After an unexpected ending changed the future she thought she knew, Arkansas author Tara Housh began building a life she couldn’t yet imagine—and found the inspiration for her debut novel, Rainbow Season.
Some moments divide our lives into a before and an after. Mine arrived as a text message.
“I’ve been lying to you.”
I stared at the words on my phone, trying to understand what I was reading. Then came the sentence I was even less prepared for. “I think we need to divorce.”
I called him. No answer.
I called again.
Nothing.
The person with whom I had built a life had just told me, through a handful of words on a screen, that our marriage was ending—and then he went silent. There are some kinds of news the mind cannot absorb all at once. You read the words again, almost as if they might rearrange themselves into something less devastating.
They didn’t.
When a marriage ends unexpectedly, you don’t only grieve the relationship. You grieve the future you thought was waiting—the holidays, the places you would go, the ordinary evenings no one thinks to photograph, the milestones, growing older, believing you knew who would be sitting beside you when you got there.
For so long, I thought I knew what came next. Suddenly, I didn’t.
I wish I could say I recognized all that uncertainty as freedom or that I looked at the blank space in front of me and saw possibility. I didn’t. A blank page is only exciting when you’re ready to write on it. Mine terrified me.
In March 2023, still living in the aftermath of that text message, I traveled to Boquete, Panama with a friend. I didn’t get on that plane as a healed woman embarking on an inspirational journey to find herself. I was still hurting, trying to imagine a future that looked nothing like the one I had planned. Mostly, I was trying to keep moving.
One morning, my friend was outside doing yoga when I heard her yell for me. There was enough urgency in her voice that I thought something was wrong, so I hurried outside. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the sky.
Stretching in front of Volcán Barú in Panama was one of the most beautiful, vibrant rainbows I had ever seen. The colors seemed almost impossibly bright against the green landscape. It was the kind of sight that makes you stop and simply look.
So, I did.
Nothing about my circumstances changed on that balcony. The hurt didn’t disappear, and I didn’t suddenly understand why everything had happened. But there, in the middle of a season that had felt so dark, was something breathtakingly beautiful I hadn’t expected. For the first time in a while, I wondered whether my life might still hold things I couldn’t see yet, too.
Maybe the storm didn’t get to decide what came after it.
Over the next three years, I began living as though there might still be something extraordinary ahead. Healing rarely moves in a straight line. There were difficult days and fears I still carried, but slowly my world began to expand.
I earned my doctorate. I stood beneath the Northern Lights, watched sunsets spill across Greece, explored Alaska and eventually found myself climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, exhausted and determined, but reaching the summit. A woman who once couldn’t imagine what came next had somehow become a woman willing to climb a mountain just to see what was waiting at the top.
None of those experiences erased what happened before them or proved heartbreak had been “worth it.” I don’t believe we need to turn everything painful into a blessing before we’re allowed to move beyond it. They simply reminded me how much life was still available to me. And somewhere in rediscovering that life, I found Paige Martin.
Paige is the main character of my debut women’s fiction novel, Rainbow Season. Approaching her forty-fifth birthday, she faces a devastating betrayal that ends her marriage and the future she thought she understood. A trip to Panama is already planned. She nearly cancels it but ultimately decides to go.
Paige’s circumstances aren’t mine, and Rainbow Season is not my autobiography. But I gave her something I understood intimately: the experience of having the future she thought she knew disappear before she was ready. And I gave her Panama.
I know the emotional landscape Paige walks through—the fear of standing at the edge of a life you didn’t choose and wondering who you’re supposed to be now. I know what it feels like when the future you carefully planned suddenly becomes a blank page.
Eventually, I discovered something else about a blank page. It is also yours. That realization became the heartbeat of Rainbow Season.
I didn’t want to write about a broken woman waiting for someone else to put her back together. I wanted Paige to be afraid and brave at the same time. I wanted her to experience adventure, connection and joy without pretending any of it erased what had happened to her. Most of all, I wanted her to choose herself.
One line came to capture Paige’s journey: When the life she planned ended, the life she needed began.
I was writing about Paige, but I couldn’t ignore how much truth there was in those words for me, too. The life I have now isn’t the life I was grieving when I received that text message. I couldn’t have planned this one because, at the time, I wasn’t capable of imagining it.
Today, when I use the phrase “rainbow season,” I don’t mean reaching some magical place where nothing hurts anymore. It doesn’t mean the storm wasn’t real or that I should be grateful for everything that happened simply because something good eventually came afterward. Some things hurt because they were painful. Some endings leave scars. Some chapters deserve to be grieved.
The storm is part of my story. But it isn’t the whole story. Some storms don’t end you. They clear the way for your rainbow season. For a long time, I thought healing meant getting far enough away from the pain that eventually it wouldn’t matter anymore. Now I think it may be something more tender: looking backward with compassion for the woman who couldn’t yet see what was waiting for her—and then looking around at the life she created.
Of all the photographs from the life I couldn’t yet imagine, perhaps the one that means the most is still the rainbow in Panama—the morning I desperately needed to believe beautiful things could still happen.
Sometimes I wonder what I would tell the woman I was three years ago if I could stand beside her on that balcony again. I wouldn’t tell her everything was going to be okay. She probably wouldn’t have believed me. I wouldn’t tell her everything she would accomplish or all the places she would go. I think I would simply stand beside her and look at that rainbow.
Then I’d tell her: Keep going. There is more life ahead of you than you can see from here.
I used to think that rainbow was telling me the storm was over. Three years later, I understand it differently. The storm was part of my story. It just wasn’t going to be the end of it.
About the Author: Tara Housh is an Arkansas author, educator and lifelong traveler. Her debut women’s fiction novel, Rainbow Season, is available at bookstores everywhere, or online at Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.
