I bought a duplex with my ex so we could co-parent our son. He has 2 rooms and I get privacy.

• I split from my husband, but we bought a duplex together.
• We live upstairs and downstairs to co-parent our son.
• It's not perfect, but our unusual setup works for us.

A couple of years ago, my husband and I decided to split up. We also decided to buy a house together.

We were on good terms. No one had been unfaithful or abusive. We'd been close friends, and then we'd fallen in love, and then, somehow, we'd fallen out of it. It might have been the stress of living through a pandemic with a toddler, or the (probably ill-advised) decision to stay with my parents to try to make it easier, or the fact that we'd always been politically divided, and that divide was feeling more impossible to reconcile than ever before.

Whatever it was, we'd found ourselves living in a rental house in the suburbs with a 4-year-old, feeling desperately unhappy most of the time.

The marriage wasn't working, but it felt overwhelming to think about leaving it. I had no idea how to navigate a separation with a small child: how to explain to my son that he wouldn't get bedtime kisses from both parents, how to manage the costs of two households, and how to navigate the complexities of scheduling as a single mom.

We bought a duplex together

We thought about renting two apartments in the same building. But most of the apartment buildings in town were prohibitively expensive. Before we decided to split, we'd been talking about buying a house after years of renting. But now that dream was out of reach… wasn't it?

And then I thought: what if we bought a duplex? The mortgage would be lower than the rent on two apartments, and we'd be building equity. We'd be able to collaborate on parenting, but we'd have our own space. We weren't the kind of exes who didn't ever want to see each other; we were just the kind of exes who didn't want to be together. It might work.

We found a place quickly, a rambling duplex on a sunny block close to the train. There was a hornet's nest in the wall, and the peeling paint was what my son called "sort of a poop-ish color." But the layout worked, and it was in our price range. We made an offer. It was accepted.

He has a room on each floor

We explained the separation to our son in terms of real estate. "Dad's going to live upstairs, Mom's going to live downstairs, and you're going to go back and forth." He accepted this with equanimity (probably because he was eating a Popsicle at the time). We made his two bedrooms as similar as possible, acquiring a toddler bed identical to the one he had and dividing his pile of stuffed animals equally between them.

We've been in the duplex for two years now. It's mostly been a successful experiment. If my son wants to sleep with his stuffed owl or wear his favorite plaid shirt, we don't have to drive across town to retrieve it. If my ex has an evening meeting on one of his nights, my son can come downstairs and read "Harry Potter" with me for an hour. And on my ex's mornings, I can come out on our shared front porch to see my son and kiss his head.

My ex and I have privacy

There are also downsides. One is that small children are very loud. On the mornings I don't have my son, it would be nice to sleep in, especially if I've been out late with friends or at a rehearsal. But instead, I'm woken up at 7 a.m. by his small feet thundering across my ex's kitchen floor, which happens to be directly above my bedroom. Sleeping in only ever happens when I'm out of town.

And then there's dating, which has actually mostly been fine. My ex and I both have less privacy than we otherwise might, but we haven't (yet) had any awkward run-ins with new partners. There have probably been people who didn't want to date me because of our set-up, but I've also met several people with unconventional arrangements of their own: they're living with their ex to save money, or they see their ex and kids every morning because the kids take the bus from their house.

These kinds of arrangements are obviously not going to work for everybody. But I think it's worth saying that there are positive ways for a marriage to end. Sometimes exes are happier and get along better than they did before. Sometimes kids are fine. When my ex and I first split up, I didn't know that. I thought the end of a marriage was always terrible. And there are a lot of situations where it is terrible, but there are also situations where it isn't.

After we'd been in the new house for a year, my son asked me about our setup for the first time. "Why do I go back and forth?" he said while I was tucking him in at bedtime. I told him that some families work best when the parents live together, and others work best when the parents live across town or in different states. "This is what works best for our family," I said, and he thought about this. And then he said, "OK," pulled up his blanket, and went to sleep.