I put my wedding ring back on this week, just to see how it would feel. Sam and I have been apart almost two years, but we never fully split, never filed for divorce, or even for legal separation.

This whole time, I've considered us divorced. I've thought of myself as a single woman and envisioned life on an unknown path.

But Sam never gave up. He begged me to go back into counseling — the same man who once sat in that office, week after week, telling me "he was who he was."

He said, "You met me in line for Grateful Dead tickets. Who did you think you were marrying?"

I thought I was done. Told myself it was just legal fees that kept me from filing. Maybe it was true for a while or maybe it was always an excuse to stay together.

If I've learned anything about myself in the last two years it's this: When I want something, really want it, I make happen.

I never even called a lawyer.

I don't know what kind of category we fit in anymore. The marriage never ended. We still live apart, and the kids split time 50-50 between our houses. I'm still single parenting, but now Sam and I are looking for a place together.

I consider what we're doing a second marriage.

I'm not the same woman who left and I won't tolerate the marriage I had. We've been part way into a relationship and just as far out for almost a year now.

But we have been sleeping together.

The kids have grown re-accustomed to family dinners and camping trips. All along I thought I was waiting for the right time to end it for good. The right time. In the three years I agonized over our relationship before moving out, I learned there really is no good time. There's always a birthday or a holiday or summer plans or some other something to make you think leaving would be easier somewhere down the line.

Never is.

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.

The longer I'm half-in, half-out of this thing, the clearer I see myself.

I have a good friend, a therapist, who says we don't keep returning to the same type of man with the same type of issues (the ones our parents had) only because it's familiar, we keep going back for more because we're trying to work out our own issues and these are the places we can do it.

She's always right.

I was telling her the other day over lunch that I hesitate to get all the way back into it, because Sam had this underlying negative something that looks totally different than my parent's negativity. But's it exactly the same.

With my parents the glass isn't just half empty, it's cracked and leaking slowly. Present them any scenario and they go first to what could go wrong.

When my niece who just graduated high school was "hang a good paper on the fridge" age, my dad once looked at a her spelling test up there, 99 percent, and said to her "Oh, Ella, how could miss .... You know how to spell that."

She's a fabulous student. National honor society. One misspelling and it's what he sees before everything that was right.

Like I said, Sam is a different kind of negative. It's more an undercurrent, not so overt.

But it has the same effect on me. The way it feels heavy, like something weighting me down.

Whatever it is I'm trying to work out, if I leave this relationship, I plan on working solo for a long time to come.

I've been separated from Sam for 20 months now, living separately, anyway. We're not divorced and we're not even truly separate. We don't know what we are.

I don't know anyway. Sam, he still wants it all back and me, I don't know how to finish letting go.

This Arizona vacation was my second family visit since the split. The first was Thanksgiving, a month after I left and I was too numb then to remember much of the trip.

In that year of firsts, everything is hard. Everything takes re-calibration. Everything is viewed through the lens of change. The difference is so glaring it's difficult to feel anything else.

This visit was the reminder about how time heals. Doesn't feel like it in the long slow recovery, but it's true. Regeneration comes.

Being with my family, just my kids and I, felt natural and comfortable and right. Now I realize during that first year when I went to Arizona without him, to friends' parties without him, to holiday celebrations without him, so much of what I missed was the familiarity of things being as they were.

For 13 years he was by my side. A lot of those times weren't so good.

With the habit of being together faded, I don't miss having him on trips, at parties, at holiday celebrations.

I realize something. I like myself better on my own. I like who I am and how I relate to other people better this way.

Right now there's false sense of something, because the transition isn't done. Whether we get all the way out or move back in, I still have to negotiate change.

Either way, I know — and I want you to know — transition is temporary. And, as they say, the only way out is through. But there is another side.

Being on it feels pretty darn good.

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.

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.

Here's one from the comments:

"Grief is the price we pay for love...end of story."

I've been all week trying to figure that one out. First, if it was in response to the post or if it was just a general belief, then, if it mattered.

