How do I answer that question?

He comes and sits beside me on the sofa.  Conversations have been mostly peaceful if awkward and marked by momentary flare ups.  We are mostly on the same page as regards our goals for the separating of our lives, the care and sharing of our child.  But he comes to sit beside me on the sofa.  I say, “What’s up?”  He says, “I don’t know.  I guess I just felt like sitting here for a minute.”

After a while he says, “Are you worried?  Are you worried about the future?”

I say, emphatically, immediately, “Yes.  Of course.”

He says, “Are you sure we are doing the right thing.”

I say, emphatically but less immediately, “Yes.  I am.  As sure as I can be in a situation like this.”

He nods.  I feel a flash of guilt.

“I mean,  generally I’m sure but I have no real gift for true certainty, but yes, I am sure.”

I feel the stronger me take hold.  The one who doesn’t go on guilty rambles.  The one who really is perfectly sure even if she has to contend with the doubts of all the other me’s.  The one who has been checking in with herself every day to find fear without sadness, to find a sense of pure liberation twinned with terror.  The me who is holding all the other me’s together.  The me who wishes he would stop asking questions like this even as she understands that he must.  That we are not on the same path.  A path that wore all the other me’s down before we quit it and dragged him along with us.

She knows that he is still catching up and that this new path is cluttered, full of twists and brambles.

And, yes -  I am worried about the future.  But there is no going back.

I am as sure as I can be in a situation like this.

And I have to grow up now.