I got a great lesson in perspective from my four-year-old daugter, Lila, the other afternoon.

We're sitting out by the banana tree — I love saying that. Anyway, we're in our zen little garden having a picnic by the banana tree in the September warm and sunshine, daisies along the garage and the fountain is trickling.

First afternoon at the new house. We're like a freaking Norman Rockwell, and you'd think this almost four-year-old would be out-of-her-mind to have just one home with her parents together in it and no more back and forth between houses.

We're eating PB&J in a sunny spot, her hands all strawberry jelly sticky.

"Mom," she says. "Next time we move can we go back to our old houses?"

"Houses?" I say. "You want back to two places?"

She sucks jelly from her forefinger.

"I liked having two houses," she says. "Why can't we have two houses anymore?"

When I left, she was 23 months old, and we had the reverse conversation. A day or two into the apartment she looked up from snapping Legos and said "I want to go home, mommy. I want to go home."

I was sure I'd ruined her life.

I take a bite of sandwich, swallow down my water and consider how to explain.

And I'm thinking, really? Is my four-year-old really asking me to justify moving back in together, to explain why we must do the very thing I'm positive all kids want above all else?

Of course she is.

She has no memory of us living all together. This is a huge change and I don't mean to sound flip or disrespect the gravity of splitting with young kids, but for Lila — for kids so young — the change itself is the hardest part.

Change is change is change is change. After the transition, then it's just normal.

We've been looking for a place to rent for almost two months, but we're still in the same broke boat, with the same crappy credit we had two years ago when I left.

And just like when I left, and all the long years leading up to it, the weight of financial pressure creates this ongoing competition for resources that exacerbates all of our other problems.

Sam says I'm more stressed about it than he is.

He says it to me and he says it to our therapist, then we walk out of the appointment and he accuses me of wanting more than I actually want, of wanting to keep up with the Joneses, when actually I could not care less about anyone else's lifestyle.

I don't want a McMansion. I just want to get by without struggling.

It's the same old fight.

Not being able to support our family makes him feel inadequate, and I know it's true because when I left because he owned up to it. Admitted the nasty things he said were about being angry with himself, not me.

So I call him on it, and he apologizes. It's an improvement I'm willing to work with.

Our therapist once told me finances are cited as a key factor in 80 percent of divorces. Money is the number-one point of contention in marriages. I'll buy that. There's so much stuff bound up in dollars.

Like they say, money is power. So, of course, there's contention about who spends it and how. That's assuming there's money to be spent.

Those arguments feel luxurious to me. We don't get to fight about whose spending irresponsibly. More likely, I ask Sam to ask his family for a loan; he refuses. Or what we are going to do about child care this fall because we owe Lila's pre-school more than it cost me for a year of college back in the day, and until we pay it down, we can't use their before and after care program.

Sam and I both work hard at jobs we love, but we don't make much money doing it.

A year ago when Sam and I began round three of counseling, our therapist recommended we draw up a contract, a kind of pre re-nup agreement, spelling out our needs and expectations.

Said it's a way to protect yourself — not your finances — the self that is YOU from being swallowed whole by enormity of committing to forever as part of a pair. Fear of losing myself in this, or any other, relationship ever again is huge for me.

She said it could be a detailed as, "If I want to go traveling in Asia alone for two years, it will be alright with you."

I never drafted it. Truth is, back when she was giving that advice I still thought I was in counseling to end my marriage, not to consider how best rebuild it.

What a difference a year makes. Closing in on this reunification, here's the rough draft of my Soul Protection Contract:

-I will always have a room within our house that is mine alone to work, think, be, and sometimes sleep in. It will have a locking door.

-We will have each have one "off duty" weekend every month with no responsibility for parenting, housekeeping, or partnering.

-We will have one free day (or night) every week.

-If someone does not use his/her time, that decision does not affect the other's right to do so without guilt.

-If I have the opportunity to travel for work to a place you would like to go, but can't because of your own work, this will be okay with you.

-When I need space for friends or I need to spend nights-on-end holed up in my room to write and think, and I emerge only help with the kids, this will also be okay.

-We will maintain separate banks accounts in addition to our household account.

-If you want to take an extended road trip with the girls during your summer break (Sam is on a school calendar) and I cannot go because of work, this will be okay with me (and with you.)

Since my somewhat, mostly ex-husband Sam and I have agreed to give it another go and started house hunting for a place to put our family back together, I've been crazy-hyper sensitive to anything that feels like old stuff.

A couple weeks ago in counseling I brought up a silly little something that pissed me off. We'd been camping at a weekend music festival with friends, trading off on the mommy and daddy duty.

