Back in the days when Scott was trying to sell me on moving from New York to Seattle, he’d drive me around in his shiny black jeep looking for rainbows.

He drove patiently, his seat so far back that he was almost horizontal, searching the blackened sky for hints of color. Fleeting beams of sunlight would flicker and dance in his eyes illuminating his face with a dusky glow and I'd sit next to him like a puppy looking for the promised rainbows around every corner.

As it turns out, I’ve lived here for more than a decade now and can count the number of actual sightings in two, okay, three fingers. One was the day Scott first spoke of them, the second was two days after our first son, Kai, was born and the third the Monday after he returned from yet another extended business trip.

On the eve preceding the third rainbow sighting I was sure that I was leaving him. So sure in fact that I had already taken down all of the baby pictures that hung on the wall of our rasta yellow kitchen. I’d already driven to True Value Hardware where I had purchased two big green storage bins, complete with matching padlocks.

I had stayed up long past midnight the previous evening running around our little house in my underwear and one of his old rugby shirts, methodically stashing every little thing I cared about as our son lay quietly in his crib breathing in angel whispers.

I filled the bins with every picture we had ever taken as a family. Inside lay 692 pictures of us in Greece, Thailand, Africa. Images of us sitting naked on the floor of our sun room tossing babies in the air, catching them in heaps of laughter. Birthday cards, ticket stubs, remnants of a life I was now intent on leaving.

With two bins padlocked and hidden I realized I wasn’t nearly done packing and thus made another trip back to True Value.  Kai sat perched on my hip in his dinosaur pajamas, sucking on his pacifier.

The clerk recognized me as the storage bin lady, the one with thin smiles and a sense of urgency about packing things. She must have felt badly for my son who clearly didn’t realize that his mother was always halfway between staying and leaving, mentally the bags were always packed.

This particular trip of my husband's set me off for a reason: I was supposed to be there too. Having worked for the same company for many years, this was to be my reunion with the workforce, my I-am-more-than-just-a-mom reappearance in front of my former colleagues. 

But instead the night before we were supposed to leave I stayed up until 4 a.m. arguing with Scott over why he wasn’t justified in reading my journal, my e mail, my mind. I stayed up until my eyes were burning and my throat was dry. I expended so much energy trying to justify my point that when I tried to swallow it was like drinking sand.

And when at 3:52 a.m. I began to shed a stream of fruitless tears, Scott lost all patience, turned his back to me, and promptly fell asleep. I don’t think I even moved that night. I lay there with swollen eyes and a racing heart listening to the rhythm of Kai's breath and wondering how I ever ended up marrying a man with a heart of stone.

In the morning, Scott prepared to leave and I walked around the kitchen, half awake, trying to muster the energy to perhaps pull it together and join him.  Our bags sat half packed in the middle of the living room floor as reminder that it perhaps still not too late to pull this trip off in my typical last minute fashion.

If I could just muster up the energy I could probably find Kai a couple pairs of matching socks, my hiking boots, a toothbrush. I could almost imagine being up to carrying him, his bottles, a car seat, and sippy cups throughout various airports for the next nine hours, but in the end I just didn’t have it in me.

I retreated to our bedroom, burrowed under the covers, and listened to the beat of the endless rain.

When it became more than clear that we wouldn’t be joining him, Scott called a taxi and matter-of-factly prepared to leave for the airport.

I managed to drag myself out of bed for a last goodbye barely containing my rage. When he walked away I spit and threw two of his spider plants at him and told him we wouldn’t be home when he got back.

He looked at me as I stood there freezing on the porch step and said quietly:

“I hope that’s not true.”

With that he turned his back to me and walked to the end of the driveway where his bright green taxi cab and its brownish driver had been waiting patiently for the man whose wife was insane.

I flipped him off as he drove away then curled up on the couch and cried.

Three days later, upon his return, all the pictures were back on the walls and I'd spent $50 on a new photo album to display the ones I had packed away.

Somehow the complexity of leaving always defeated me in the end. It was always easier to stay, to curl up with Kai on our cloud couch, to fall asleep to the pitter patter of the rain.

It was always easier to continue looking for the rainbows, hoping for them.  A rainbow, after all, can make even the most perilous darkness appear inviting.