. It was technically my time to recover before another school year, but nobody ever said that part out loud.

It wasn’t like anyone sat me down and announced that his hours belonged to him while mine were available for redistribution. It simply became the domestic arrangement.

At that point, our finances were fairly equal. He was changing job locations and had started at a lower level than he had previously held. I was earning a private-school teaching salary, which was never more than around $40,000 a year, but we were both working and both contributing.

And yet, I had already become the person responsible for making our shared life function.

Then we had a baby.

When my oldest son was born, my sister, mother, and stepfather stepped in to care for him while I was teaching. I was incredibly lucky to have that support, but I was still the person managing all of it.

I packed the bags and made sure he had everything he needed at both houses. I checked in throughout the day. I scheduled the appointments and took him to the doctor. I knew what he had eaten, how long he had slept, what size clothes he needed, whether we were running low on diapers, and which mysterious plastic object needed to be washed immediately because apparently the baby could not survive without it.

Usually, it was an old television remote.

I was the primary parent in every way that counted.

I went back to teaching that November. By February, I knew there was no way I could keep living that way.

I was getting up with the baby all night, getting myself ready for school, teaching all day, coming home, making dinner, caring for the baby, cleaning up, grading papers, planning lessons, and preparing to do it all again the following morning.

My spouse also had a full time job.

I remember buying Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift because I was desperately trying to understand what was happening to me.

I did not have time to read it.

I could not understand why I was also employed but still responsible for everything. Why was I the one waking up all night and then teaching all day? Why did his job excuse him from the domestic work of our family while my job was treated like something I had chosen to pile on top of my real responsibilities?

At the time, I did not have the language for domestic inequity, invisible labor, the mental load, or the second shift.

I just knew I was drowning.

And because I had been socialized like so many women to interpret a structural problem as a personal failure, I assumed the problem was my job.

I did not think, my husband needs to become an equal parent.

I thought, I need to leave teaching.

This is what women are taught to do when the system around us is not working: rearrange ourselves.

We leave jobs. We reduce our hours. We become more flexible. We wake up earlier. We make better calendars. We download apps. We buy planners with inspirational quotes on the cover. Before I left my teaching job I took advantage of the photocopy machine and quite literally made myself a giant binder of home-economical checklists and charts. I never used it once.

So I told my husband I wanted to leave teaching and start a marketing company.

I have no idea where I found the gumption. I had never taken a marketing class. I did not have a business plan, an office, or even a particularly clear understanding of what a marketing agency was supposed to look like.

I started talking to local business owners. I literally knocked on doors with my son on my hip. I offered to manage people’s social media for free so they could see what kind of work I could do.

I found a few clients and started freelance writing. I made $25 for an article and felt as though I had won the lottery.

(Thank you, Rookie Moms.)

That was the beginning of my marketing career.

Looking back, it is not particularly surprising that my husband was a big fan of this plan!

At the time, I experienced his support as evidence that he believed in me. Maybe part of him did. I’d like to believe this theory.

But my working from home also meant that very little had to change for him. I could build a business and remain available. I could have clients and still care for the baby. I could earn money and still make dinner. I could be home for the frequent deliveries connected to his music.

I could become ambitious without requiring him to become more domestic.

It was a remarkably convenient form of female empowerment.

I was not simply a work-from-home parent. I was a full-time mother and a full-time agency owner, except both roles were happening simultaneously and neither came with protected hours.

I did not have an office. I did not even have a desk.

I had a kitchen table, a laptop, and a baby whose needs determined the structure of every day.

I took him to classes, cared for him all day, and posted social media content for clients whenever I could find a few minutes. I answered emails during naps. I built strategies between snacks, diapers, errands, and whatever else needed to happen.

Then I made dinner and put the baby to bed.

By that point, I was exhausted, but my spouse wanted us to spend time together. If I tried to work, he felt lonely. So I would sit with him and watch television until he fell asleep on the couch.

Then I would begin my actual workday.

At ten or eleven o’clock at night, I would reopen my laptop and work until one in the morning. Sometimes later. Then I would go to bed and continue being the person who woke up with the baby all night.

This was described as flexibility.

As I type this now, I am laughing at how absurd that sounds.

I was lucky because I could work from home. I was grateful because I could be with my child. I was lucky because I had started my own business. I was grateful because my husband supported my ambition.

And I was lucky and grateful, in many ways.

But flexibility is a strange word for a life in which one person is expected to bend around everybody else.

Or perhaps that is exactly what it means.

The girlboss era told women we could build companies during naptime. It did not ask why the fathers of those children were not expected to rearrange their lives too.

It told us to wake up earlier, become more efficient, outsource what we could, and believe in ourselves. It told us that if we wanted success badly enough, we would find the hours.

So I found them. (Aren’t I so good at finding things?!)

They were between eleven o’clock at night and one in the morning, after the baby went to sleep and after my husband fell asleep on the couch.

They were borrowed from my sleep, my body, and my well-being.

I did not lack ambition.

I lacked a wife.

Then we bought a house.

Most of the down payment came from my savings, which is a whole other story.

I was already burning the candle at both ends, but home-ownership apparently looked at my two burning ends and thought, You know what this woman needs? More candles.

I handled the painting, coordinated the new floors, managed the move, and packed and unpacked our lives. My husband was a good packer, to be fair, but nearly every other form of labor associated with making the house livable landed with me.

None of the existing work disappeared.

I was still raising our son and growing my client list. I was still doing most of my paid work at night because the daytime belonged to everybody else. Our baby was still not sleeping, which meant I was also not sleeping.

Meanwhile, my business grew.

For the first several years, I was probably making around $30,000 annually. It took me roughly three years to surpass the teaching salary I had left behind.

My husband paid the mortgage from his paycheck, and our health insurance came through his employer. That obviously mattered enormously.

But I paid for nearly everything else: food, the children’s needs, electricity, heat, preschool, babysitters, and many of the other household bills and endless small expenses that come with raising children.

His salary paid for the roof over our heads.

My income paid for much of the life happening underneath it.

And still, even as I began making good money, my work was never respected in the same way.

His career was established.

Mine was something I did from home.

His work was the structure around which our family operated. Mine was the substance squeezed into whatever time remained.

That distinction matters because respect for someone’s career is not expressed only through compliments.

It is expressed through protection.

Does that person receive uninterrupted time? Are their deadlines treated as real? Can they say, “I need to work,” without another adult becoming lonely, offended, or inconvenienced? Does anyone else reorganize their schedule because this person’s work matters?

My income was welcome.

The conditions required for me to keep earning it were not.

When we had our second son, I worked from labor and delivery because I was terrified of losing clients.

I wish I could tell you that sentence was written for dramatic effect, but I was literally communicating with clients from the hospital because I had built a business with no safety net.

There was no maternity leave, paid time off, or colleague who could reassure everyone that their social media posts would continue even though I was currently producing an entire human being.

I was afraid that if I stopped responding, the business I had built in stolen hours would disappear.

By then, I was also doing more freelance writing, and my relationship to my work had started to change.

At first, the agency had been a solution. It allowed me to stay home with my child while earning money. It was the life raft I built when teaching and motherhood became impossible under the arrangement we had.

But eventually, it stopped being only a practical solution.

I liked it. A lot.

And I was really good at it.

I liked building something from nothing. I liked thinking strategically. I liked writing and discovering that I had instincts people trusted.

I started working with influencers, authors, and global brands. I was invited into larger projects. People knew my name, followed me, and asked what I thought.

I began to understand that this might not be a flexible little business I operated from my kitchen table.

It could be a real career.

It could become a larger life.

The problem was that I had already used every available margin.

I had used naptime and the hours after everyone went to bed. I had borrowed against my sleep. There was no hidden locket of time left for me to discover. I had searched the entire house.

Eventually, I paid babysitters so I could have a few uninterrupted hours to work.

I paid for the support that should have already existed inside my marriage.

By then, I had a full client roster and was doing consequential work for recognizable people and companies.

Still, I handled bedtime every night. I did every bath, fed everybody, did the laundry, and managed the appointments, clothing, food, school information, and supplies required to keep a family alive.

Even when I broke my foot, I arranged for somebody else to do the laundry.

That is one of the cruelest parts of domestic inequity: competence becomes a trap.

The woman who remembers everything is rewarded with more things to remember. The woman who can earn money from the kitchen table is rewarded with the expectation that she will remain at the kitchen table.

Her ability to survive impossible conditions is used as evidence that the conditions are perfectly reasonable.

My success did not earn me more support.

It simply proved that I could carry more.

This is the part the girlboss era never knew how to explain.

It told women to think bigger without asking who would take over the work required to make that bigger life possible.

It told us to scale.

Nobody told our husbands to pick up the laundry basket.

The girlboss was sold as a new kind of woman, but she was expected to maintain the life of the old kind of wife.

She could build a company, but she still needed to remember that the children were outgrowing their shoes. She could manage a team, but she still needed to ask her husband for “help.” She could earn money, but her work remained the flexible work.

She could become powerful as long as her power did not require anyone around her to change.

Girlboss culture framed the barriers facing women as internal. We needed more confidence. We needed to negotiate. We needed to stop apologizing, wake up at five in the morning, and drink a green juice before the children got up.

We needed to lean in.

But you cannot lean in when you are already holding up the entire house.

You cannot productivity-hack your way out of an unequal marriage. You cannot purchase the correct planner to make another adult respect your time. You cannot manifest a husband into doing bedtime.

The failure of the girlboss era was not that it encouraged women to become ambitious.

Women were already ambitious!

The failure was that it treated ambition as a personality trait instead of a logistical arrangement.

Ambition requires time, money, childcare, uninterrupted thought, and sleep. It requires someone else to notice that the dishwasher is full.

And then, yada yada yada, we separated.

Then, a few months later, the pandemic arrived.

I spent quarantine at home with both of my children. I homeschooled a second grader, cared for a toddler, fed everyone approximately nine hundred times a day, worried about the world, worried about money, and worked constantly.

During that period, I also hired my sister Jenny to work with me at the marketing agency.

I want to be honest about that because it mattered.

