My dad and stepmom met Mike last spring, and they said they liked him, but, really, what else would they say? Since they visited my sister last week, I figured I could check in with her and make sure.

So I checked. And, yes, they do. But...

"They think you're getting married," my sister said.

"What?" I squawked.

This is me we're talking about. Put aside that whole not wanting to get married again — this relationship's barely a year old! We haven't even lived in the same city yet! We're not even ready to live together! Plus that whole my-divorce-isn't-even-freaking-final-yet thing.

I casually mentioned this.

"I know, I know," she said. "But Dad thinks so, because you're coming to visit me."

Since Mike and I will be spending Christmas on the East Coast, part of our travel plan involves stopping in Boston to see my sister.

"SO?" I asked.

"Well, when I said you were both coming, he got all thoughtful. You're at his place, then Mike's parents', then here. He said maybe you were making ‘the family rounds.' ‘She must have something to announce!' he said."

"Don't worry," she said hastily, as I started sputtering. "I set him straight."

"But, but...how could he possibly think that?  Doesn't he know me at all?"

"Please," my sister said, "this is our dad. He asked me my senior year of college if my boyfriend and I were pinned. His world is a different place than ours."

Thank God their conversation happened. Otherwise, Thanksgiving might have been awkward, without me even realizing. 

I have to fess up. My secret is not much of a surprise, I'm sure, which hardly makes it a secret, but still I'll feel better straight out saying it. I want my apartment back.

Hold on, now. I'm not saying I want to leave Sam again. That's not it. And I'm not saying I don't want to live with Sam anymore. That's not it either.

I do want to live with him, just not all the time. I do not want to live with anyone all the time.

Maybe this makes me a loser, but it's the truth, so I'm saying it.

I spent all morning re-arranging my office and you know what? In the end I realized creating what I want there is impossible. No matter how many ways I move the furniture, it's all still in that one room, in that one house where we all live. All of us. Together. All the time.

Here's my fantasy: Sam and I get an apartment a few blocks from our house, and we furnish it with the leftover stuff we didn't sell in the garage sale we never had after we moved back in together.

I stay at the apartment a couple nights a week, he stays at the apartment a couple nights a week (if he wants) and three or four nights a week we all stay together, one big happy, nuclear family, at the house.

The girls have each parent five nights a week and two parents about half the time.

Before we separated I'd never lived alone, had no clue how amazing, how liberating, solitude can be.

We have all these ideas about how marriages and families should look, but the reality is parenting small children is brutal. Many of our families are fragmented, parceled out across the country. Thousands of miles apart.

There's no reprieve coming from grandparents, aunts and uncles, or older cousins. No one to take the kids for a couple nights or a couple hours. No villages to raise our children. Our therapist is always asking what we can do to create more space for ourselves.

Welcome to my recipe for disaster. On Thanksgiving Day this year my daughter will be 21. I am trying to combine a milestone birthday, a holiday, the umpteenth anniversary of my father's death and a tentacled divorce. I can't even tell you the half of it because doing so here would compromise the privacy of people close to me. I'm leaning toward Jet Blue. I will focus instead on stuffing.

My favorite stuffing story was the year I decided to make the bird at my house and transport it to my late brother Stephen's home. People were not relaxed. I was never known as the turkey girl and I that year I was going to show them! 

Everyone at the table watched in awe as my mother pulled a plastic bag of innards out of the stuffing cavity. I can still hear my brother's hysteria. This year I'm at it again...shoot me.

For decades it was my mother's Italian egg stuffing recipe. A combination of, roughly, a dozen large eggs, a handful of grated Locatelli cheese, a handful of chopped fresh Italian parsley, enough plain bread crumbs to thicken the mix till it drips off a spoon and a little salt and pepper. This then blows up inside the turkey and is absolutely delicious.

My sister-in-law Susie started going with her sausage & chestnut stuffing and my stuffing allegiance is now challenged. Actually, I am open to stuffing suggestions. Got any?

It is happening. The great Family Holiday Trade.

Mike and I started dating a little over a year ago, a month or so before Thanksgiving. I ended up spending my Thanksgiving break in New York that year, but we went our separate ways on the actual day. There was no way I was taking the train to DC with him to his parents'; we had just started dating. We hadn't put a name on this. We were still holding things at arm's length. Just meeting parents at this point would have been too much.

This year he's coming to my dad's for Thanksgiving and I'm going to his parents' for Christmas. It feels at once completely logical and the Scariest Thing in The World.

