I'm Jen Klassen 

Part 3: Coming Home, Chapter 3: Re-call

In the spring of my second year, I became an empty nester when my youngest set off on an eight-month adventure in Europe. Prior to her departure, I worried that I might be lonely. I had never lived on my own, my entire adult life having been spent tending to the needs of a husband and children. As it turned out, it took me a total of about 10 minutes to adjust.

Living alone and having only my own needs to consider gave me the space I needed to stop organizing my life around anyone but myself and come to know myself without interruption.

During this time, my divorce was finalized and I began the process of taking back my original surname. This was not an easy decision for me as my children carry the last name of their father. I’d grown my children inside my body, birthed them, and carried the majority of the mental load required to raise them. It seemed unfair to me that, after everything my body and life had given to motherhood, I was the one expected to let go of the shared name that had tied us together.

Taking back my original surname wasn’t about rejecting my family history; it was about reclaiming myself within a patriarchal system that had never quite made room for that.

It was a small decision on paper but a meaningful one in my body.

Nevertheless, I was elated when I received my new passport with my own, true last name. It felt like coming home to myself.

Another significant change during this time was selling our family home. This was the final step that untangled me from the old life I’d shared with a husband of 30 years. There was both celebration and grief in that transition.

In fact, this is the anatomy of divorce; a tapestry of joy, sorrow, relief, and loss.

Our shared history wasn’t all bad. There were years of raising children, shared holidays, ordinary days that mattered, and memories I will always carry with me. There were also moments that were not our finest—times shaped by immaturity, fear, and patterns we didn’t yet know how to interrupt. Both are true and all of it needed to be named and processed before I could decide what I would take with me and what I would release.

I don’t need to erase my entire life in order to move forward.

I will take the good with me. I will honour the history of my family without remaining bound to the form it once took. My heart is big enough to hold all of it. That chapter is complete—not denied, not rewritten, simply finished.

I found my perfect home in a new city 30 minutes from where I’d raised my family for the past 25 years. I wanted a fresh start where no one knew me. This was a chance to reinvent myself and my life as I’d known it. I moved into a beautiful two-bedroom apartment that was all mine. Here I would create my new life. I rediscovered my love of colourful, vibrant spaces.

And so, I began in earnest, with the help of my oldest childhood friend, to create a home that had ‘Jen Klassen’ written all over it. Together, we re-called Jen Klassen —we essentially called her back to us.

We remembered and, in doing so, re-membered the lost parts of me that were buried under years of responsibility, compromise, self-sacrifice, and care-taking.

In her most foundational work, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells the story of La Loba, who wanders the desert gathering the bones of what has been lost, singing over the bones until life returns. Creating my home felt like that —an act of love and loyalty, calling myself back bone-by-bone.

But resurrection is never the end of the story, is it? Life moves in cycles from building, breaking, and beginning again. What followed was a series of events that threatened to shatter the stability and equilibrium I’d crafted with such care and intention.

At this point in my transformation, work was the one area in my life that was misaligned. Having a salary position at a large corporate company had always been a poor match for me but was a job I clung to out of necessity. The truth is —I hated my job. The pace, demands, pressure, and almost round the clock vigilance felt like an assault on my nervous system that I could only escape when on vacation for three weeks out of the year. Even then, however, I never quite knew what I would be returning to and this made it difficult to really disconnect even thousands of miles away.

What followed was an event that I won’t detail here, but it involved a deep breach of trust—one that made it impossible for me to stay.

And so, I found myself single, an empty nester, in a new home in and new city, and on a leave of absence with no return to work date. For the first time in my life I had no role to perform, no expectations or deadlines to meet, and no problems to solve but my own.

And in my little apartment, all on my own, there were no problems but tending to my mental health which was fragile at the time—a very difficult reality for me as I had always taken great pride in my ability to endure and ‘soldier on’.

Because of the nature of what had happened, and the breach of trust involved, I carried a loneliness I had never known before. And deep and profound terror. Nights were the worst; my mind would spiral into the abyss of worst-case scenarios. Some moments felt simply unbearable and I wanted so desperately for someone to tell me it would be okay. That I’d be okay.

Through it all, however, the safe container I had built over the years—therapy, friendships, my kids, self-trust, and my relationship with a source larger than myself—held.

The center held even in my darkest nights. And though I often felt alone, I knew I wasn’t truly alone. I clung to that knowing like a life raft.

There is an irony here that I can’t ignore. The job that harmed me also made possible the healing container I needed, so I used up every last penny of my mental health benefits on twice-weekly therapy appointments. It was during these appointments that my therapist of many years challenged me to consider the ways I had abandoned myself in order to sit at the table of achievement all those years ago when I ran towards it in a desperate attempt to secure safety and belonging.

She gently called into question my buried dreams of coaching, writing projects, and all the programs and workshops I had created and abandoned. Then firmly, but lovingly, she challenged me to revisit them. And every time I came back to her with an idea for a new course I thought I should take or certification I believed I required, she challenged me again on my belief that education and status would qualify me to do the thing I already knew how to do. Rude.

And so, I began to re-call long forgotten dreams. I taped 5 large poster boards to my bedroom walls and then, with old journals, university papers, and abandoned projects spread out on the floor, I took my sharpie and wrote the words of Frances Mayes in Women In Sunlight,

“This is it. This is where I create the future”

I listed the things I yearn for, what lights me up, what I know, and everything I hate. Then, on the last poster board I wrote, The Map. The biggest revelation of all was the list of things I hated – every single thing I had ever turned to for security were the very things I hate: pressure, performance, competition, targets, systems, hierarchy, patriarchy, convention, and being told what to do. My body already knew what my head had been refusing to accept.

I was never meant to build a life inside systems that asked me to abandon myself. The work, I was beginning to understand, was not about finding the right table—but about arriving there rooted in my own sovereignty.