Jenny gave me professional support. I was no longer trying to execute every part of every project completely by myself. She is incredibly talented, and bringing her into the agency allowed us to take on larger projects and expand the business.

I also had more control over my own schedule. I was exhausted and working strange hours around two children, but the hours belonged to me in a way they had not before.

By every reasonable calculation, my professional life still should have collapsed.

Instead, my business exploded.

For the first time, I came close to making six figures.

Jenny’s support was of course a large part of that growth.

But the other part is more difficult to explain unless you have lived inside a marriage like mine.

I had already been doing the parenting alone.

I was used to managing the illnesses, appointments, baths, bedtimes, meals, clothing, school logistics, and midnight wake-ups. There had never been a reliable handoff when something went wrong with the children. There had never been another parent consistently stepping in so I could work, rest, or fall apart.

I was already taking care of three human beings.

After we separated, I was taking care of two.

That did not make single parenting easy.

But I had not lost the kind of domestic support people assume disappears when a marriage ends.

I had never really had it.

What disappeared was the labor of taking care of another adult on top of taking care of the children.

There was one fewer person to cook for, clean up after, accommodate, reassure, and organize my life around. There was no longer another adult guilting me for working, feeling lonely because my attention was elsewhere, or requiring me to defend the time I needed to earn money.

An entire space opened in my life.

Not because I suddenly had more help at home.

Because I had one fewer person to care for.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from doing everything alone while another capable adult stands nearby, benefits from the work, and behaves as though everything is simply being handled.

It is different from actually being alone.

When I became a single parent, the workload remained enormous, but the confusion disappeared.

I no longer had to wonder why nobody was stepping in.

There was nobody else there.

I no longer spent my energy negotiating for support, anticipating pushback, tracking another adult’s moods, or proving that my work deserved time.

And professionally, I had Jenny. I had somebody brilliant working beside me, helping me build instead of creating another set of needs for me to manage.

For perhaps the first time, support actually meant support.

I was still tired. I may have been more tired.

But my energy was finally moving in a direction.

It was going toward my children, my work, and the life I was trying to build.

Maybe the girlboss was not burned out because she was too ambitious.

Maybe she was burned out because she was a boss at work and an assistant at home.

Maybe she was leading teams all day and then returning to a house where she was still expected to locate a grown man’s black socks.

Maybe she was not exhausted by success.

Maybe she was exhausted by the unpaid labor required to make everybody else’s success possible.

We talk constantly about women leaving the workforce because they could not balance work and family.

We talk less about the marriages that made balance impossible.

We talk about women scaling back their ambitions after having children, as though motherhood naturally reaches inside a woman’s body and removes her professional desires.

We do not talk nearly enough about what happens when every expansion of a woman’s career creates a domestic emergency because the man beside her refuses to expand his role at home.

And we talk about divorce almost exclusively as professional and financial devastation for women.

Sometimes it is. Often, perhaps.

Divorce can flatten a woman economically. It can destabilize housing, dismantle childcare arrangements, interrupt a career, and leave her rebuilding every structure of her life.

But there is another story too.

There are women whose careers expand after divorce. Women who subtract a spouse and somehow recover hours. Women who become more productive despite technically having less help. Women whose ideas become larger because they no longer need to make them small enough to protect somebody else’s ego.

Women who finally stop spending their best energy managing another adult.

A lot of men like the idea of an ambitious woman. They like the income and the impressive wife. They like telling people that their wife runs a company, writes books, works with influential people, or has a public platform.

They like what her ambition produces.

They do not always like what her ambition requires.

Supporting an ambitious woman is not the same as saying, “I believe in you.”

It means doing bedtime. It means washing your own clothes. It means treating her deadline as seriously as your own commitments. It means understanding that her time does not automatically belong to you.

It means allowing the architecture of the family to shift around her dreams too.

That is where support stops being a compliment and starts becoming a redistribution of power.

And a lot of men do not like that.

We need to stop treating women’s exhaustion as evidence that female ambition went too far.

Maybe the problem was never that women tried to have it all.

Maybe the problem was that we were expected to do it all while the men beside us remained largely unchanged.

Ambition changes a woman. Not because success makes her selfish.

Because building something teaches her to recognize systems.

It teaches her to look at how the resources are being allocated, identify an unsustainable structure, and notice when one person is performing nearly all the labor while another receives most of the benefit.

It teaches her to stop approving bad arrangements.

And when a woman finally becomes the boss of her own life, she may look at the marriage in front of her and realize she would never approve of it.

Highly recommend checking out: The Ambition Penalty by - a very thorough deep dive into all of this and more!

My Evil Genius Little Sister

Olivia Howell — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:33:30 GMT

Today is my sister and co-founder’s birthday (so go wish her a Happy Birthday!). When it came to birthday gifts, she asked for something very specific: a piece about her in The Happenstance. I have been working on this for about a month, and it’s become one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written. I also recorded a version in my own voice, so have fun listening! (ETA: actually, her birthday is 7/31, but I am sending this out a day early!)

My sister was nine years old the first time I understood that she might be an evil genius.

We were standing in the kitchen of the first house my father rented after my parents separated. It was the middle of a hot Long Island summer, but the kitchen was inexplicably cold. The floor was cold beneath our bare feet. The walls were bare. There was not enough furniture anywhere, as though someone had placed a few necessary objects inside an ancient house but had forgotten to make it a home.

Everything about the house felt unfamiliar to us. The rooms smelled different. The light came through the windows at the wrong angles. Our things were not there, except for whatever we carried back and forth in overnight bags. This was the beginning of the era in which we were always arriving somewhere without ever feeling that we had arrived home.

My sister stood in the middle of the kitchen in bike shorts and an oversized T-shirt, her wavy hair framing her face, her hazel eyes fixed seriously on the wall in front of her.

Then she threw her entire body against it.

She stepped back, crossed her arms over her chest, and looked at the rest of us.

“Your turn,” she said. “You have to copy me.”

There was music playing on the radio in the background.

She was dancing.

Let me explain.

That summer, my brother, my sister, and I were eleven, nine, and five years old. My parents were in the middle of their divorce, and we were doing some version of splitting the week between their houses. For half of it, we lived in our familiar home with our mother. For the other half, we stayed with our father in a centuries-old house in the middle of the village where we had grown up.

My father had to work during the day, so he hired a friend of his then-girlfriend to watch us.

Unfortunately for her, she did not know exactly what she was signing up for.

Unfortunately for us, she did not seem to like children very much.

Or perhaps she simply did not like us.

She thought we were three chubby children who only wanted to sit around, eat, and go to restaurants. I found out later that this was how she described us to other people, which is a particularly strange thing to learn about an adult who had been paid to care for you.

It was the early nineties, before children had phones or tablets to disappear into, so our options were limited. We could watch whatever happened to be on television, wander around the unfamiliar house, or sit in the kitchen beneath the watchful eye of an adult who had already decided we were the wrong kind of children.

One afternoon, she decided we should dance.

I cannot remember exactly how the game began. I believe each person was supposed to invent a dance move, and then everyone else had to repeat it. Perhaps it was meant to be fun. Perhaps it was meant to make us exercise without calling it exercise. Perhaps she imagined that music would transform three unhappy children into the kind of cheerful, energetic children she believed we should have been.

Instead, my sister studied the rules and immediately found the weakness in them.

When it was her turn, she walked directly toward the wall and threw herself against it.

Not playfully. Not gently. She committed to the movement with the seriousness of a trained gymnast performing the final sequence of a floor set.

She hit the wall, stepped away, and jutted one hip to the side.

“Your turn now,” she said, straightfaced. “You have to copy me.”

And because the woman had made the rules, she had to throw herself against the wall.

We watched her do it.

Then Jenny did it again.

Soon we were all hurling ourselves into the kitchen wall, over and over, because my sister had understood something the rest of us had not: if an adult creates a ridiculous system and demands that you participate in it, the only reasonable response is to follow the rules so precisely that the entire system collapses beneath the weight of its own stupidity.

Jenny did not refuse to dance.

She invented a dance no one wanted to perform.

This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about my sister.

She has always been able to identify the invisible structure of a situation—the rules, the weaknesses, the thing everyone else is pretending not to notice—and then turn it gently on its head.

Sometimes not so gently.

She does not need to yell. She does not need to announce that she has won. She simply stands there with her arms folded and her face perfectly straight, waiting for the rest of us to realize that she understood the game long before we did.

She was nine years old in that cold kitchen, surrounded by adults making decisions about her home, her family, her body, and where she would sleep each night.

But for those few minutes, Jenny made the rules.

And everyone had to copy her.

I have countless examples of my sister proving herself to be exactly the person she was in that kitchen: cunning, brilliant, preternaturally calm, and just dangerous enough to make you regret underestimating her.

A few come to mind.

Last year, our father decided to marry someone my siblings and I are not particularly fond of, for reasons that are complicated and not entirely mine to tell.

The marriage itself was not the most painful part. It was everything we learned around it: the secrecy, the omissions, the conversations that had apparently been happening while we were being told something else. There was the unsettling realization that the version of our family being presented to the world was much smoother and more beautiful than the one we had actually been living inside.

The news shook us like an earthquake. Not because our father was getting married, but because the architecture of our family seemed to shift beneath our feet again.

Suddenly, old conversations sounded different. Timelines no longer aligned. Small details we had dismissed began arranging themselves into a story we had not known we were part of.

My sister and I processed it over Zoom from opposite sides of the world. We talked for hours. We cried. We went over the sequence of events again and again, trying to understand what had been real, what had been withheld, and how long everyone else had known the shape of the story before we did.

It felt strangely like mourning someone who was still alive. Not the actual person, perhaps, but the person you had believed them to be—or the relationship you thought you had with them.

I knew almost immediately that I could not attend the wedding. It was going to be an extraordinarily elegant, very tony event, full of beautiful flowers, expensive clothes, polished photographs, and people raising glasses to a version of the story that did not feel true to me.

I could not imagine standing there pretending that my body did not know what it knew. I could not smile for photographs while feeling that something essential had been concealed from us. I could not participate in a celebration whose beauty seemed to depend, at least in part, upon everyone agreeing not to look too closely beneath it.

Jenny made the opposite decision.

