Excerpt From ‘Ring of Salt’ by Betsy Cornwell ’10

After the purchase came through, I texted the survivors’ group and told them that as far as I was concerned, any of them could come for a residency anytime they liked. The first one to take me up on that was Aisling. She brought her kids for a weekend and they slept in the guest room, and we piled into the car to go to the beach together and they screamed and ran around with Robin until they were all exhausted. I made them roast chicken and potatoes with a wild sorrel salad, picked by Robin, for dinner, and caramel-apple cinnamon rolls for breakfast. We ate with the same gusto as the children, and with caramel in my mouth I remembered the winter months after Tommy had left when I could hardly bear to eat dry toast. I could feel the weight I’d gained in the years since then, soft on my hips and arms and chin and belly. I was glad. 

Aisling looked at me across the table cluttered with crayons and crumbs. “Any mother would be glad to come here,” she said, “just as it is.” 

So just as we were, the house and me, I announced the knitting factory’s first official residency. Inspired by activist and theologian Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry, and by my own profound need for rest, I decided I wanted this one to not be the arts residency I’d first imagined, but a rest residency. I wanted to give another single mother the time and space to rest that I’d been craving for years. The rest that filled the exhausted survivalist dreams of every single mother I knew. 

I asked people not to include their names when they wrote their applications because I assumed I’d mostly be hearing from people I already knew, who already followed the  project, and I didn’t want to be swayed by any of those friendships. 

But the call for applications went viral. It was shared thousands of times. People from all over the world told me how much this idea meant to them, as single parents, as children of single parents, as people who love a single parent.

I got so many applications that names didn’t matter. 

I read every one with care. So many broke my heart. Every single parent who applied deserved to rest. And, of course, they deserved so much more. There were no best applications, none most deserving—I felt and still feel a horror at the idea of ranking them. 

In the end I offered the residency to a woman named Tawasul. She had brought her two young children from Sudan to Belfast, where she started a women’s support group and community garden for refugees, and where she now works for a human rights organization. I was in awe of her strength and kindness. 

So many people told me that just writing to me, telling the story of their single parenthood and their children, and why they struggled to get the rest they needed, helped them affirm for themselves that they deserved that rest, even if they’d never been able to ask for it before.

When we don’t write our own stories, too often they get written for us: by a controlling ex or a cruel parent, by overwhelming cultural stereotypes that insist they know how our lives will play out better than we do—even just by our own worst critics, the part of ourselves that believe what other people say is true. 

When we tell our own stories, we choose how they’re told, how they end, how they begin again. 

The knitting factory had become a way for me to tell my story. But reading those applications, I thought: What kind of story was the house going to be? I’d hoped, back in the castle days, maybe even when we moved here, that it would be a happily ever after. 

But even with the miraculous happy-ending moment of the purchase coming through, a magic ending I wouldn’t even have believed in a novel, I didn’t see it as a happily-ever-after story anymore. Happy endings still haunted me sometimes; sometimes they haunted me so much they nearly broke my heart—the happy ending I thought I’d found when I was younger: a lasting marriage, lasting love, more children in the farmhouse I’d dreamed Tommy and I would share. In my ugliest, tenderest heart, sometimes I still longed for those other homes. Sometimes I still longed for my husband. 

But, like every person who wrote to me, I had mended those longings into something stronger. Mine was a secondhand, darned dream: the dream of a divorcée, a single mom, a woman who fled my parents and my country before I was really done growing up, and who’d had to start over several times since then. 

The Old Knitting Factory wasn’t a happy ending. It was a chance. I had the chance to mend this house, this old factory where a hundred years ago women had worked to remake their lives. I’d hoped I could remake my own story here, too. 

And I had. Writing about The Old Knitting Factory, sharing my story and the story of this house, brought my son and me home—largely through small crowdfunding donations from people who recognized some part of their stories in mine. My words and their faith made my home, my dream, come true. That’s the realest magic spell I know. 

I take my life in my hands. I feel for the holes, I find them, and I mend them where I can.

That is the story I am telling now.

[From Ring of Salt: A Memoir of Finding Home and Hope on the Wild Coast of Ireland by Betsy Cornwell. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.]