Before you scoff at this 33 (Gah! 34!) year old woman's panic at bringing a boy home, at spending a week at a boy's parents' house, let me remind you that Jake and I started dating when I was 15. This is all new to me.

I don't have a childhood home at this point, but my dad's house has always been the place to go when things are hard. He and my stepmom are a happy little island of normalcy in my otherwise questionably functional family. It's quiet there. People are nice to each other. Jake hated it, so I tended to visit alone. I don't think of it as a place where I have a partner.

I'm stupidly nervous about Mike coming with me. What if he hates it, too? There's nothing to do — my family and I play cards, watch movies, putter around the living room. That's what I like about it. What if he doesn't? What if he's bored and cranky?

Plus — there's something so definite about this. If he comes to my parents' house, he's for real. He'll get to know my family. They'll know him. Every step in this direction makes an ending that much messier.

I suppose, at some point, all of these "first things" will be over and then I can stop worrying about them. Right? 

I told my mother-in-law a little lie on the phone last weekend when she called to talk about which American Girl doll should she get Roxie for Christmas. Sam's parents are visiting for the holidays.

We decided on Kit, the Depression-era girl. I said I thought Roxie would like that. Kit would be fine.

I said, "I'm so excited you are coming out for Christmas." It was a lie. And I said it again.

Not a total lie, but mostly more false than true. It's been weird with my in-laws since the split and reunion.

I used to say Sam's parents were much easier visitors than mine. Even enjoyed them. They like their time in the mornings and they stay in a hotel, not my house. Most of the places where my parents are anxious, they are easy-going.

At least, I thought they were easy going.

Actually they're just unwilling to acknowledge anything difficult. My mother-in-law has built herself a happy little Donna Reed world and just you try smuggling any unpleasant kind of truth past that white picket fence.

Try having a conversation about anything real. Oh-no-no. Ignore it, whatever it is, it will go away. If not we can always pretend.

Early on in my separation I gave her a stuttering, obviously uncomfortable five-minute apology for something I thought I'd mishandled. Said this was unfamiliar ground, and I was sorry. Nothing I did or didn't do was meant to hurt or offend, it was just, I didn't know what to do.

She said, "We'd like to have portraits taken of the girls, if that's okay."

Not "Thanks." Not "I appreciate your candor." Not even "OK."

I wasn't sure I'd spoken out loud.

It can make you crazy.

We haven't talked about the separation. We sit down like I did not leave Sam for two years. But it's there in the room, just under the over-stretched veneer.

Probably be there for ever. Unresolved emotions always at the door.

The family joke is that if I had stopped at two children, I'd be the most insufferable mother who ever lived. My two oldest daughters have never given me moment's pause — well maybe a few moments — but I saw none of the screaming, slammed doors, sullen withdrawals or general obnoxious teenaged behavior I've heard about (or exhibited myself as a self-absorbed young lass). Never had to set curfews, never had to mete out punishments for missing said curfews. How clueless I was.

But daughter number three — bless her little heart — has given me a run for the money from the very start. Didn't want to be born; we had to induce. Once born, she didn't want to leave my arms — or the house. Where most babies are lulled to sleep in their car seats, K would scream bloody murder the entire time. I remember one wretched ride where I compulsively kept reaching for the radio knob, as if that could turn her volume down.

Now it's just the opposite. At 15 with her first beau, it's all about The Boy, and she can't wait to get into his car. She doesn't want to spend any time with me — and certainly not with my beau and His Boy, four years younger. And I understand her need to be with her guy, her first love, so it's a delicate dance between her legitimate needs and ours.

So I thought she was being particularly magnanimous, when S and his son came over one Saturday afternoon and she agreed to go iceskating with us at a nearby rink. Afterwards, we came home, baked cookies together. When she said she'd like to skip going out to dinner with all of us to meet her guy, I thought it was a reasonable request. But S got a little pissy, which annoyed me, so I sweet talked her into it. We had a lovely dinner, then she went off with The Boy, S and I retreated up to my room for a movie, his son settled with video games downstairs.

I awoke at 3 am with a start. I was sure K was home by now, but something made me check.

Not in her room.

I have decided to take Adrian to meet Levi's mother. I actually had decided this a few weeks ago, but hadn't said anything to my friends about it just yet.

She has asked to see him a few times now, and it occurred to me that I would like to treat her in the way that I would like her to treat me. I can't really explain it, but it just feels like the right thing to do.

I was going to take Adrian to the Museum of Natural History (the butterfly exhibit open again!), so I asked her if she'd like to come along. We'll be meeting next weekend.

Last night I attended a group meditation/message circle in upstate New York. It was a lot of fun; they did tarot cards, meditation, and then the medium gave people messages.

