Reviewed by Kathryn Haueisen
Posted on: February 27, 2025
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Leah Fisher’s description of her decision to spend a year traveling without her husband, and how that led to rekindling her affection for Charley and her passion for life, is encouraging. If more couples in their middle-aged years knew it was possible to separate on good terms for a specific purpose and a pre-determined amount of time, the divorce rate among long-term marriages would likely decline significantly.
As happens in many empty-nest marriages, Leah’s relationship with her husband was getting lopsided. Charley poured more and more of his time and energy into work. She wanted to rekindle some of the spark from their earlier, pre-parent years. Their differing agendas brought her to the point of wanting to do something drastic to give their marriage a boost. He insisted he could not possibly put his work on hold for a year to travel, but eventually, reluctantly, blessed her decision to do the traveling alone. Her decision to do home stays with some of the poorest people she’d ever met reshaped her priorities, and made her immensely grateful for the husband back home.
Her Epilogue hits the nail on the head: “I realized that these couples were seeking a breakup, not so much from each other as from stagnant or outgrown patterns of marriage. They were fighting for change! Underneath their struggles was the wish for a fresh and dynamic marriage, preferably with the same partner.”
Leah takes the reader on a journey to several cultures, where she makes friends with the children she encounters, leading her to consider herself a global grandma. Her efforts to mitigate the profound suffering she witnesses in her travels is commendable. She creatively reaches out to partner with others to provide simple but effective resources to help children cope with the enormity of losses in their families and communities. In doing so, she joins a global network of disaster response personnel who volunteer in the devastated communities left behind by calamities of nature.
Her descriptions of how quickly she makes new friends with local people should inspire anyone willing to leave the familiar comforts of home to explore the way others in our global village live. Using play, the universal language of love, she builds strong ties with children in every culture she visits. Her descriptions of struggling to communicate through language barriers will relate to anyone who has found themselves using pantomime to negotiate the basic essential of life in a foreign country.
Readers will also benefit from her description of her efforts to stay connected to her husband through their periodic short-term reunions. Sometimes he came to where she was staying, and they explored the area together. Other times she returned home to spend time with her husband and tend to the needs of her elderly mother.
Fisher has gifted us with a heart-warming account of the challenge of loving ourselves while also figuring out how to best love others.