She lives in Scotland, but she booked a plane ticket almost immediately.

“I am not going to let them get away with thinking that we don’t matter,” she told me. “I am going to show up. I am going to look amazing. And I am going to remind them that we are still part of this family. We are his children.”

There was nothing impulsive about it. Jenny understood exactly what she was walking into. She knew she would be entering a room arranged around a gleaming, carefully composed version of events. She knew her presence might complicate the picture simply because she remembered everything that had been cropped out.

But she went.

She took the flight. She put on the dress. She entered the room.

She stood there as our father’s daughter, whether or not that disturbed the symmetry of the photograph.

I was so proud of her that day. Not because attending was morally superior to staying home. It wasn’t. We each did what we had to do to protect ourselves.

I was proud because she recognized that I could not walk into that room and, without ever making me feel weak for it, said in her own way, I’ll take this one for the team.

She became the protector of her siblings. She carried our presence into the room with her.

I imagine she stood there exactly as she had stood in that kitchen when she was nine years old: shoulders back, face composed, hazel eyes taking in everything.

You want me here? Fine.

But I will be here on my terms.

A few years earlier, Jenny had done something similar in a very different room.

A struggling divorce platform approached us about the possibility of Fresh Starts acquiring its business. We had never been part of a conversation like that before. We were a young startup without piles of money sitting around, but we were curious. We were excited that someone saw us as a company capable of buying another company, even if we did not yet know what that process was supposed to look like.

We joined the meeting eager to learn.

The owners told us about the business, its audience, its products, and what they had built. Jenny listened intently. She nodded. She asked precise questions.

How many products had they sold?

What was generating revenue?

What exactly would we be acquiring?

What were the numbers behind the story they were telling us?

I have a tendency to listen to people and imagine what they might become.

Jenny listens to people and notices what they are avoiding.

At the end of the call, she asked them to send us a formal proposal and a complete breakdown of the numbers.

When it arrived, they wanted us to pay approximately thirty thousand dollars for the business.

There was only one problem: the information in the proposal did not appear to support what we had been told on the call. The numbers were not simply underwhelming. They seemed to tell an entirely different story.

I was stunned.

Jenny was not.

She had been listening.

She sent an email that I can only describe as the written equivalent of an nine-year-old girl standing in bike shorts with her hands on her hips, staring down an adult who had just announced a rule she would soon regret.

The email was not rude. Jenny is rarely rude when precision will do more damage.

She went through the discrepancies one by one, explaining what we had asked, what we had been told, and what the documentation now appeared to show. Then she ended with this:

“This feels significantly different than what we were approached with and we aren’t able to locate the value in the offering. We will be passing on this opportunity. We hope you find a home for your users.
Please let us know if you’d like further notes on our decision.”

I have read many angry emails in my life. I have written a few myself. But there is something almost operatic about telling someone that you cannot locate the value in what they are attempting to sell you, wishing their users well, and then offering to provide additional notes about why you rejected them.

There was no frantic anger. No unnecessary performance. No attempt to prove that we belonged in the room.

She simply showed them that she had been paying attention the entire time.

This is one of Jenny’s particular gifts. She allows people to speak long enough to reveal the rules of the game they are playing. She watches. She listens. She lets them assume that her quietness is compliance.

Then she finds the wall.

And makes everyone else dance.

She absolutely hates when I tell people this, but I am going to tell you here anyway, so please do not tell her I said it:

Jenny is the reason almost everything in my life is possible.

People know me because my name is often the one on the social media posts. They hear my voice on the podcasts. They read my writing. They see me talking about Fresh Starts and may assume that I am the person behind it all.

Ideas are the easy part.

Jenny is the reason they become real.

Every impossible idea I have eventually lands in front of her like another wall in another unfamiliar room. She studies it. She turns it around. She finds the weak point everyone else missed. Then she builds a door where the rest of us were convinced there could not be one.

There is nothing I could have built on my own here.

She is the wizard behind nearly everything at Fresh Starts. She understands the systems, the structure, the technology, the language, the people, and the thousand (million?) invisible details that hold a company together. She comes up with brilliant ideas and then possesses the rarer gift of knowing how to bring them into the world.

She has co-parented this company with me from across an ocean.

In many ways, she has co-parented my life.

She has co-parented my dreams, my decisions, and, from thousands of miles away, even my children. She worries about my boys, celebrates them, remembers what they need, and helps me think through the things I cannot see clearly because I am standing too close to them.

She has spent most of her life doing that for me.

The funny thing about Jenny is that, although she is two years younger than I am, I have often felt like I am the younger sister to her older sister. Somewhere along the way, our birth order quietly rearranged itself.

She sees the thing I have forgotten.

She anticipates the problem I have not noticed.

She points out the hole in the plan, but almost always arrives carrying three possible solutions.

And then, as though all of that were not enough, she is also a beautiful poet and artist.

This might seem like a separate part of her, but I do not think it is.

The same sensitivity that allows her to notice the flaw in a business proposal also allows her to notice the light falling across a room. The same mind that sees the hidden structure beneath a company understands the hidden structure beneath a poem. She sees systems, but she also sees beauty.

People have underestimated Jenny for most of her life because she is sensitive.

They have mistaken tenderness for weakness. They have seen tears and assumed fragility. They have watched her absorb the emotional temperature of a room and believed that meant the room had power over her.

They could not have been more wrong.

Her sensitivity is the source of her intelligence.

It is how she gathers information.

She notices when someone feels excluded before anyone else does. She hears the sentence everyone else skips over. She catches the small shift in tone, the missing number, the timeline that does not quite align. She feels the room change before most people have realized anything has happened.

Because she feels so much, she sees so much.

And because she sees the invisible architecture underneath a problem, she knows which wall to push on.

Looking back, that is exactly what she was doing in my father’s kitchen.

Everyone else remembers the little girl who made us throw ourselves against the wall.

I remember the little girl who looked at a ridiculous set of rules, found the flaw inside them, and created another way.

Years later, Jenny fell in love with a man who lived in Scotland.

Most people saw an ocean.

Jenny saw a life.

Moving across the world required the same quality she has carried with her since childhood. She had to look at all the reasons it might not work—the distance, the paperwork, the logistics, the separation from everything familiar—and find her way through them.

But this time, she was not solving the problem for someone else.

She was choosing herself.

She packed her life into suitcases. She crossed the Atlantic. She settled down with someone she loved in a country far from the world she had known.

People ask me all the time if I miss my sister.

The truth is, I do not. Not in the way they mean.

We talk all day, every day. We work together. We text constantly. We Zoom across the ocean more often than some people see their neighbors. I see her when I need to see her, and she remains woven through every part of my life.

What I miss is convenience.

What I have instead is joy.

After watching Jenny spend so much of her life worrying about me, protecting me, fixing things for me, and walking into rooms because someone she loved needed her there, it felt profoundly important to watch her finally put herself first.

Nothing makes me happier than knowing that the little girl who once stood barefoot in a cold kitchen, figuring out how to survive inside someone else’s rules, now wakes up every morning in a home she chose, beside a person she chose, in a country she chose, with her feet on the warm wooden floor.

A room where she does not have to throw herself against the walls anymore.

Although, knowing my evil genius little sister, if there were a wall in her way, she would already be studying it.

Looking for the weakness.

Figuring out how to move it.

Happy Birthday, sweet sister Jenny. You are loved beyond belief. Now, let’s go take over the world.

Maybe Being the Weird Mom Is the Point

Olivia Howell — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:45:07 GMT

Something I’ve been struggling with lately is the very strange intersection of raising two tween boys and being a writer who talks publicly about divorce, marriage, relationships, and, increasingly, sex.

Specifically, the sex part.

Because listen, I am very aware that there is something objectively funny about publishing an essay about sex and then, like, twelve hours later, standing at a school event making small talk with someone’s dad.

“How are you?”

“I’m good! You?”

And meanwhile, somewhere in the back of my brain, I’m thinking: you may or may not have read 2,000 words about my sex life last night.

Cool cool cool.

I’ve been putting pieces of my life on the internet for a million years. This is not new for me. I have always been open. I write to understand things. I talk about the things we’re not supposed to talk about. I have built an entire career, in many ways, around saying the quiet part out loud.

And yes, as I’ve started writing more intimately about sex, marriage, coercion, and the things that happened inside my own relationship, I’ve made the decision to put some of those pieces behind a paywall. There are parts of my life that I don’t necessarily want floating around Google for my children—or my parents—to accidentally stumble upon. (Don’t even bring up the piece about my period in NY Magazine to my stepdad unless you want to hear an Italian father make strange, very loud noises, for example…)

But I am still me.

I am still going to talk about this stuff.

What has changed is that I’ve never before been at this specific life intersection: being this open publicly while also raising two boys who are old enough to understand that their mother has a public life, but still young enough that I am deeply embedded in theirs.

And I mean embedded.

I built my life that way on purpose.

(photo by my favorite human Alexandria Mooney Photography)

Their father lives out of state, and I am the parent who is here. I do the pickups and drop-offs. I go to all of the school events. I know all of the teachers. I know the parents. I know who has practice and who needs to be where and what form was supposed to be signed three days ago.

I spend pretty much all of my time with my kids.

They are my priority, and I have structured my work and my life around being able to show up for them.

Which means I also cannot really compartmentalize my life into neat little boxes.

There isn’t Writer Olivia over here and Mom Olivia over there.

Writer Olivia publishes something deeply personal about marriage on Thursday, and Mom Olivia is standing next to you at school pickup on Friday.

For a while, I have been telling myself a story about that.

The story was that I was the outlier.

The other parents are therapists and lawyers and fitness trainers and teachers and doctors and people with jobs that, from the outside at least, seem to remain politely at work (and do not usually include Googling things like “other words for masturbation.”)

And then there’s me.

Hi!

I’m putting my entire life on the internet!

I’m talking about divorce in the press. I’m writing about marriage. I’m talking about sex. I’m talking about the parts of relationships we have historically agreed to pretend do not exist.

And then I’m showing up at the same school event as everyone else.

Sometimes that has made me feel weird.

Not ashamed. I’m not ashamed of what I write. I wouldn’t publish it if I were.