Immediately the medium looked at me and told me that he had a message from one of my relatives in spirit. He asked, "Are you planning a trip to the city soon?" "Yes, I am," I replied.

"Yeah, this is going to be a huge step for you," he said, adding that the message from my relative was, "Don't worry, she knows her son is an ass and she will like your boy."

Wow. Had I known before that psychics could be this dead on I might not have spent so much money in therapy.

Today I got an email from the medium. He said he saw the Statue of Liberty — and that's what tipped him off that I was going to the city — but he thought that was an odd reference for New York. He said that he thought about it more and decided that the message meant that this meeting with Levi's mother will be very liberating for me.

Liberating? We'll see.
 

According to domaintools.com there are 78 million registered dot-coms on the Internet. That's one way for companies and people to stake their claims. Others have Facebook or MySpace.

How else do people stake claims? During the settling of the West, they could claim large pieces of land by:

● Arriving in Oregon in the 1840s, where a married couple could get 640 acres of land, at no charge, as long as they settled there and improved it.

● Settling on and improving 160 acres in places like Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas under the Homestead Act of 1862.

● Scrambling from a starting line to claim a piece of farmland or town lots during the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889.

Staking a claim, whether virtual or real, is part of our human nature. During divorce, the rush to get a property settlement and a distribution of assets is a painful negotiation. I suppose on some gross level, even children may be treated like part of the distribution of assets.

The push really comes to shove on things like holidays and vacations. Which parent will get the child or children on any given holiday? That decisions has lasting implications.

During my marriage we traveled a lot. We spent summers on Fire Island, sometimes for a month or more. Christmas was always in Jamaica - again sometimes for several weeks.

After we separated, negotiations between me and my ex were hourly, daily, weekly, but especially celebration specific. These haggling sessions were volatile and frustrating. Every hour I spent away from my kids felt like part of me was being ripped out.

But, over time, things have smoothed out. Both of us have established new traditions, values and ways of paying for things. It helps that most of the specifics were spelled out in our divorce agreement, but areas of interpretation are bound to arise.

Off topic here, I know, but my mind is still spinning around Obama, President-elect Obama and the Democrat's election night party last Tuesday in Portland. Until I write this, I won't be able to write anything else.

I took Roxie down to the Oregon Convention Center for the big party, past her bedtime before we even got there. She's been hooked on Obama since the primary last winter, back when she was half-way through kindergarten.

That this will be her earliest political memory. This election. This night. This president. Wow. I mean. Wow. Me, I'm stuck with a 36-year-old snapshot image of Richard Nixon's motorcade passing. Warren, OH, five days after my third birthday.

But, Roxie. She's got Obama and I know just the moment I want her to hold, the one she'll detail when she tells my great-grandchildren about the night he was elected.

There are 7,000, maybe, 8,000 people at convention center and John McCain is on both big screens conceding the race. We're at back edge of the crowd where it's less claustrophobic, Roxie on my hip so her head is the same height as most adults in the room.

You can't hear McCain over the noise.

There's an older African American woman, late 60s, early 70s, coming out toward the edge from deeper in the crowd and she stops in front of Roxie. Two teenagers behind her stop, too.

The woman takes Roxie's hand and holds it, looks her brown eyes into Roxie's blues.

She says. "We did this, baby. You and me."

And, I realize, for the first time in their lives I have hope for world my girls are growing into.

My husband has accepted a position overseas for a year. The kids and I won't be going with him. We're staying put while he goes and gets an apartment and lives a life without a wife and kids.

It's a weird situation. We're going to be separated by distance but we aren't going to be separated as far as our marital status goes...at least I don't think we are. If that's the intent it hasn't been discussed. So I'll still be married, but my husband won't live with us. He'll visit once or twice during this time away, but for the most part we'll live separate lives during this work assignment.

I think this is a step in the right direction. I'm so conflicted over whether we should stay together or not that sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live without him for a while. Will I miss him? Will he miss me? Will the kids freak out without Daddy around? It's like a trial separation without all the hubbub of a real, intentional marital separation.

Honestly, I don't know if I could dream up a better scenario.

The last time he went away for an extended period of time for work — which was for a few months — I was glad he was gone. We were right in the middle of our worst difficulties and not having him around was a real relief. We have since been through marital counseling, but I don't know that it really helped all that much. I'd generally resolved to just muddle through and see how things turn out. This new development makes things very interesting indeed.

We still have a few months before he leaves, but we're preparing now for the time he'll be away. Can a damaged marriage survive a long separation? I guess we'll find out.