Living With My Ex
May 13, 2025 at 10:09PMTen years into their relationship, Richard Kelly Kemick’s wife, Litia, made two surprising announcements: First, that she was gay. Second, she was pregnant. Faced with the end of his relationship, the arrival of his son, and a pricy British Columbia housing market, Richard and Litia broke up, but stayed together, moving to a house in Vancouver for Litia’s job. Their family dynamic puts their son first and has saved them the sometimes fraught emotional and financial burdens of running separate households, despite the complications it puts on their respective dating.
Litia said it took her two years between realizing she was gay and telling me. At first that made me sad, because it seemed like an awfully long time to be lonely. But aloneness is the basis of transformation. Ever since the kid was born, I’ve never been more surrounded by people. I have also never felt more alone. Parenthood is a process of such embarrassment and shortcoming, of revelation and ardour, so intimate and exposing that it demands to be experienced alone. There is no one who can understand what is happening to you, because you will never be able to convey what you are becoming. It is the aloneness of interpreting dreams, portending the shape of yourself: I dream of an oven that cannot be turned off, a chandelier so large it blocks the doorway, of standing in a clearcut.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/13/living-with-my-ex/
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