He stayed at camp one night with the sleeping kids while I stayed out late partying with our friends. I slept in, he did the morning routine. I took afternoon shift while he took a nap. Back and forth the way you do.

Or the way you should do, but we've never been good at it. And yet, there it was, working out just like a dream. Until dinner. He'd been mostly relaxing and I'd been schlepping 35 pounds of sleeping kid over hills and paths for an hour-and-a-half and I wanted a nap and he wanted me to help with dinner and none of this is important.

What matters is this: We were back to the same old always. We didn't communicate, I gave in and got up and got angry. But I didn't say anything. And, I got over it.

That lazy gene that Jill Brooke wrote about in the news section last week? We both have it. I've got it worse, but there's always a push and pull between Sam and me.

It goes like this:

Lila says, "I really bad need to poop."

Sam looks at me. He says, "I've already taken her to the port-o-potty once today."

I say, "Awesome. I've gone three times."

So last week in therapy I did what you do, took that minor thing and took it apart.

He said, "I just don't think it's a big deal. I didn't even know you were mad. You're just looking for old patterns."

God, how I hate being the single mom on Friday nights. Stuck home with sleeping kids while all the free world plays. I can't leave even for five-minutes to get ice cream from the quickie mart.

Even if I could, 14-hours into being mommy, after making three meals and washing three sets of dishes, after all day wiping butts, and a night of reading stories, my get up and go is gone.

This afternoon my friend Sequoia called. She's spent hours in the back yard watching her Blondie-girl splash around the kiddie pool. It's all you can do in this Portland heat wave.

We have the kind of hot that feels like being stoned. Too hot to think. Too hot to move. Too hot to breath. Way too hot to single parent alone. So you find water and wait it out. If you're solo, you try to find another mother to help get you through.

Sequoia is married, but hour for hour she single-parents more than I do. She does it all week. I'm on 24 hours for half the week, but the other half, I am free, free, free. And for tonight, I’m free.

It's close to dinner time, Sequoia’s husband's out of town, Blondie-girl goes to bed around eight, and then its empty hours ahead. There’s that hollow belly feeling that settles in around sunset.

Roxie and Lila are at the beach with their Gammy and PopPop, so I tell Sequoia, "Yeah, hell yeah, I'll come drink red with you."

Heat blows though my open car windows and Mt. Hood glows pink in the rearview mirror. This is the kind of summer day it was two years ago when I first knew.

Calf-deep in the wading pool at some sun-baked park, Lila in a swimming diaper at my feet and Roxie on the merry-go-round. One eye on each of my babies, and right there I realized the truth of how staying in that marriage would bring more pain than parenting alone.

When Sequoia opens the door her fingers are bare, wedding rings off. I wonder what she's been weighing today.

You can tell Roxie feels change coming by the crazy way she's been acting.

It started in Arizona last week, but I just chalked it up to the over-tired, over-stimulated chaos of travel. She started having the kind of meltdowns I haven't seen from her since I Sam and split our household in two.

She bit her cousin in the swimming pool at the end of a long day. Biting was her thing for a while, but it's been a couple years since she last bared her teeth.

Her behavior has reverted, though. She's had a rough week. In school Thursday when I was visiting for family day her best friend looked at me and asked, "Why is Roxie acting that way?"

"That way" being out of control, dumping other kids stuff on the floor and laughing.

None of the 16 kindergarteners have seen this side of my baby.

It's been long gone, packed away when we moved.

Thing is, she's super sensitive, she feels every minor shift — and what I think she felt in Phoenix was Daddy wasn't there. Daddy wasn't there and the energy surrounding his absence had little to do with the high cost of tickets.

This kid, I know she could feel my conflict every time I said Sam and I have been scoping out rentals. Would hear the thoughts under my words saying something else.

Saying I don't think we'll be back together by the end of the summer, I think we'll be all the way apart.

This is dragging on too long. For everyone. I need to be all the out or all the way in by the time she starts first grade. Sam needs a direction. He deserves it.

Sometimes I hate myself for keeping everyone in waiting. Sometimes I wish I could close my eyes and make this all disappear. Wake up two years in the future, lessons learned with out having to live through them.

I don't waste much time feeling sorry for myself anymore. Not usually.

That path goes the wrong direction, a downward spiral. Self-pity is the opposite of gratitude and learning gratitude has been a challenge but I'm there. Most days.

Not today. I'm sitting in a big leather chair in my brother's new house, boxes all around, and I don't want to get on a plane and fly back to my life tomorrow. I've been in Arizona a week, which is usually about four days too long, but I think about going home tomorrow. I'm wiping tears with my sleeves. Rubbing my eyelids dry with my forefingers.