But exposed, maybe.

There is a particular kind of awkwardness in making small talk with someone when you know they potentially know something extraordinarily intimate about you.

You’re standing there talking about the school play while wondering if this person read about what happened in your bedroom ten years ago.

I have spent a lot of time thinking that this was the price I paid for being open.

Until the other morning.

And then my brain completely flipped.

I got a phone call from someone in our community.

And this was not the first time.

Over the years, I have had many people reach out to me privately when something in their life is falling apart, or changing, or becoming something they finally need to say out loud.

When my phone rings or I get a certain kind of text on a weekend morning, I usually know.

And I’m always here.

So we talked.

I listened.

I told this person I was really proud of them for calling me. We made plans to meet up and talk more soon.

And after we hung up, something dawned on me that I cannot believe I had never considered before.

They called me because I’m the weird mom.

They called me because I talk about this stuff.

They called me because I have made it extremely clear that there is no shame here.

It wasn’t because I’m an “expert.”

(Technically, I am a certified divorce coach and a certified life coach. I did that training years ago because I wanted to understand how to hold space for people going through enormous life transitions. I don’t coach in that capacity.)

But anybody can have credentials.

Credentials do not necessarily make someone feel safe enough to call you on a weekend morning and say, “something is happening in my life and I need to tell somebody.”

Safety is different.

And suddenly I realized that all this time, I had been looking at my openness from completely the wrong direction.

I thought people in my community knew too much about me.

Maybe knowing me is precisely why they call.

Maybe every time I have shown up publicly and said, Divorce happens. Bad marriages happen. Sex can be complicated. Marriage can be lonely. People cheat. People leave. People stay too long. People change their minds. People have things happen inside their homes that nobody else knows about. You can talk about it. You do not have to be ashamed—

someone else has been listening.

Maybe someone standing next to me at a school event isn’t thinking, Oh my God, I can’t believe she wrote that.

Maybe they’re thinking, If I ever needed to tell someone, I could tell her.

That realization completely knocked me over.

Because I had been so worried about what it meant for my children to have a mother who talks openly about these things.

And suddenly I wondered whether I had been asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question isn’t whether my children will someday be embarrassed that their mother talked about sex on the internet.

I mean, let’s be honest, they probably will be.

They’re my children. I can embarrass them by tapping my foot to a song while waiting in line at the bank (“NORMAL LEGS, MOTHER,” my older son says to me under his breath.)

Maybe the bigger question is what they learn from watching their mother refuse to participate in shame.

What do they learn about divorce because I talk about divorce?

What do they learn about consent because I talk about consent?

What do they learn about marriage because I refuse to pretend that marriage is always beautiful just because two people stayed in it?

What do they learn about sex because their mother believes it should be something we can talk about honestly?

And what do they learn about being a person in a community when they see that people can bring the hard stuff to our door?

Because that is also what I am modeling.

Not just openness.

Availability.

You can call me. You can tell me. You do not have to clean the story up first.

You do not have to decide whether what happened to you was “bad enough.”

You do not have to know what you are going to do next.

You don’t have to whisper.

I think I had somehow convinced myself that being this person publicly made me slightly less legitimate in these very normal spaces of parenthood.

That morning, I realized it might be one of the most important things I bring to these spaces.

Every community needs the lawyer and the therapist and the teacher and the fitness trainer.

And maybe every community also needs the mom who has already said the embarrassing thing.

The mom who has talked about divorce.

The mom who has talked about sex.

The mom who has talked about the marriage ending and the life after it and the parts nobody wants to admit happen behind closed doors.

The mom you don’t have to explain the shame to because she already threw hers out years ago (put this on my gravestone, please).

I thought putting my life on the internet meant everyone knew my business.

I never considered that what I was actually doing was leaving the porch light on.

It Was Never About the Sex

Olivia Howell — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:31:05 GMT

A quick note: The Happenstance is free, and most of it always will be. This piece is one of the more intimate ones, so it lives behind a $5/month paywall — partly because I’d rather it not appear in my children’s Google searches someday, and partly because the money goes somewhere meaningful: every dollar helps buy someone an item from their Fresh Starts divorce registry. Feel free to use code BANJOBOY for 50% off your subscription to The Happenstance.

I was today years old when I realized what had actually been happening to me inside my marriage.

I know.

That sounds completely ridiculous coming from someone who has somehow made an entire career out of talking about marriage, relationships, divorce, abuse, and all the messy ways we humans manage to complicate each other’s lives.

I literally wrote about coercive sex this week.

As in, just a few days ago.

And then on a random Friday morning (today), while pulling my red Rolling Stones T-shirt over my damp hair, admiring my indoor plants on the shelf, I just...stopped, blinked and and froze in place.

Holy shit.

How did it take me more than seven years to figure this out?

The Hidden Cost of Having a Husband

Olivia Howell — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:27:32 GMT

A couple of days ago, posted a video about getting things done around her house now that she doesn’t have a husband there.

She saw something that needed to be done, and then she did it.

That was it.

There was no committee meeting. No six-month waiting period. No extended conversation about the best possible method. No man standing in the middle of the kitchen saying he was going to take care of it while also somehow preventing anyone else from taking care of it.

She just did the things herself.

And I thought: Yes. This. I have been saying this for years.

Jenny and I used to joke that I was going to write an article called “The Cost of Not Having a Husband,” because sometimes the best money you will ever spend is the money you are finally allowed to spend once your husband is no longer there telling you he will get to it eventually.

But it isn’t only about the money.

It is also about time.

It is about how much faster your own labor becomes when you are the only person making decisions about it.

When you live alone, or when you are the only adult managing your home, you notice that things simply get done. You wipe down the counters because they are dirty. You replace the shower curtain because it is moldy. You move the lamp because the room is too dark. You throw away the broken toothbrush holder and buy another one.

You do not spend three weeks discussing a toothbrush holder.

You do not have to present several possible toothbrush holders for review.

You do not have to explain why the current toothbrush holder has become an urgent quality-of-life issue. You do not have to hear that the old one is technically fine, even though it is cracked, impossible to clean, and has been irritating you every morning for the past year.

You buy the toothbrush holder. You put the toothbrushes in it. The end.

This sounds so small, and that is exactly the point.

A tremendous amount of a woman’s life can be consumed by tiny negotiations that theoretically do not require two people in the first place.

By the time the decision is finally made, the woman could have completed the task herself three times.

People talk constantly about the financial cost of divorce. They talk about maintaining two households and dividing assets and paying lawyers and losing the economies of scale that supposedly come with marriage.

But we rarely talk about the economy of obstruction.

We rarely calculate what it costs to have another adult in the house who does not want to do something, will not hire someone else to do it, and still believes they should retain veto power over how and when it gets done.

And we rarely calculate the hours women lose explaining, reminding, debating, researching, following up, backing off, trying again, and finally doing the thing themselves.

That is labor, too.

Your unpaid labor is worth more when you are allowed to complete it efficiently.

The work itself may not disappear after a husband leaves. You may still be the one cleaning the kitchen, reorganizing the closet, buying the shower curtain liner, and figuring out why the bathroom sink is draining slowly.

But the negotiation layer disappears.

You are no longer managing the task and managing another adult’s relationship to the task.

You are no longer washing the counter while also defending the decision to buy a different cleaning spray.

You are no longer fixing the curtain rod while listening to someone explain that they had been planning to fix it.

You are just doing the work.

And there is an enormous difference between labor and labor performed under observation, commentary, resistance, or delay.

It is not always that the spouse is incapable.

It is that they are perfectly capable, theoretically. They could paint the window trim. They could finish the floor. They could call the handyman. They could wash the laundry.

They just don’t.

But because they could, you are expected to wait.

This was the story of my house.

There were so many small projects that needed to be completed. Not catastrophic projects. Not a collapsing roof or a flooded bathroom. Just the ordinary maintenance of a family home—the things that make a house feel cared for instead of perpetually halfway abandoned.

We had windows replaced, but the areas around them needed to be repainted.

The kitchen floor needed new vinyl flooring. My stepdad helped put down part of it, but the job was never finished. Half the floor remained undone until I eventually moved out.

We needed pegboard in the garage so the boys’ helmets and outdoor things could be hung up instead of thrown into piles.

The basement really, really needed to be cleaned out.

These were not enormous undertakings. They did not require a home renovation, an architectural plan, or a second mortgage. They required a Saturday afternoon, a phone call, or a few hundred dollars paid to someone who knew what they were doing.

But none of them got done while I was married.

Don’t worry, though.

The living room was fully outfitted with surround sound.

The wires were beautifully hidden. Time had been taken. Research had been conducted. Holes had been drilled. Equipment had been selected and installed with care.

So it was not that my spouse was incapable of completing household projects.

He was extraordinarily capable when the household project was something he wanted.

This is an important distinction.

Many women are told that their husbands simply “aren’t handy” or “don’t notice things” or “aren’t good at that kind of stuff.”

And yet somehow the television is mounted.

The gaming system is connected.

The speakers work.

The problem is not always ability.

Sometimes it is priority.

Sometimes a spouse’s competence magically appears when the task serves them, entertains them, interests them, or makes their life more comfortable.

Meanwhile, the practical household projects remain suspended in time because they do not belong to them in the same way. They benefit the family. They make the home more functional. They reduce the woman’s labor.

And that does not create the same urgency.

There was always the implication that these things would eventually be handled. And because someone was going to handle them, I was not supposed to hire anyone else.

Except someone did not handle them.

So the unfinished project became a permanent feature of the house. It became another thing I walked past every day, another small visual reminder of what I could not make happen.

There is a particular madness in living with someone who will not complete a task but also will not release the task.

It is not exactly laziness. It is territorial. He has claimed the job, which means you cannot claim the solution.

When my younger son was about one, I broke my toe badly enough that I was told I could not walk on it properly for three months or I might need surgery.

Our washing machine and dryer were in the basement.

My spouse would not do the laundry. (To be fair, he tried, once.)

I want to be clear here: this was a capable adult human being. He had a job. He could drive a car. He could use complicated equipment. He could install surround sound and hide the wires.

He could have done laundry.

