It took 45 minutes from the time I placed the ad on Craigslist —Free couch to anyone who wants it!—for two young women to show up in our parking space behind our house and haul it away. I was loading sippy cups into the dishwasher when I heard their voices, and I peered out the window to see them—two 20-somethings in shorts and t-shirts heaving the overstuffed white hulk of a sleeper sofa into the back of their SUV.

That couch had been with me for 10 years and six moves around the country and when I described it in the ad as “gently used,” I wasn’t quite telling the truth. I’d bought the couch when I was 28, a single working woman living in Washington, D.C. It was my first real purchase, bought in the heady days just after I’d landed a promotion from researcher to full-fledged editor at National Geographic magazine. I’d spent many nights curled up on that couch, jotting notes in the margins of manuscripts. Later, my husband and I shared our fi rst kiss on that couch. And, when he was offered a post-doc at UC-Berkeley, and I decided to jettison my job and follow him away from everything I knew, we hired a man from the want-ads to cart it down the tight stairwell of my apartment building and put it on a truck bound for California.

As my husband’s academic career took off and I started and quit several jobs, we hauled the couch from Berkeley to Chicago and then to Boston. I nursed our son, William, through nights of colic on that couch, and by the time our daughter, Jessie, was born, I’d given up working outside the home completely, choosing instead to spend mornings with her on the sofa, teaching her Pat-A-Cake, getting her dressed, and folding what sometimes seemed like hundreds of tiny shirts and onesies.

Last week, I watched the couch make its final, ungraceful descent down a flight of stairs as the men who’d delivered our son’s new bunk bed took it out to the curb. I was determined to get it picked up before night came with its forecast of rain, so I rushed to the computer, logged onto Craigslist, and searched for words to describe it—settling on “very comfortable,” “attractive,” and “gently used.” None seemed enough to embody all that the couch had meant to me, but my main mission was to get rid of it. After my quick success, I called my husband to tell him, feeling a combination of triumph and longing for the person I’d been back when I first bought it.

How much my life has changed. I no longer work as a journalist or even in an offi ce. I don’t have a business card or a boss. Through the years of moving and motherhood, I’ve let my career fall by the wayside. I’m now a part-time freelance writer, working between childcare drop-offs and pick-ups in my jeans at a desk in our basement, rising intermittently to wash a load of clothes, marinade a pound of chicken, or haul out the trash. In any given year, I earn enough to buy myself an occasional sweater. I am, I reluctantly admit, a member of the “Opt- Out Revolution,” a place I’ve come to in steps, some so huge I fretted over them for months and some so small I didn’t even notice myself taking them.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss my old life. I miss the clear-cut trade of work hours for a paycheck. I miss black pantsuits and shoes that click when I walk. I miss riding the bus each morning with my coffee, newspaper, and sense of genuine purpose. And the hush that would come over the room on the ninth fl oor at National Geographic headquarters when a photographer just back from Sierra Leone or Borneo would fl ash breathtaking images from the fi eld onto the screen before us, and I would sense that I was part of something much bigger than myself.

Mostly I miss the ambition I saw in those young women after they’d wrestled their prize into their truck and tied it down. It was the way they got in and drove off—with the urgency of people who have somewhere to get to and the freedom of people who have no one to take care of but themselves—that made me catch my breath.

At 39, I’m starting to understand that life has seasons, and mine is nearing the end of summer. What concerns me now are things like how to calm the anxiety brimming in my son’s eyes or whether my daughter will grow up with a positive body image.

Where my heart used to leap at a travel assignment to a faraway place or a positive review from my boss, I now find joy in moments no one else sees: striding behind William as he wobbles down the sidewalk on his first bike ride to school or watching Jessie wrap her mouth around the word “spider” for the first time. It’s then that the label “Opt-Out” seems all wrong to me. In truth, I feel more “in” my life than ever, connected to a purpose—the love and care of my children—that is pure in a way no job I ever had was.

And yet, as I watched the couch disappear down our street, I couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of those women, perched at the outset of their adult lives and careers. I wondered: Who are they? What do they do? What will they tell their friends about their great find?

“Can you believe it?” they might say. “We saw the ad on Craigslist and got there first!”

I wish now that I’d gone outside to talk to them before they left. But what would I have said? That you have to press the metal crossbar down hard so the bed doesn’t bump up in the middle. That the feet need new scuff pads. That the small punctures on the arms are from our cats and the stain on that one pillow is just apple juice. Is there anything I know that they might not figure out on their own?

Maybe.

I would have told them to enjoy it.

Katherine Ozment is a freelance writer working on a memoir and a collection of essays about motherhood. Her writing has been published in The New York Times (“Modern Love”), National Geographic, Salon, Child, Boston, The Boston Globe Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Brevity, Babble, Literary Mama, and Brain Child, among others.