Life is boxes, tape, documents and an endless series of checks.

We are moving. During the past few weeks, I have signed countless papers, assembled W2s, IRA statements, released my credit history to faceless strangers and begged, borrowed and darn near stolen to qualify for a home while my Colorado Springs townhouse remains on the market. My checkbook looks thin, beaten. Checks in two-, three- and four-figure amounts have been ripped from its paper mouth.

But money is not bothering me. All this will work out.

For the last two days, I’ve been packing. Amazing how much hides in a two-bedroom apartment in which you have lived only 11 months.

Packing is tedious. I’d forgotten how much so. But packing is not bothering me.

My son told me about two weeks ago that he hates his stepmother. Since then, with gentle prodding from me, he has admitted to more and more unrest about the life he lives in what I have always known was her home – not Robby’s or his father’s. But hers.

His sadness - this is what is bothering me.

I’d always thought we were the exceptional split family, with the rare good stepmother/son relationship. In fact, I’d been a wee bit jealous of her. While I never liked the split in parenting time, or thought the judge had made the best decision for Robby, I figured it was OK. Robby was doing well. He liked both his homes. He was loved in both.

Often, I’d suspected his dad did not provide him with enough to do. That Robby was neglected in the bustle of caring for a hobby ranch teaming with animals. I’d believed since they’d married that my ex jumped for his wife, and tended to Robby’s needs second. That my ex’s fear of being left skewed the world for him, caused him to agree to things – such as the move to an 80-acre ranch truly in the middle of nowhere – because his terror of being left again was so overwhelming.

They’d hoped Robby would like ranch life. He does not. But instead of finding new things for him to do, instead of taking him to the small library there, or arranging time for him to see his school friends, finishing the long-promised tree house or buying the long-promised trampoline, he plays video games there. He does chores. He attends school, and does his homework.

My son is not given to drama, so I believe the things he is telling me. I believe he has wanted to tell me for some time, but because he doesn’t like to rock the boat, he’s kept it inside.

I question him one night as I am tucking him into bed.

“Do you feel loved at your dad’s house?” I ask him.

He looks away from me, up at the ceiling. He makes a clucking sound with his tongue. This is what he does when he’s trying not to cry.

“Just by my dad,” he says.

“Is Sherry mean to you?”

“Yes.”

His answer shocks me.

“How?” I ask. “Has she hit you?”

I wait for the answer, coiled tight like a snake ready to strike her in the jugular if he tells me she has.

“No. She just yells at me.”

“How much?”

“A lot,” he says, clucking, eyes rolled to the ceiling, tears gleaming anyway just inside the bottom lid.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She just does.”

“Are you happy there?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Do you like living there?”

No answer.

“Do you like school there?”

He nods.

Finally, after a series of questions – some answered, some not – I understand that he would like to live her fulltime, but still attend his little school in which he knows and loves everyone.

“Well,” I say, wrapping up the conversation as lightly as I can. “That would be a very long bus ride, wouldn’t it?”

I cuddle him close, tell him how much I love him, how special he is, say nothing about his father or Sherry. But inside, I feel no such calm.

I think about the judge who made a decision so biased it shocked the child court advocate, who had recommended my son spend his school days, and most of his time, with me. The judge – a former city dweller turned mountain goat - said Robby did not need all the extra curricular activities of a large school, when he had the mountains at his back door.

Shocked, emotionally and financially drained, I tried to accept the verdict. Eighteen months and $10,000 had passed; I could have appealed. I chose not to.

Now, I wonder if I made the right decision.

It is this I think about as I pack. The life that could have been, should have been, for my son.

On a shelf behind his bed, I find four soccer trophies, all of them a little dusty. I dust each one, wrapping them individually in sheets of newspaper. The trophies are from Dillon and Colorado Springs. The most recent, a bobble head we both found particularly cute.

This happy character, his right leg bent in a perpetual kick, saddens me. Here is the sport Robby never will be able to fully pursue because he cannot be on an organized team. In the tiny town in which he attends school, there are no team sports. No band. No choir. No nothing. His time here is too limited, his ability to make practices too impossible.

I open his closet door and see a skateboard and helmet. This, for about four months, was his passion. But he had no one with whom to practice, no one to egg him on to bigger stunts. No one skateboards in a ranching community. Roads are gravel. Homes are at least 80 acres apart. Kids don’t gather after school. No one “hangs out.” In this apartment complex, we see almost no children. I took him to skate parks, but without a partner, his confidence waned. The skateboard vanished behind a wall of hanging clothes.

All these tiny things make my heart ache. It bleeds, an ever so thin but constant trickle, for my son.

This move, I hope, will be about healing, offering him a new life and refuge from a house controlled by a woman whose maternal instincts never grew.

According to a nonverbal agreement between his father and I, Robby will attend high school where I am. I do not trust him. So instead of hoping he’ll simply do the right thing, I will entrench my son in his new neighborhood so firmly that there will be no question. That Robby’s voice, not the judge’s, or his father’s, will this time decide his future.

Robby and I found our new neighborhood by accident, searching for access to a beautiful park we spied from a busy cross street. We found the park, then walked the neighborhood. It felt, we agreed, like home.

The children on our new street are the ones with whom he will attend high school. Before I put an offer in on the house, I checked with the state to learn the quality of the high school – Excellent. I walked the street, talking to neighbors. One after another, they told me how much they love their neighborhood. The children ignore the nearby park to play in the street, they said. The adults gather in driveways to barbecue. Dogs roam free because everyone knows them.

I made an offer that day.

A couple of my friends think I should talk to my ex about what Robby has told me. But I see no way to win with this approach. My ex and his wife both likely will resent me for it. I have asked Robby if he will talk to his father. "No," he says. And when I push some more: "I never will."

So I'll take this silent approach. In addition to all the love and support I have, I will create for him the best home possible. A place that doesn't feel like something temporary, with neighbors who don't duck their heads as they walk without speaking from car to apartment door. A place without harsh words, warm with good food and good friends.

So that when the time comes, if his father balks, Robby can say -- perhaps even without words -- where he feels best. He can finally, fulltime, come home.