But I knew that asking him would become an entire event. There would be a lot of resistance.

I could not physically carry the laundry up and down the basement stairs, and I did not want to fight about whether my husband should wash his own family’s clothing while his wife had a broken bone.

So I hired someone.

They came to my house, picked up the laundry, washed it, folded it, and brought it back.

I paid for the entire family’s laundry out of my own money.

And honestly? It was wonderful.

The laundry disappeared and returned clean. No one sighed at me. No one acted like I had asked for a kidney. No one needed to be congratulated for knowing where the detergent went.

It was a completely functional exchange: I needed help, someone was willing to provide it, and I paid them.

This is one of the things I learned after my marriage ended: sometimes paying a stranger is significantly less expensive than asking your husband.

Not necessarily in dollars.

In energy.

In negotiation.

In resentment.

In the hours you spend preparing to ask, asking gently, reminding him, trying not to sound critical, reassuring him that you know he is busy, and then either doing it yourself or hiring someone three months later anyway.

After my husband moved out, I started getting things done around the house almost immediately.

I had the office painted. I had areas of the house touched up and repaired. I called people. I made appointments. I paid them. They came over, did the work, and left.

It was almost alarmingly easy.

But I also did things myself.

I cleaned out areas I had been avoiding. I rearranged things. I fixed small problems as I encountered them. I made choices without having to forecast another person’s reaction to every choice.

That was the part I had not expected.

I knew I would have more freedom. I did not realize I would have more time.

Not because the work vanished.

Because the friction vanished.

The issue had never really been that we could not afford to hire someone. None of these jobs cost an extraordinary amount of money. The problem was that he did not want to pay someone because he was going to do it himself.

Someday.

Eventually.

When he had time.

After he researched it.

When he found the right tool.

When life calmed down.

There was always a theoretical future version of him who was extremely handy and available.

Unfortunately, I was living in the house with the present version.

And once he was gone, I no longer had to honor the imaginary plans of a man who was not doing the actual work.

I could simply solve the problem.

After divorce, people asked me how I did everything alone.

The answer was: there was also no one standing between me and the solution.

I did not have to double-check everything with another adult who was not doing the work.

I did not have to convince someone that the basement needed to be cleaned.

I did not have to live with half a kitchen floor because someone had once announced that he planned to finish it.

I did not have to spend an afternoon talking about a task that would take twenty minutes to complete.

I could decorate the way I wanted. I could move the furniture. I could hire the person. I could spend the money. I could make the appointment. I could wash the counter without receiving notes from management.

I could ask for help without first proving that I deserved it.

And I could trust my own judgment about what needed to be done.

There is a popular idea that a woman without a husband must be doing everything alone.

Sometimes she was already doing everything alone.

Now she is simply doing it without interference.

The house may have one fewer adult in it, but it also has fewer arguments, fewer stalled decisions, fewer unfinished promises, and fewer invisible checkpoints between a problem and its solution.

She can look at the wall and decide she wants it painted.

Then she can paint it.

Or—and this is the truly revolutionary part—she can pay somebody else to paint it.

The cost of not having a husband can be enormous.

The legal bills. The moving expenses. The second set of furniture. The years spent rebuilding your financial life.

But there are savings, too.

You save time.

You save energy.

You save the small daily humiliation of begging another adult to participate in the life he also lives.

You save the hours spent negotiating over objects, repairs, plans, and choices that never needed to become negotiations.

And sometimes, spending the money is what saves you money.

Before I moved out of our house, I finally had all the work done that had needed to be done for years.

Every room was repainted. The kitchen floor was finished. The downstairs half bathroom—which desperately needed a complete overhaul—was redone.

All of it took a few days.

Not years. Not an endless series of Saturdays. Not the arrival of some future version of a husband who suddenly had the time, interest, and correct tools.

A few days.

I spent around $10,000. Maybe a little less. It was not a small amount of money, but it was also not the impossible expense the unfinished work had been made to feel like for all those years.

I made the decision.

I hired people.

They did the work.

And I got my time back.

We had already moved out by the time the house was shown. There were eighty showings, and it sold for significantly over the asking price because it looked like a brand-new house.

The rooms were clean and freshly painted. The flooring was complete. The bathroom was beautiful. All the things we had spent years living around were suddenly finished.

That $10,000 did not disappear.

It came back to me.

And then some.

The money I had supposedly been wasting by hiring people became an investment with an extraordinary return.

This is what I mean when I say it was easier without a husband.

It was not only that I could finally choose the paint color or call the contractor. It was that I could make a clear economic decision without spending months negotiating with someone who was neither doing the work nor allowing me to solve the problem another way.

I paid skilled people to complete the labor.

They completed it quickly.

I used my own time for something else.

The house became more valuable.

So did my time.

For years, the unfinished work had been presented as the cheaper option.

It wasn’t.

Waiting had a cost.

Living around it had a cost.

Thinking about it every day had a cost.

The hours I would have spent trying to finish it myself had a cost.

And the house being worth less because we had postponed basic maintenance had a very real cost.

Sometimes the most financially responsible thing a woman can do is stop waiting for a man to get around to it.

Sometimes she hires the painter.

She finishes the floor.

She renovates the bathroom.

She sells the house.

And she gets her money—and her life—back.

A Few Books to Read Next

This is not a new conversation, of course. Women have been writing, researching, and screaming into the void about unpaid labor, invisible work, domestic inequity, and the cost of trying to build an ambitious life inside systems that were never designed to support us.

Here are three books I have read and highly recommend:

The Ambition Penalty by

This book examines why women continue to be penalized for wanting more—not because we lack ambition, confidence, or willingness to work, but because the systems around us make that ambition so extraordinarily expensive. It looks at the forces holding women back both at work and at home, which feels particularly relevant when we consider how much unpaid domestic labor quietly consumes women’s time, energy, and earning potential.

No More Mediocre by

Laura Danger is one of the clearest and most necessary voices talking about domestic equity, weaponized incompetence, and the relationship dynamics we have been conditioned to accept as normal. This book explores what happens when one partner becomes responsible not only for completing the work, but for noticing, delegating, explaining, and managing all of it. It is sharp, validating, and deeply practical.

Fair Play by

Fair Play gives language and structure to the invisible work that keeps a household and family running. Eve Rodsky identifies the many tasks we rarely count as labor and offers a framework for dividing ownership of them more fairly—not just the physical execution of a task, but the conception and planning that happen before anyone else even realizes the task exists.

All three of these books approach the subject from slightly different directions, but they arrive at the same essential truth: women’s time is not an endlessly renewable household resource.

Our attention has value. Our labor has value. Our ambition has value.

And the systems that waste those things are costing us far more than we have been taught to calculate.

A quick note: The Happenstance is free, and most of it will stay that way. I’m putting a few of the more personal essays behind a $5/month paywall, both for a little privacy and because every dollar goes directly toward buying registry items for people rebuilding after divorce through Fresh Starts.

Who Gets to Keep the Beautiful Parts?

Olivia Howell — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:21:48 GMT

This morning I opened Facebook and saw that Liz had died.

I knew she’d been sick for a long time, but it still stopped me in my tracks. She wasn’t old, and I think I’d quietly convinced myself she’d always be out there somewhere, standing on a stage, smiling, with a guitar in her hands.

Liz was the lead singer of a band my ex-husband played with when we first met. He’d been playing music since he was a young teenager and is one of those musicians who can pick up almost any stringed instrument and make it sound like he’s been playing it his whole life. When we started dating, he was living in Connecticut, and one of the bands he played with was Liz’s.

She was one of those people who left an impression on you immediately.

She had long red hair, wore flowing skirts, and had this incredibly grounded, gentle presence. She wasn’t trying to be interesting. She simply was. Children adored her because she adored them right back. She had two boys she loved fiercely, and she wrote the kind of folk songs that made you stop talking and actually listen.

The first time I met her was at a little restaurant where the band was playing. Over the next couple of years, I saw them all over Connecticut—vineyards, outdoor festivals, little summer concerts where everyone sat under white tents drinking wine while the music drifted through the trees.

When I think about being twenty-four, I think about that summer.

I think about lying on the bed in his tiny Connecticut apartment while he mixed one of Liz’s albums, rewinding the same sections over and over because he could hear minute imperfections that no one else could. I knew every lyric before the album was even finished simply because I heard it so many times.

At the time, it all felt completely ordinary.

I had no idea those songs would become part of the soundtrack of my twenties.

After I saw the news about Liz this morning, I did what I think a lot of us do when someone dies.

I went looking for them.

I found the album.

I put it on while I was driving the boys to art class.

And somewhere around the second song, I heard one of the banjo parts and immediately thought,

God, he’s good.

Then almost instantly, another feeling washed over me.

Shame.

It surprised me.

I drove for another few miles trying to figure out what, exactly, I was ashamed of.

Was I ashamed that I still thought he was an extraordinary musician?

Was I ashamed that hearing him play still made me feel the same sense of pride I remembered feeling twenty years ago?

Or was I ashamed that I still loved the music?

The more I thought about it, the stranger the whole thing became.

I’ve spent the last five years talking to people about divorce almost every single day. We’ve talked about lawyers, custody schedules, retirement accounts, mediation, emotional abuse, grief, rebuilding, dating again, and starting over.

But I don’t think anyone has ever asked me this.

Who gets to keep the beautiful parts?

Not the house. Not the furniture.

The beautiful parts.

Who gets the songs?

Who gets the restaurant where you had your first date? Who gets the vacation spot where you laughed until your stomach hurt?

Who gets the version of yourself that existed before you knew how the story ended?

Because if I’m honest, I think I’ve spent years quietly assuming those things weren’t mine anymore.

There are songs I’ve skipped because they reminded me of him. Stories I’ve stopped telling. Places I’ve avoided.

Not because I stopped loving them. Because somewhere along the way, I started believing they belonged to our marriage instead of to me.

But sitting in the car today, listening to Liz sing, something shifted.

That album doesn’t belong to my marriage. It doesn’t even belong to him.

Liz made that music. An entire band made that music.

I just happened to fall in love while it was playing in the background.

Those aren’t the same thing.

And that’s when I realized I wasn’t actually thinking about my marriage at all.