Most days I accept my best for what it is. I believe in self acceptance lies the openness to achieve and grow and cultivate gratitude. Know that I'm good enough.

My brother and his partner have an outdoor fireplace that looks like it should be a fountain. It's a long, narrow basin filled with blue glass chunks. The wall behind it is white tile, so you'd think water should cascade down it into the glass. But under the glass, in a layer of sand you don't see, there's a gas pipe. Turn it on, light and flame burns on the glass.

Their dining room chandelier is from Holland. They saw it in a window last winter and had to have it, Googled compulsively until they found it. The soap dispenser by the kitchen sink is motion activated, put your hand under and the gel drips out.

My brother and his partner have offered to pay for all the vision therapy Roxie needs to "train her eyes to keep up with her brain." So her hands can do what her eyes can see.

I'm grateful. I have a list of learning differences that have never been addressed. I'm hopeful in the long run this means Roxie won't spend her life struggling to survive, as I do, because of challenges no one can see.

Those inappropriate things I took out of Roxie and Lila's suitcase last week when we were packing for Phoenix? All the long sleeve dresses and pants they wouldn't need in the desert...

It's a good thing my mom bought each of the girls a new raincoat for next fall; they've gotten great use covering sundresses in the 60-something Arizona rain this week.

Turns out my niece's outdoor graduation ceremony was a high school football packed with families huddles close under blankets, tilting umbrellas to block the sideways rain. There was more hot chocolate than cold water.

Turns out we could have used the long sleeves and then some.

Turns out, as usual, kids know a lot more about what they are doing than we think.

They always know, the little psychics. My girls mirror back feelings before I'm even aware I'm having them.

It's amazing what people can tune in to before their brains are cluttered with the day to day static of grocery lists, work projects, and endless to-do lists.

I'm not saying the random winter clothes my 3-year-old packed was fortune telling; I chalk that up to coincidence.

But other things, like the state of their families — our small kids know way more than we think.

Doesn't matter what you say or don't say, how carefully you chose words when talking to your husband, or how you try to stage the state of your marriage.

They pick-up the truth beneath the veneer. Might as well be a picture window.

They see everything. And, for all the time I spent trying to hide the problems in my marriage, my kids have been much happier and visibly better adjusted since I left.

Now that I know they see, I'm not trying to hide anything. 


Roxie, Lila and I flew to Arizona last week for my niece's high school graduation. Most of my family is down there in the desert.

My parents live in a cookie-cutter neighborhood. They've been living in the same house for 10 years, and at night, I'm still not sure which on is theirs.

Every house is that suburban-Scottsdale tan adobe with a terra-cotta roof.

In May the weather is uniform like the architecture. Everyday is hot and sunny.

Our visits are always pretty scripted. They kids stay with my parents, I stay a couple nights there and a couple nights at my brother's, or my sister's.

And it's hot.

Last graduation here, my other niece's, I was pregnant with Lila. It was 100 plus degrees, my shear tank-dress was one layer too thick and no amount of bottled water could quench my desert thirst.

What I love about travel is the unexpected. Visiting family isn't exactly "travel," but it's a break from routine.

And this trip we got a great dose of the surprise. The temperature dropped 50 degrees from 108 on Tuesday to 57 on Thursday.

It was cold and rainy and nothing like late-May is supposed to be here.

The wind blew graduation caps across the fields, and while people huddled under blankets and umbrellas they laughed though the complaints.

And loved it for the great stories that come out of disaster even as it's happening.

For me, that's key to surviving these hard times. Loving them for the stories they will become and laughing a little right now, too.

Yay! Vacation. Bring it on!

Well, not vacation, exactly. But as close as I'm getting anytime soon.

We're headed to Arizona for some quality family time and my niece's high school graduation.

My girls and I have been packing this week. OK, technically, Roxie and Lila have been packing and I have been unpacking the inappropriate things they've chosen for the trip.

Replacing long-sleeve dresses and heavy jeans with tank tops, skorts, and cotton capris.

I love traveling alone with my girls. The adventure. Three girls alone on the road, or in the air, as it were. It's empowering to know we can do it ourselves. Even if, technically, I'm going to my family where my kids stay with the grandparents, I stay with my brother or sister and I have way more help than I do at home as the only adult.

Still, even on these totally scripted trips, where little room is left for spontaneous activity, travel feels like possibility.

Even on the "easy" trips, you can't leave home without learning more about yourself. Travel is the ultimate crash course in self discovery.

And there a few things I already know.

We can go anywhere. Do anything we want. Don't need anyone else.