The Fall That Taught Me to Fly

It was the week before Valentine’s Day, one year after my divorce, when I ran into an old friend at Shopper’s Drug Mart. We were both picking out little stuffed animals for our kids — two single parents navigating the holiday in our own ways. It started as a casual conversation in an aisle, the kind where you don’t realize at the time that life is about to shift.

A few months later, he invited the kids and me to a local hockey game. We both knew the other had been through heartbreak — me divorced the year before and him single for several years. There was something comforting about that shared understanding, the quiet knowing of what it means to start again.

Over the eighteen months, we grew closer. I sold my house, he sold his, and together we decided to build a new chapter under one roof. He bought the house where our families would blend, where laughter and possibility filled the rooms. Not long after, he proposed. At the time, it felt like hope. A second chance at love. A big blended family. A future.

But life has a way of revealing what’s real over time.

The version of him I fell in love with and the reality I later saw were not the same. The relationship ended — abruptly, painfully. In what felt like the blink of an eye, I found myself without a home of my own. I made the heartbreaking decision for my kids to live with their dad while I bounced between friends’ couches and a spare bedroom. Eight months and four days. That’s how long I lived in that in-between space, holding on to the thread of hope that I could somehow buy back into the real estate market that seemed to be climbing higher with every passing week.

The stress and emotional weight were suffocating at times. How did I get here? How did I give my whole heart to love and still end up watching it all slip away? How could something that felt so right leave me in such deep financial and emotional uncertainty?

I won’t pretend that season was easy. It cracked me open in ways I never expected. But it also showed me how fiercely resilient I could be. I didn’t just face the unknown — I stepped into it. And step by step, I rebuilt.

I’ve learned that love can be both beautiful and brutal. That trusting again is courageous, even when it doesn’t lead to the ending I hoped for. And that sometimes, losing what you thought was “home” is what leads you back to the one you build within yourself.

This chapter didn’t break me. It refined me.