I was thinking about being twenty-four.

I was thinking about summers in Connecticut.

I was thinking about the first time I watched someone I loved play music and how wildly excited I was about the life I thought I was beginning.

The music still makes my stomach flip.

Not because I want that life back.

Because I remember how deeply excited I was to be living it.

At twenty-four, I wasn’t broken yet.

I was just hopeful.

There’s something heartbreaking about looking back at that girl because I know what’s coming for her.

She has no idea.

She doesn’t know she’ll spend years trying to save a marriage that can’t be saved. She doesn’t know she’ll eventually become a solo mom. She doesn’t know she’ll build an entirely different life than the one she’s imagining while she’s sitting under those white tents listening to music.

But she also doesn’t deserve to lose those memories simply because I know the ending.

We spend so much energy dividing the tangible things that we quietly start dividing the intangible ones too.

The music. The traditions. The places. The memories.

The joy.

As though someone who eventually hurt us somehow gets to retroactively own every beautiful thing that happened while they happened to be standing beside us.

I don’t think that’s true.

In fact, I think I’ve been getting it completely backwards.

I don’t think people get to retroactively own our joy simply because they happened to be standing beside us when we experienced it.

That joy still belongs to me.

Those summers in Connecticut still belong to me.

The excitement I felt still belongs to me.

Even that twenty-four-year-old girl who couldn’t believe she’d stumbled into this beautiful little corner of the world filled with folk music, vineyards, and possibility.

She still belongs to me.

I keep thinking about Liz tonight.

About the way she moved through the world. About the kindness she carried so effortlessly. About the way she wanted her boys to notice beauty.

This morning I thought I was putting on one of her albums to remember her.

Instead, she reminded me of something I had forgotten about myself.

I think she would have liked that.

The Happenstance is free, and most of it will stay that way. I’m putting a few of the more personal essays behind a $5/month paywall, both for a little privacy and because every dollar goes directly toward buying registry items for people rebuilding after divorce through Fresh Starts.

What Are They Like As Husbands?

Olivia Howell — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:02:32 GMT

Sometimes I look back at my high school years like a fever dream.

I can’t even really explain how I got through them or what happened during them, but I think about them often. I think about the boys I interacted with often, too. Now that I’m raising two sons, one of whom is going into eighth grade, I think about how both young and old those boys seemed to me then.

They were 15, 16, 17, 18.

They felt ancient at the time.

Now I look back and think: they were babies. They were just boys. Boys in salmon-colored pants. Boys with lacrosse sticks. Boys who flirted on AOL Instant Messenger at night and ignored me in the hallway the next day. Boys who were tender and cruel and funny and defensive and very strange. Boys who probably had no idea what they were doing. Boys who also knew exactly what they were doing.

And now, because I am in my 40s, I wonder what they are like as husbands.

Do they do the dishes?

Are they tender and sweet?

Are they jerks?

Do they look at their wives and say, “I’m so glad you’re in my life. I love you so much. Go take a nap.”

Or do they ignore them because their spouse didn’t want sex at that moment?

I dreamt last night about a boy I went to high school with. I’m not sure why he was in my dream, but it pulled me right back into that complicated world.

When I was in high school I was kind of an introvert. Maybe that doesn’t make sense because I’m pretty extroverted online now, but the thing about my high school experience is that it happened during a very specific and strange time in history.

You could have external relationships with people during the day that had almost nothing to do with the internal relationships you had with them online at night.

That was very true for me.

I had very distinct and different relationships with the guys in high school on AOL Instant Messenger than I did with them during the school day. At night, they would talk to me. They would flirt. They would tell me things. They would ask me for relationship advice. They would let me see some softer version of them.

And then the next day at school, they would barely talk to me.

Or they would be mean.

Or they would act like the nighttime version of us had never existed.

Looking back, I can see how confusing that was for me. I could tell these were boys who didn’t necessarily treat me well during the day. Some ignored me. Some were cruel. Some seemed to need me emotionally at night and then erase me socially by morning.

How was I supposed to know what to do with that?

There were two tables near the elevators in the library in high school. One was where I would sit with two of my girlfriends during study hall and free periods. We would do our work there. The table next to us was often claimed by a group of boys who were seemingly nice, very smart, hard workers, and also kind of total jerks sometimes.

There was one boy in particular who was only at the school because his parent worked there. He tried really hard to fit in. He was handsome, and he knew it. Very athletic. From a single-parent family. And he could be a real dick.

There was something completely defensive about him. He used this elevated Matthew Perry kind of humor to deflect and be cool. But I could see there was a softness to him. I could see that he was sad.

Now, all these years later, raising my own son, who reminds me of him a little bit, I can see it differently. I can see that he probably felt abandoned in some way. I can see that he was trying very hard to fit into a world he didn’t necessarily feel like he belonged in either.

But there were times he was really cruel to me.

One day, maybe junior year or senior year, I finally had had enough. I was bold and brash in my own way then. A little rebellious. And I walked right up to him and said, “Why are you being so mean to me? What is the purpose of this? I know you’re not like this.”

He looked at me, tilted his chair back, wearing his salmon-colored pants, and basically said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. Okay.”

And from that point on, we were much more friendly.

He just kind of needed someone to call him out.

I think about that now. I see what I see on social media. I see these people who got married. He has two sons too, from what I can tell. And I wonder: do people change? Do they grow? Do they go to couples therapy? Do they learn tenderness? Do they learn how to repair?

As somebody who works in the divorce space, I hear things all day that do not line up with what gets posted on social media.

So I wonder.

Are the anniversary posts true?

Are they really the love of your life?

Are you kind in your house?

Did the boy who needed to be called out become a man who can call himself out?

There was another boy in that friend group who was tall and handsome and very kind. A little quiet. At night, we would have these long, long conversations on AOL Instant Messenger. We would talk and get to know each other and become really friendly. We were both in different kinds of high school relationships, and we would ask each other for advice. He was a football player, and I was a writer. That explains that.

In fact, we got to know each other so well that I’m still friends with his high school girlfriend, even though they broke up many, many years ago.

Isn’t that funny how girls work?

We had a very deep friendship on a lot of levels, and yet during the school day, we did not talk to each other.

Now, looking back, this is confusing to me.

What was I to him?

A friend?

Not a friend?

A therapist?

But I do know one thing. Right after high school ended, right after graduation, his father passed away, and I went to pay my respects. I gave him a big hug and told him I loved him. He said he loved me back.

I will always remember that because it was incredibly sweet.

I wonder about him as a father. He has daughters now, from what I can see. Does he help around the house? Does he take the garbage out? Does he lie in bed with his kids and giggle and act goofy? Is he gentle with them? Is he tough on them?

I think about all the things husbands and fathers are supposed to do.

Where did these boys learn how to be fathers and husbands?

My sons certainly don’t know instinctively. I am constantly reminding them to take the garbage out, and still it takes days. We spend hours talking about kindness, compassion, consent, and gender dynamics. So where do boys learn this? Who teaches them to notice the overflowing garbage? Who teaches them to be soft with somebody else’s heart? Who teaches them to sit in discomfort without turning it into cruelty?

Neither of those boys had a father in their life in the way we imagine boys “learning” from fathers. And now I’m raising sons who are also not being raised with a father in the house.

That fascinates me.

And then, of course, there were the boys who were just cruel.

I won’t even give them the dignity of mythology here, but in case you’re wondering, their names were Charlie and Aaron. They were mean. They bullied me for absolutely no reason. One of them bullied me so badly that I had to go to the school therapist with him, which, by the way, looking back, I have no idea why I had to go to therapy.

I wasn’t doing anything.

He was the one chasing me across campus with a lacrosse stick and barking at me.

The school therapist asked him point-blank, while he was sitting next to me, why he was so mean to me.

He said, “I don’t know.”

And yet it continued.

This is part of why I pulled into myself so much in high school. I had friends. I had a life. I was bold in some ways. But there was so much unnecessary cruelty. So much casual humiliation. So much boys-being-boys nonsense that adults did not seem to know how to interrupt.

And now, one of those boys has “life coach” in his Instagram bio.

Alright.

But I do wonder what he is like now. Does he remember hurting someone that badly? Does he remember that I had to sit in a room with a therapist because of what he was doing to me? Does he think of himself as a kind person now? Did he become one?

What made him so cruel at the time?

I’m looking back now as a mother of sons, and I can see how quickly you can make somebody mean. I can see how much of kindness has to be practiced. I can see how much of compassion has to be modeled. I can see that raising boys into good men is not something that just happens because they are “good kids.”

It is daily work.

It is talking about consent and community and kindness over and over again. It is telling them that being funny is not the same thing as being cruel. It is telling them that sarcasm is not a personality if it is constantly making someone else smaller. It is teaching them that girls are not emotional rest stops. Girls are not secret nighttime therapists. Girls are not places where boys get to practice vulnerability and then deny it in public.

I have two boys who are naturally compassionate and kind, and still we talk about this all the time.

Because if no one is having these conversations with boys, how are they supposed to know?

If no one teaches them to feel things without making someone else pay for it, what happens?

If no one teaches them to repair, apologize, listen, notice, help, soften, and tell the truth, where are they supposed to learn it?

Maybe some tenderness is natural. Maybe some cruelty is learned. Maybe some of it is pain. Maybe some of it is home. Maybe some of it is the culture boys are handed before they are old enough to ask whether they want it.

I don’t know.

I just know that I think about those boys now.

I think about them as husbands.

I think about them as fathers.

I think about the ones who were sweet at night and silent by day. I think about the ones who were defensive and sad. I think about the ones who were cruel for sport. I think about the ones who probably had no idea how much I remembered.

And I wonder what the last 25 years did to them.

Did they grow?

Did they learn?

Did they become soft fathers?

Did they become husbands who go to therapy, say sorry, fold laundry, hold babies, make dinner, and tell the truth?

I guess I could ask them.

But they probably wouldn’t answer me.

Maybe they would have on AOL Instant Messenger.

But it seems that ship has passed.

Most of The Happenstance is free, and that’s very intentional. A few more intimate pieces will live behind a $5/month paywall, partly to keep them from someday becoming searchable childhood lore for my kids, and partly because the money does something real: it helps buy registry items for people starting over after divorce.

