I don’t have a destination. Just a canvas tote in the passenger seat, a shirt and pair of jeans, toothbrush and a laptop. An old Bible shoved in the front pocket for good measure.

A few hours of criss-crossing highways, drawing circles with my tires, I park in the lot of a crappy motel. I’m going to be brave, live on the edge, check into a room with faded bedspreads and a gum-chewing girl manning the overnight lobby. This is a sheltered young woman’s act of defiance.

Virginians can’t cook Mexican food, but I eat a burrito and a cup of bland rice, cross legged on a hotel bed of cement. I listen to my own thoughts, speak aloud to the walls, whisper at the patchy television across the room. Embers burn in my gut and exhaustion clings to my bones.

I don’t sleep that night.

Morning comes and I brush my teeth, handing over my room key by 7am. I pass a donut shop, fill a cardboard box with a baker’s dozen and find myself home to kiss the man I married and listen to the boys argue over the sprinkles.

The years had cracked the axis of my being. I’d splinted it and smiled, but the fracture ached with the seasons. My fibers begged for wholeness.

And so I bought a farm.

John didn’t believe, at first, that it was necessary to uproot our lives and move ourselves to the country. He stood in the kitchen of our white rental house with the scuffed walls and said it didn’t make sense. Why was the fight for life wrapped around this farmhouse?

I paced, I cried, I stood straight and told him I knew deeply that this was it. This was the thing. We needed to buy the house, move our furniture and our souls to a wider plot of earth and recreate the messy life into which we’d fallen. He needed this as much as I did because I needed it to live.

On a Thursday morning in May we closed on the farmhouse and mopped the floors that night. I stayed late to finish cleaning the bathrooms, but I panicked in the country quiet and what if there were axe murderers out here? I used my sticky new key to jiggle the door lock, sprinted to the car and drove back to the old house to sleep.

Early the next morning we sat on steps of the yellow farmhouse and watched the early summer sunshine catching dewdrops. John’s jeans were dirty, my hair frizzed in the wet air and our hands had found each other. He leaned over and nudged my shoulder with his own, side-eyeing me, smirking. This was it.

There was no way of knowing in April exactly why I needed these few grassy acres or the yellow of the cottage or the worn wooden staircase or even the particular four-square layout of the house.

But we bought chickens and I found a therapist.

We mowed the pastures and I went to bed on time.

We sipped wine in the white porch swing and I started to breathe.

We found a few sheep and I found a psychiatrist.

We started milking a cow and I learned to hear my heart move.

We planted seeds and I felt the knots in my soul loosening.

Our lambs were born and I laughed.

I knew the truth in the thin places. There are lives within me worth fighting for.

Prettiest photos taken by photographer friends Chelsea Hudson and Kate Fuster. All others from my Instagram.

We talk about it late at night, me with my knees pulled into my chest, leaning against the pillows. He is there, sprawled across the foot of the bed on his stomach, his chin resting on his folded forearms.

I use my hands when I talk, wide and sweeping, and my fingers spread apart as I speak. “But you can’t, I know you can’t love me when I’m a mess like this.”

We wrestle it for two hours, no voices raised here, only passionate words flying to the top of the room with its high ceilings.

I tell him – the man who rocks the baby in the wee hours while I doze under my down comforter – that I don’t feel he understands.

I tell him – the man who wakes before dawn, making sandwiches for the elementary school lunches – that I don’t feel he appreciates it.

I tell him – the man who fills the checking account, pays the bills, keeps everything in order – that I don’t feel like he cares about everything I’m juggling each day.

It’s always tension, I wail (my hands are pulling apart, fingers interlocking in the air), between what I should be doing with my days, what he wants me to do, and what I actually seem able to accomplish.

He asks me then, just what is it? What is it I think he’s expecting?

So many things, too many to name. He wants me to be a coupon-er, a frugal goddess, the one who snags a deal and buys 50 rolls of toilet paper. A fitness guru, a runner, a health aficionado. Early to bed, early to rise, one who makes hot breakfast every morning and has supper on the table at 5:30 PM on the dot. Practical, minimalist, spartan. The furniture in my home squared to each corner, efficiency winning over style. Cargo capris from REI and no makeup on my face.

But I’m not a coupon-er, and I don’t exercise enough. I worship the night hours, I spend my late evenings writing and reading and knitting. I wear lace and mascara and skinny jeans. Dressers and chairs are set at angles in every room of my house.

I’m clearly the antithesis of everything he wants in a wife.

He laughs there at the end of the bed, propped on his elbows now. He rolls into a guffaw, his eyes wrinkled at each corner as he looks at my eyes. Then he crawls to my feet, sits himself upright.

“You realize you’ve just described me, right?

Who would want to marry himself?”

I’m forced to laugh a half sigh, and he tips his head toward mine, because this is the way we make it through this era we’ve dubbed “the messy years,” the way we sort out the unrealistic ideas about marriage I can’t seem to unravel.

He tells me, then, how he loves my scattered brain and head-in-the-clouds ways. He loves the way I play with words and my sporadic yoga and my endless ball of yarn. He tells me I’m beautiful without makeup and reminds me how he laughs and rolls his eyes when I put it on anyway. He loves me even though I keep him up late and groan when he wakes me early. He loves what it means that half of our furniture is set at an angle.

It dawns upon me, over and over like the cycle of each morning sun, that he hasn’t said or shown disdain for any of part of my being, the soul-depths or the no-longer-17 outer shell.

Perhaps the only person not wanting me is… me?