If change is a wave that picks you up and carries you somewhere you’ve never been, divorce after a long marriage is a tsunami. It’s not so much a wave as it is suddenly, improbably, a completely different ocean. The water level rises and rises. You watch helplessly while familiar landmarks on the ground below shrink and become insignificant.

The tsunami holds its breath with you at the top. Terrified, you teeter amid the froth and confused sea animals on its crest.

And then the whole damn thing lets go all at once and rockets you far past what is comfortable, well beyond what is safe, at a speed so fast it makes your vision blur.

Not even a tsunami lasts forever, and eventually even that non-negotiable and unrelenting momentum will begin to exhaust itself. You start to slow down. By the time the water that’s gripping you is only a few feet deep, you start to see parts of the terrain below through all the muck and silt. It’s not where you were before, not by a long shot, but it’s not Mars, either, and that’s comforting.

This part, right here, is where I’m at right now. My ex-husband moved out in May, and then in June I moved my kids and myself to an apartment and began looking for a job. School let out the day after we moved, so this summer has felt simultaneously like the slowest and fastest of my life.

Once the stress and fatigue of moving was finished, the unstructured nature of summer grated on me. Our routine felt anchor-less. Normally summer is filled with trips and camps and plans, but I chose not to do that this year because we needed a little monotony. We needed healing. We needed to get used to our new normal. We needed space. The tsunami picked the kids up, too, and they needed time to come to terms with where it finally set us down.

Shortly after my ex-husband moved out, I had an hour-long panic attack while the kids were at school. I hyperventilated so much I almost passed out when it was time to stand up and go pick up my daughter. I somehow made it to her school, where a friend noticed I was woozy and sat with me for an hour until I’d calmed down enough to drive.

The enormity of the decision I’d made and trying to wrap my head around all the repercussions of it had been threatening to swamp me for weeks. The panic attack happened because I finally let them.

I had taken my stable life and upended it like a silverware drawer onto a counter top, and I needed to have just the slightest bit of a breakdown before I started reorganizing the drawer. This long, boring summer is a respite from all that work, because I’m at the long tail of the cleanup now. The drawer is back in the kitchen island, most of the cutlery has been rearranged, and now all that’s left is to vacuum up the crumbs from the floor and wipe off the counter.

In the last three months I’ve moved twice, mutually decided to end my marriage, and sent out over seventy-five job applications. I’ve done over twenty phone screens, a handful of in-person interviews, and requested no fewer than a million pep talks from my friends.

I’m being super picky about which jobs I pursue, because they’ll need to suit me and accommodate the realities of being a single mom. I think my job search is going well, as well as they ever go at least, and something tells me I’m nearing the end of it.

All at once, my long, anchor-less summer doesn’t seem so annoying. Getting a job is the last item to go in dealing with the aftermath of the tsunami. I’m almost certain getting used to a full-time job and commuting and after-school pickups and all that jazz is going to take a lot of time to get used to, but getting a job is the last crucial element. For some reason, I feel like it’s going to happen soon.

The water is flowing around our ankles as it recedes back to the ocean. The kids and I made it. We aren’t where we were before, but there will be joy here, too. In fact, there already is. A lot of it. We’re healing and rebuilding during this long, unprecedented summer, and it’s going well. Every day for the last three months I’ve told myself, “Everything is going to be fine,” but I’m beginning to doubt this. From where I sit, I don’t think everything is going to be fine. I think it’s going to be great.