Sixteen Years Ago Today at Ellis Island

Olivia Howell — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 11:27:01 GMT

I wasn’t going to write anything today.

I was going to sleep late and finally catch up on some artwork I’ve been meaning to get to. Then I checked my email, and Shutterfly so kindly informed me that sixteen years ago today I was at Ellis Island with my ex-husband’s family.

Well. At the time, he wasn’t even my husband yet. We weren’t even engaged. We were living together, so technically he was my boyfriend, but that’s beside the point.

I felt really close to his family back then. His mother’s people came from a heritage similar to mine, and there was something easy about that closeness. It was my first time at Ellis Island, which sounds strange to admit, because I’m a fifth-generation New Yorker. You’d think I would have made it there at some point in my life before that. Instead it took a boat full of people from Illinois and North Carolina to finally get me there.

I’m a pretty spiritual person, and I remember standing there, right where people came through the doors and iron gates, thinking about my own family. My ancestors. My father’s grandfather walked across Russia for years—years—before he ever got to a boat that would take him to New York. He left his entire family behind to do it. He never saw them again.

I think about them a lot. And standing in those hallowed halls, I remember thinking how profound it was that this was the foundation. This was what made it possible for me to be an independent woman, in this city, in this lifetime. There was a strength in those walls, and I absorbed it without knowing I’d need it.

I wouldn’t understand how much I needed it until years later, kneeling on the vinyl floor of my ranch house kitchen, praying that my ancestors would find a way to save me from what was happening to me. That there was a way out.

Looking back, I can barely recognize that person. She feels like a ghost of a time I lived through. But even then, some part of me knew I had the strength of people who crossed an entire ocean, an entire world, to a place they didn’t even know would let them in. They took that risk without any guarantee of the gates opening. They wrote their names on a manifest and hoped.

I think about my ancestors a lot; I talk to them daily, ask them for guidance and support. And I wonder what they think of the work we’re doing to liberate women from their marriages.

Because the older I get, the more I realize we have not changed as much as we like to believe. Sure, we have changed laws (and changed some back…). We sort of have changed language. We have attempted to change the public story. But inside homes, inside marriages, inside the private rooms where women are still managing men’s moods and reactions and punishments, freedom remains…complicated.

I felt that most clearly when we weirdly found ourselves in the middle of the 2024 election. A tweet I wrote—about not needing to tell your husband who you voted for—went viral, and we turned it into an actual campaign: Vote Without Fear. Celebrities got involved. We ran a hotline.

When we launched it, I thought we were saying something obvious.

You are allowed to vote privately.

You are allowed to have your own political conscience.

You are allowed to enter a voting booth and belong entirely to yourself.

But the response taught me something. Or maybe it confirmed something I already knew. So many women understood exactly why we said it. So many women knew that a legal right is not the same thing as a safe home. So many women knew that privacy can be revolutionary when you have been trained to believe every thought, every choice, every dollar, every vote must be explained to someone else.

We have come so far. And we still have so far to go. Both of those things are true at the same time, and I think that’s the part we’re not supposed to say out loud. We want the story to be finished. We want to be able to say we fixed it. But the work isn’t a line with an end point. It’s something you hand off, generation to generation, a little further down the road than where you found it.

That’s actually what’s on my mind at the moment, as later my older son and I will be watching Suffs on PBS, which feels like the right thing to be watching today. It is probably my favorite musical ever (shh, don’t tell Les Mis). There’s a song near the end about how progress doesn’t move in a straight line (Keep Marching).

'Cause your ancestors are all the proof you need
That progress is possible, not guaranteed
It will only be made if we keep marching, keep marching on

That’s what my ancestors were to me, standing in that hallway at Ellis Island. Proof it was possible. Not a guarantee. Just proof.

And sometimes that is all we need to keep going: proof.

Proof that someone else kept marching, and left their path for us to boldly walk.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus, 1883

The CVS Receipt

Olivia Howell — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:09:07 GMT

In August 2019, two weeks after my husband moved out, I got a CVS receipt sent to my email.

Ordinarily, this would not have been a big deal. I went to CVS constantly then. It was across the street from our house, and I was there many times a week for diapers, shampoo, snacks, medicine, whatever small domestic emergency the day had created.

But this was a Saturday night.

I was home alone with the kids.

And I had not gone to CVS that day.

At first, I barely noticed it. CVS receipts show up in your email and you don’t exactly stop your whole life to investigate. But then I looked closer and saw the address.

It was not the CVS across the street from our house.

It was a CVS in the Midwest.

So I sat down on the stairs in my kitchen while the kids played in the other room, and I opened the email again.

It was my account. That much was clear. Someone had used my CVS card to get the discount. Technically, it wasn’t even my card. It was under my grandmother’s phone number, because she had died and I had kept using her number for the coupons and points she had spent years earning.

And if I’m being honest, I kept using it because it made me feel like she was still alive for one second when I typed her phone number into the screen.

Evidently, my ex still had the little CVS ExtraCare tag on his keychain. The tiny plastic barcode thing you scan at the register. A ridiculous little leftover from our shared life.

And there it was.

A bottle of water.

A box of Ferrero Rocher.

Condoms.

When I got to the third item, I audibly gasped and called my sister.

Part of me laughed, because what else can you do? Divorce is so absurd sometimes. It is so unglamorous. Nobody tells you that one of the defining moments of your early separation might arrive through an automated CVS email involving your grandmother’s phone number and a condom purchase in another state.

And part of me felt my stomach drop.

At the time, I told myself maybe he had used the card by accident. Habit. Muscle memory. He had scanned that little keychain tag for years. Maybe he didn’t think about it.

Looking back, I’m pretty sure he knew exactly what he was doing.

It was Saturday night, after all.

It was date night.

And this is one of the strangest parts of divorce. The person who was just inside your daily life is suddenly outside of it, living a whole life you are no longer invited into.

Two weeks earlier, he had been living in our house. He had been my husband. Not in the romantic sense, necessarily. Not in the everything-is-fine sense. But in the real and logistical and bodily sense.

He was the person I had shared a bed with. Shared a shower with. Shared children with. Shared a house with. He had seen me get dressed in the morning. He had stood near me through the deaths and births and ordinary mornings of my life.

And then suddenly he was in a CVS in the Midwest buying water, his favorite chocolate, and condoms.

Part of me was glad he was using protection.

Part of me wanted to die.

Both things were true.

I think people want divorce to make emotional sense from the outside. They want the story to be clean. You either want the marriage or you don’t. You either love him or hate him. You either left or were left. You’re either relieved or destroyed.

But divorce is just not like that.

I was relieved the marriage was over. I really was. I wanted peace. I wanted healing. I wanted the tension and the constant dread to stop. I wanted to become myself again.

And I was jealous.

I was jealous of him.

I was jealous that he got to leave and be out in the world. I was jealous that he seemed okay enough to go on a date, to buy condoms, to have sex with someone, to be desired by someone, while I was home with the kids trying to survive the wreckage of the life we had made together.

I was barely keeping myself upright.

And there he was, apparently able to move forward.

That hurt in a way I did not want to admit.

And I was jealous of her, too. Whoever she was. I did not know her, and it wasn’t really about her. But he had been my person for a decade. Even when he was no longer safe for me. Even when the marriage was ending. Even when I knew, fully and clearly, that I did not want to go back.

He had been my person.

My body knew him that way.

That is what made me feel so ashamed. I kept thinking, why do I care? Why am I jealous of someone I don’t want to be married to anymore? Why does this hurt when I know the marriage is over? Why does my body still react to him like he belongs to me in some way?

But of course it did.

You do not spend ten years loving someone, sleeping beside someone, having sex with someone, building a family with someone, fearing someone, needing someone, resenting someone, and then suddenly become a clean and enlightened person because the marriage ended.

Your body is simply not that tidy.

Divorce is not just paperwork. It is not just logistics. It is not just custody schedules and bank accounts and who gets the couch.

It is also your body trying to understand that the person it was trained to reach for is no longer yours.

And maybe never really was in the way you hoped.

That is the part we do not talk about enough. You can be done and still jealous. You can be relieved and still furious. You can want someone gone and still feel sick when you imagine them touching somebody else. You can know the marriage needed to end and still feel humiliated by how much you care.

It does not mean you made the wrong choice.

I remember sitting on those stairs and feeling so many things at once that I could not name them fast enough.

Anger.

Jealousy.

Relief.

Disgust.

Arousal.

Curiosity.

Shame.

A tiny flicker of comedy.

A very real sadness.

Because there was also this other thought underneath it all: he was going to be fine without me.

That sounds obvious now. Of course he was. People go on. People adapt. People buy chocolate and condoms and water in CVS stores all over the country every single day.

But when you have been married to someone for a long time, especially when you have carried so much (most) of the life together, there can be this strange belief that they cannot possibly function without you.

And then they do.

Maybe not beautifully. Maybe not kindly. Maybe not in a way that makes anything easier for you.

But they do.

And that is its own kind of grief.

I had spent so long being entangled with him that his ability to be separate from me felt like a second abandonment. He had left, and then he was also okay enough to be wanted by someone else. He was okay enough to be touched by someone else. He was okay enough to have a Saturday night.

Meanwhile, I was sitting on the kitchen stairs reading a CVS receipt.

That is divorce.

Not always, of course. Not for everyone. But enough of us know exactly what I mean.

It is not always dramatic in the ways people expect. Sometimes it is not a screaming fight or a courtroom scene or a cinematic moment of walking out the door.

Sometimes it is an email receipt.

Sometimes it is seeing condoms listed underneath chocolate and realizing that the person who once slept next to you is now preparing to sleep next to someone else.

And you are supposed to just keep going.

You still have to put the kids to bed. You still have to answer emails. You still have to find pajamas and refill water bottles and act like your whole nervous system did not just get thrown through a window by a CVS notification.

If I could go back to myself on those stairs, I would not tell her to be more mature about it.

I would not tell her not to care.

I would not tell her that jealousy was beneath her.

I would say, yes. This is fucking weird.

Of course you are jealous.

Of course you are angry.