It doesn't. It's just a good thought to think on, because there's a whole lot of truth in it. Grief is the price we pay. For everything dear to us. For living life, grief is a cost.

But, so what? If we had no grief, we'd have no passion. If we have no passion, what's the point?

The thing is, I keep going back to that comment because I don't understand the writer's intent. Maybe s/he was agreeing with me. Saying exactly what I'm trying to figure out how to say right here.

It's not a cynical outlook. It just is. Everything worth having comes with risk taking. Everything that comes goes.

I've always thought of "this too shall pass," in terms of hard times, because the good times, we want those to last for ever. But, this too shall pass. Our lives are fluid.

Like the ocean, we're the water not the waves. The tide comes in and the tide washes back out, the water remains.

Grief is not the price we pay for love. Grief is the price we pay for holding on too tightly.

Grief is the price we pay for being human.

I say it's all worth the grief.

Sam didn't want me to go. He begged and cried and left a haiku stuck to the mirror on Post-It notes every morning.

He said marriage is forever and we promised to be in this together forever.

He said I said I was ruining the kids.

He asked if I could find it in my heart to give him one more chance.

The thing is, he was miserable in it, too. Was so unhappy, months before I left he went to a friend's house to ask if he could live there for a while. Until he figured things out. Got a place of his own.

But he didn't ask. Sam said he knew that night, in coming so close to leaving, that he wanted to stay, would stay in it forever trying to make it work.

I wonder why sometimes. Love or fear?

He wasn't getting what he needed from me any more that I was getting it from him.

I know it's true, because I wasn't giving it. He blames himself. Outsiders, when they look at our relationship, they blame him too. The things he "did" were tangible.

You could name them.

And some were just reactions. Ways of being in relation to the ways I was being.

I thought I was taking my time in this separation to see if there was changes in Sam that could make us better together. That's not what I'm doing.

What I really doing, I know now, is taking my time to see if there are changes in me.

On Thursday afternoons I go to a writing workshop in the basement of a local novelist's home. You've maybe read some books workshopped and developed in that basement, or seen the movies.

"Dangerous Writing," it's called. Dangerous because it's about going deep into places that scare you, the vulnerable places, and writing from them.

The sore spots, my teacher calls them. It's fiction writing, mostly. Characters created to explore places too hard to go alone.

He's the real deal. Along with a Pulitzer-nomination and his seemingly bottomless stores of compassion, he has a gift for intuitively guiding writers into the heart of their own hauntings.

We are all of us haunted, he says.

And he lives it. His books are brilliant and beautiful, but they aren't easy.

A couple weeks ago he was talking about how, for a long time, his boyfriends were just anyone who loved him.

I wonder how many of us do this. First fall in love with the love itself, regardless of who is loving us. Then stick around long after we should just in case there's no one else. Trade fear for love.

Because what if this is as good as it gets.

Or what if, in leaving, we are forced to see ourselves. The good, the bad, the hauntings, all of it. See who is living in our skin.

There's no hiding from yourself on the page and there's no hiding from yourself in divorce. It strips you down, exposes every place you never wanted to see.

It's dangerous business, being human.

The reward for seeing, for living circumstances that weren't supposed to be, is, hopefully, we put ourselves back together stronger and healthier.

More human and more loving.

The other night I lay in bed with Sam at his place. The bed that used to be my bed, my favorite piece of furniture. The nightstand that used to be my night stand. The husband that used to be my husband.

And none of it felt like mine anymore. Laying there, body next to body, I was thinking: This man is my husband. And the words surprised me.

I don't feel married. Haven't worn a ring since before I left.

This man is my husband. I don't know what that means anymore.

There's no judgment, no longing. Just the thought. This man is my husband?

It's close to two years we've been apart together. I haven't dated anyone else. Haven't kissed anyone else. Haven't had sex with anyone else. In 15 years there hasn't been anyone else.

When I write these posts, I always feel like they should to go somewhere deep. Land on some wise thing.

I don't have that. No clarity to offer.

I'm just keeping with these words, meditating on the thought: This man is my husband.

This man is my husband.

If I repeat them enough, they'll lead me to the truth.