As a parent, there have been two lessons I’ve tried to impress upon my kids: 1) learn to go to sleep on your own, and 2) life isn’t fair. As a grown up, that second one still is a bitter pill.

Yes, I’ve been very fortunate to have always had a roof over my head, food in the fridge, decent health insurance, though the relationship that gave me these things came at a cost, too: Loneliness, lack of emotional support, lack of intimate connection. I’ve walked away from that safe but lonely life for a second chance to get to know and love myself, nurture and heal myself, provide and care for myself. It’s not easy, but most of the time I feel confirmed that I’ve done the right thing.

But then there are days where real life smacks you in the face and you realize that life is just unfair.

For the past 14 years I’ve driven a minivan. I was thrilled to finally get it–my first new car–while I was pregnant with my second daughter. My old car, a Ford Explorer, had taken to suddenly turning off, regardless of where I was, or how fast I was driving. I’d begun feeling unsafe driving it, and had been asking my husband to replace it for several months during my pregnancy before, finally, he did. That was in ’04. In the past few years, I’ve been asking for an upgrade. The van was a Honda. It would last forever. In that same time frame, he’d bought an elegant sedan and more recently had begun eyeballing Teslas. In the past two years, as the van, like our marriage, began showing more wear and tear, I began petitioning a bit louder for a new(er) car.

Now we’re separated. In mediation for divorce. And as I fight to fairly divide the pennies, the dollars of the past quarter century of our lives, his responsibility to share the cost of summer camp for his kids, he’s gone out and bought a Tesla.

Two weeks ago I took in an older foster dog. She’s sweet, but has gut issues, is obedient, but has arthritis. I will love her well for as long as I can, but she’s not a brand new, bright and shiny dog.

A dear friend said this morning that she is practicing radical acceptance. Me, too. I am practicing. But growth is hard. This move out of my home, divorce from my marriage, reckoning with my personal skeletons is changing me, but I’m not yet fully evolved. So, while I’ll go walk my new, creaky, sweet dog and I’ll drive my old, scratched, dented van, I’ll keep breathing. Even if those breaths come out with a sigh of injustice.