Of course you are sad.

Of course part of you is laughing, because this is objectively ridiculous.

Of course your body still has feelings about the person who was your person for a decade.

That does not mean you want him back.

That does not mean you are weak.

That does not mean you are confused.

It means you are living through the impossible middle, where the marriage is over but the body has not caught up yet.

I saved the receipt email.

Of course I did.

Because even then, some part of me knew I would need proof of how strange it all was. How one tiny digital artifact could hold so much. My grandmother’s phone number. My marriage. My jealousy. His date night. My survival. His favorite chocolate. My sister on the phone. My kids in the other room.

All of it.

And maybe that is what I want to say now, more than anything.

There is no correct way to grieve a life that was once wrapped around yours.

You are allowed to feel jealous of the person who left.

You are allowed to feel jealous of the person they touch next.

You are allowed to be relieved it is over and still feel devastated by the evidence that they are moving on.

Your body grieves too.

Even when you know.

Even when you chose peace.

Even when the receipt is just a receipt.

A quick note: The Happenstance is free, and most of it always will be. A few of the more intimate pieces will live behind a $5/month paywall, partly because I’d rather they not appear in my children’s Google searches someday, and partly because the money goes somewhere meaningful: every dollar helps buy someone an item from their Fresh Starts divorce registry.

Today My Youngest Turns Ten

Olivia Howell — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:24:18 GMT

Today my youngest son turns ten.

And I don’t think we talk enough about the grief that comes with not remembering a lot of your baby’s life because you were trying to survive a marriage.

He was born at a terrifically difficult intersection in my life. My business was taking off. My grandmother was actively dying. My marriage was falling apart. I had another little one to raise. And I was doing all of it by myself.

I remember not knowing how I’d survive those long nights—him crying, another kid to take care of, clients waiting. Everything felt so heavy, because I knew that if I couldn’t make money, I couldn’t save money, and I couldn’t eventually get out. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was completely subconscious. It was like the ancestors in my cells were screaming at me to just keep going.

He was such a sweet, funny, interesting child. He is my greatest teacher, in all ways. He is so different than me—a magic, magic human, spiritual, an incredible musician and inventor. His brain works in a completely different way than mine, and somehow I understand him in ways I don’t always know how to explain.

He was three when my marriage ended. Aside from my family, it’s been me and my boys. Wyatt was raised by a completely single mom, in all ways. He is brave. He sees through people so quickly. He has taught me so much about healing and accepting myself.

The other night, he picked up a guitar and just started playing. And for a second, I could see it: the whole life opening in front of him. The music in his hands. The gift in his body. The person he is becoming.

And still, his birthday is wrapped in grief for me. Because I was so alone when he was born. Because I was so scared. Because from the moment he arrived, I had to defend myself, speak up, survive, work, mother, fight, and keep becoming the woman I knew I was somewhere underneath all that fear.

I’m so glad we made it to the other side. Not without trauma. Not without bumps—we deal with those every day. But I had this realization that nearly knocked the breath out of me: I was the one who raised him. And that’s profound to me.

So I wanted to say—it’s okay if there’s grief wrapped up in it.

Even the most beautiful moments, like the birth of a child, can hold an immense amount of grief. And that’s okay. It’s more than okay. It’s human.

We are allowed to hold more than one feeling at once. It doesn’t diminish either one. In fact, holding them both is how we honor them—giving each a place at the table, a name, a little respect.

It's My Wedding Anniversary

Olivia Howell — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:06:52 GMT

Today, I have been Olivia Howell for fifteen years.

Fifteen years ago today, I got married. And in the fifteen years since, I have written and written and written.

One of the pieces I was proudest of—fifteen years ago—was a piece about my wedding, for a website called A Practical Wedding. At the time, APW was everything. Getting published there was a goal I’d circled and chased for a long time. And then it happened. My words, my wedding, my name, on a site I loved and respected.

Read the original piece here →

To be honest, the piece didn’t land the way I wanted it to. After it went live, the man I’d married was disappointed in it—it didn’t say enough about his side of the family, about the music the way his family played it. I so clearly remember sitting at our little kitchen table, with my laptop open, the piece in front of us. He was standing over me and the look on his face made my body ache. I was so proud of that piece. And I learned, almost overnight, to be ashamed of it instead.

I hadn’t read it in years. I read it again this morning.

And here’s what I can see now that I couldn’t see then: I was screaming for help, in a wedding dress, in full view of everyone I loved—and I didn’t have the language to know that’s what I was doing. I literally did not have the words to explain what was happening to me.

So let’s read the piece together. Not to laugh at her. Not to correct her. Just to translate her. Because she was telling the truth the entire time. She just didn’t have the compass yet.

She wrote:

I felt like a huge wave had swept me into its swell…and to be quite honest, I wasn’t sure how I was going to swim ashore. I laid in bed for three days after the engagement.

Wow. Three days in bed. After the engagement. The thing you’re supposed to be happiest about.

She called it stress. She called it planning. She reached for the language of logistics, because that was the only language a happy bride was allowed to use. But read what her body was already doing. Her body had picked its words: swept under. Can’t reach shore. Three days in bed. The body is always the first to know. It speaks in water and weight long before the mind catches up with a sentence that makes sense.

I had the words for the water. I didn’t have the words for what the water meant.

She wrote:

I was the issue. I took on too many other people’s emotions, feelings, opinions, and ideas. I was constantly on the phone… double checking that everyone’s emotions were okay.

Read how fast she takes the blame. I was the issue. Not the situation. Not anyone else. Her.

And watch what she’s already an expert at: scanning every room for everyone else’s feelings. Making sure everyone is okay. Managing the emotional weather of every person around her so that no one—no one—is ever disappointed in her. She thought it was stress. She thought it was wedding planning.

It was a lifetime of practice. And she was very, very good at it.

She wrote:

I felt like I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know what I wanted, and no one was ever happy with me.

No one was ever happy with me.

She wrote that line about a season. She didn’t know she was writing it about a decade. She didn’t know it would become the quiet hum underneath so much of what came after—that you could do everything right, hand out the pizza, sing every song, write the whole ending of the story as a gift to someone else, and still be told it wasn’t enough.

She didn’t know that yet. I do.

Here’s the part I most want you to see.

She was not alone. Look at the piece. The room was packed. Chairs dragged in from every other room. Family pressed against the walls. Pop-Tarts and the Tennessee Waltz and her two sisters getting dressed up beside her. Love, everywhere, in every single photo, spilling out of the cottage so loud you could hear it from outside.

And she was drowning anyway.

That’s the part we don’t talk about. We think loneliness is the absence of people. We think a room full of love must mean a heart that’s full, too. But you can be surrounded—truly, genuinely surrounded—by people who love you, and still be lonely all the way down to the bone. Because the loneliness was never about who was in the room. It was about something hollow at the center that no amount of love in the room could reach.

I didn’t have the word hollow yet. I had wave. I had I wasn’t sure how I was going to swim ashore.

I was lonely because it was hollow. And I think we need to talk about that.

And then there’s the part that isn’t in the piece at all. The part that happened after.

I wrote the entire ending of that piece about the music. About the jam in the cottage. About my husband, still in his wedding clothes, playing banjo while my family played around him—welcomed in, I wrote, as a musician now in their “family-band” and their circle. I planned that whole night, in my own words from back then, as a gift to him.

And it still wasn’t enough.

Because it didn’t feature his father. Because it honored my family’s music and not enough of his. And so the thing I had made out of pride and love became something I was supposed to feel sorry for. I tucked it away. I stopped telling people I’d written it.

There it is. The whole story, in miniature. The warmth and the harm in the same room. The music playing while something quietly gets taken from you. You make something beautiful, you hand it over as a gift, and what comes back to you is the list of ways it failed.

I have the words for that now.

Fifteen years ago, a woman wrote a beautiful, breathless, half-drowning little essay about the happiest day of her life and didn’t understand a single thing it was trying to tell her.

I understand it now.

There’s more here. There is so much more here. But today—fifteen years to the day—I wanted to start by going back and finally hearing her.

I see you, my love. I’m so sorry it took me this long.

Thank you for being here. This is The Happenstance by Olivia Howell — personal essays on reinvention, motherhood, and the unplanned turns that lead somewhere good. If you want more, subscribe so the next piece finds you. If something here lands, subscribe to get the next one, tap the ♥ so more people find it, and tell me what it stirred up in the comments. I read every one.

Welcome to The Happenstance

Olivia Howell — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:57:00 GMT

For my sixth birthday, my parents gave me a typewriter. They set it up in my father’s home office, by the window. Nearly four decades later, I sit in that exact spot every single day—same window, same light—except now the office is mine. I didn’t plan that. Nobody did. It just happened that way.

Happenstance, maybe.

I’ve been writing since before I can remember, and writing about this—divorce, families, the interiors of people’s lives—for thirty years. That’s not a figure of speech. My first published piece was a poem about my parents’ divorce, in an anthology of student poetry, when I was twelve. I’ve always been fascinated by people. By families and how they work and how they come apart and what’s really going on underneath. I think I have a kind of superpower for it, honestly: taking the inside of a person—the stuff they can’t quite name—and translating it into emotion, and emotion into thought, and thought into words on a page.

That’s what I want to do here.

Happenstance is what happens when life hands you something you didn’t plan for, and you pick it up anyway and figure out what to do with it. Sometimes that means falling apart. Sometimes it means building a startup to help other people through the exact thing that nearly took you down. In my case—both.

The name is also a little wink at where I come from. I’ve been online since basically the dawn of it—AOL chat rooms for teen poets, AIM away messages I workshopped like sonnets, a very-lovely blog Jenny and I ran in the early 2000s. The internet was where I first found out that writing the interior could reach someone. The Happenstance is me coming home to that—a place for my more interior thoughts, the ones that don’t fit anywhere else.

So stay tuned. There’s a lot happening over here.

Here's some of what you'll find: essays on starting over and building things, the occasional dispatch from inside the books I'm writing, and the interior thoughts I've been collecting for years and finally have a place to put. Some of it will be polished. Some of it won't. All of it will be true.

I’m so glad you’re here. 🤍

— Olivia