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.

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.

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.

I got to talk with Harville Hendrix, the author of Getting the Love You Want, last week. He's in Portland for a conference of Imago Relationship Therapists, the school of therapy he and his wife pioneered.

In the hour we talked, Hendrix answered my questions with great depth and careful consideration. Typed-out, his replies to each of my four queries were several pages.

Boiled down, edited and over-simplified, here's the heart of it:

"It really is very simple, how to be in a great relationship," Hendrix says. "It can be stated in a few sentences."

1. Your relationship will become more satisfying to the extent that you get it that you live with another person. This person is not you. They are an other. If you get it that you are living with difference and you give up trying to make them be like you, then the conflict starts to go away.

2. You have to drop negativity. Negativity is all an attempt to change the other person. Replace it with affirmation and finding all the things about your partner that are beautiful and wonderful. If I'm getting curious about my wife when she's doing something that makes me uncomfortable, 99 percent of the time, my discomfort has nothing to do with what's she's doing. It has to do with her not matching an inner image I had of her. She moved out of my picture frame, and I want her back in the frame.

3. Affirm and advocate their otherness. Become curious about it. And the way I can make all this happen is to engage in dialogue. So I can hear her disclose who she is and get at who this person is I'm living with. 

My bedroom walls are yellow. Two months into this new place and still the only thing on those walls is the sunshine paint job.

It's the least finished room in the house. I'm attempting to not assign any kind of significance or symbolism or whatever to the bare walls in that room. Chalk it up to most of our artwork is out of the past, out of the places we lived together before we lived apart and even the most beautiful pieces have dragged little bits of ugly along with them.

These walls are no place for those ghosts.

We have some great photos of the girls, too, but my wise friend and informal feng shui consultant advises that, energetically, hanging them in the bedroom is a no-no. The kids have laid claim to every other space in the house, she says, my bedroom should be about the adults. A sanctuary.

The art should be lush and sensual, reflect energy of partners and of lovers not of mommies and daddies. What I'm going for is more love-den than pre-school.

I could tell you the walls remain naked because we don't have the money to buy new stuff for them — and that's a true, true thing. But it's not the whole truth.

The whole is, I'm always looking for just the right something, even if I can only afford to fantasize about actually buying it. And two months in, nothing. I don't even have a gauzy fantasy of how that room should be.

Sometimes, I guess, you just have to grow into a space, same way we sometimes have to grow into ourselves and no matter what we wear it all feels like a costume if it doesn't reflect the truth.

Sunshine and open space. I guess that will do for now. 

Two months into the school year and every week Roxie's homework is due on Friday. She gets these four-page packets on Monday, has all week to work them. This is the routine. It does not change.

Ten-word spelling list, journal page, math page, reading log, and a page to practice her 10 spelling words. Never mind that I think this is a ridiculous amount of work for a first grader.

Never mind that Roxie has visual processing stuff — like everyone in my family has processing stuff — and it makes writing a bear for her. This week she did so much by Tuesday, I gave her Wednesday afternoon off.

Plenty of time, and not much to finish with Sam Thursday night.

Accept they didn't.

Maybe this should not infuriate me. We do this every single week, this homework routine. It does not change.

Sam and I work with her 50-50. I told him Wednesday exactly what needed to be done Thursday. I get home late Thursday night, kids are in bed and it still needs to be done.

I want to be furious with him, but I remember something. Sam has an auditory processing disorder. He does not learn by ear and he does not retain information given verbally — he does not think this is true. But it is.

Most of his family is this way. I've never sat at a quieter dinner table.

And here's impact of learning/processing differences on a relationship — my relationship. Because me, I'm just the opposite. Just like Roxie. My ears are everything.

How I understand the world is conversation and I need lots of it to thrive. Reading is tedious, I'm slow and remember almost nothing.

Sam knows the world with his eyes, it's all visual. The way I get little from a book and don't remember it anyway, that's what conversation is for Sam.

I know these things. If I don't write it down for Sam he will not remember. It's completely counter intuitive to me though, so I forget. And I'm not angry with him, but...

In my family learning disabilities are so widespread we joke that "typical" kids are "special." Needing special education services, that's "normal."

Three of my four nieces and nephews traveled, or are traveling, through public schools on IEPs (school speak for Individual Education Plans — the annual goals set by parents and school officials for kids with learning differences.)

We don't stop at your standard disorders either, oh no. Way too simple. These kids muck it up by being "twice exceptional" — meaning they qualify for both talented and gifted programs and special services.

Me, I'm about as ADD as they co... Look, something shiny!

And I have visual processing stuff I couldn't begin to explain within the space of this blog. Or to even understand in the space of the 39 years I've lived it.

