When my family moved apartments a few summers ago, the first thing I did was call a junk removal company to haul away our cheaply upholstered black love seat. In our new place, the sun hits the hardwood floor in honeyed beams so rich, we could sip them from a spoon. Windows look out from every wall, their deep sills crowded with plants. This space deserved a carved mango wood coffee table just kissing the woven area rug and throw blankets draped just so across a custom linen sofa. The old bargain couch had to go.

Replacing it was the hard part.

For years, I loved a West Elm couch the way you love museum art: reverently, from a distance. My ideal model was an unaffordable two-piece chaise sectional, but I could swing the 92-inch standard sofa in a steel gray woven linen with the 47-inch seat depth. It was roughly the dimensions of a twin bed; as someone who will probably never know the luxury of having a guest bedroom, this felt as close as I could get. I ordered it an hour after I signed our new apartment’s lease.

I spent my children’s early years living in homes that were never wholly my own. I had my son at 21 and my daughter 15 months later. When they were little, their father constantly criticized the messes they made in our tiny New York apartment — toys scattered across the living room, bottles and blankets strewed over the kitchen counter and night stand. I tried to suit his standards, but my efforts were never enough. I left him when my kids were 2 and 3, moving us to a basement room in my mother’s split-level home in the suburbs outside Philadelphia. There, again, I could make no decisions over my space. Buying a new, adult couch in a space of my own felt monumental.

It wasn’t long after we moved in that the home I’d dreamed of for a decade was full of warmth and love and pet hair and a Roomba that ran at 1 p.m. on the dot. But the couch, which I’d envisioned would remain in a constant state of artful arrangement, was in a constant state of chaos.

It was not meant for two active teenagers and their revolving door of friends or for the puppy that grew from a 25-pound furry shark into a 150-pound bear with no concept of personal space. Then the cats came, preferring the upholstered armrests to their $139 scratching posts. Six months in, the sofa’s middle began to bow. Squished shoulder to shoulder on the bench cushion one night, we heard a splintering crack. All three of us ripped through the canvas and onto the frame. The split wood scratched my son’s thigh and left a gouge in the hardwood floor — a mark that is still there.

In this couch, I had envisioned I would find stability: physical proof that I’d made it, after years of toxic relationships, housing challenges and personal and professional backslides. It was, to my mind, evidence that I was a good mother, a label I’d been chasing all of my parenting years. But staring at the sunken cushion, I noticed a stain that was probably once something sticky and had collected so much lint that it was a deep dirty gray. The sofa suddenly looked cheap and sad — not evidence of my ability to provide a loving and comfortable home for my children but the remnants of a try-hard woman who would never live up to the things she aspired to be.