Last week I read a new study on the higher rate of divorce among parents of kids with ADHD.

It says parents of ADHD kids are twice as likely to divorce by the kids' eighth birthday. Says higher stress from parenting these kids leaks into communication among the adults. Everyone is more stressed. And angry. Confrontational and ready to bolt.

Makes sense. But there's one glaring flaw in the study.

The risk factors in this study don't include the impact of mom and/or dad's ADD/ADHD on the marriage. And guess what? Turns out the apple really does not fall far from the tree. Show me an ADHD kid and nine times out ten, I'll show you the parent they inherited from.

I don't question the impact raising hard kids has on a family. But how much of it is truly the stress of managing a special needs child and how much of it is the stress of managing their own special needs?

Ha! Figured out my new blog goal. Turns out it's the same as the old: to have a place to be to-the-bone honest with myself to constantly keep moving forward.

Sometimes I get so caught up in looking for the problems to write about, that it feels like if I'm not working through the problems, I not being real with myself. Feels like it's what I'm supposed to do. But, the thing is, right now the relationship is smooth.

Good even. Better, in a lot of ways than the best of it ever was before, even before I started hating Sam right down to his pinky finger. And, give thanks for that, right. Maybe, just maybe, we'll store up enough good to boulder through the bad when things shift.

And things always shift. Of all the couples I know well enough to know the truth, I can't name a single anyone who hasn't gotten so far out of their grove that divorce was a real thought. A brief thought for some, but everyone, everyone I know has contemplated divorce.

This morning I woke up empty, they way I do when I get too much sleep (read: eight hours).

Mornings are like that for me, everything wrecked in my head and the big empty hollow in my body. When I wake with Sam and feel that all over empty, I think "Oh my god. It's the marriage. I've made a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mistake and I am stuck in my decision."

A few in breaths and I remember. Felt the same in the morning without him. Felt it before him, after him, and with him. It's always been there. It's not discontent with the marriage. It's just plain discontent.

Here's what's changed.

This morning I woke up, and before Sam's eyes were all the way open I was deep into listing off all my middle-of-the-night worries: Not enough time. Not enough money. And how can we do this?

I'm having a small identity crises. Not identity, exactly; it's more like a crises of purpose.

When I started blogging at First Wives World, I'd been separated from Sam for 14 months and we'd just started dating again (read: having sex together, because we rarely had an actual night out by ourselves without the little creatures we procreated climbing all over us, ahem, me — but I digress.)

I began blogging with a couple specific goals. I wanted to either be divorced or back together within one year.

I wanted a space figure to out my relationship in a way that would keep my procrastination-loving butt moving forward — whichever direction that is. And I hoped doing it here for the gods, and all the divorcing world, and everyone to see would let someone else out there a feel less homeless in it.

Also, I was self-conscious about the molasses pace of my process. Having people along for the ride kept me honest. Kept me thinking, I can't keep going round over the same things, complaining the same complaints without changing something.

I'd already spent four years deliberating. Four years. It was time to decide.

So, goal one. Check. Week after week I came to this place to be real with myself. I scrutinized Sam and I scrutinized me and I studied the ways I was with him and the ways I was on my own. Eight months after starting this blog, I moved back in with him.

Goal two. Check? I hope so. With every post I hoped someone out there sat through my indecision saying, "Yeah, me too."

But now, now goal one is met and I need a new purpose. And I'm wondering, if anyone out there still relates.

I found this old notebook the other day, a legal pad with mostly blank pages, and started using it for lists without looking at the previously scribbled notes.

Then I'm  flipping through and a couple letters catch my eye. Drafts of letters I never sent to Sam. Grievences, now five years old, from the first time we attempted counseling, or maybe even earlier.

Pages and pages of my early anger.

The first therapist, the one we saw back then hated Sam. No secret. She spent our sessions arguing his ridiculous, self-centered ideas and in the end, when he refused to go, she told me she'd be out of line with him. Said he pissed her off so much she couldn't help it.

She said some men just never get until their wives are leaving, then they're willing to do anything, but it's too late.

Sam was one of those. He never got it until I left. Never believed I'd leave until my stuff was in the truck.

I don't know if it's too early to call our re-unification a success. We've been back together in the new house for about six weeks and so far so good.

But I have some thoughts on why our separation "worked" as a marriage saver.

1. We didn't date other people. We never said we wouldn't. We just didn't. Sam was 100 percent focused on saving the marriage and I was too busy and tired and depressed for dating.

2. We went back to therapy (different therapist) about half-way through the separation and pledged to see her until we were either all the way back in or all the way out.

3. We lived 10 miles apart and kept out lives and finances separate, but parented together.

4. We gained the distance to see our roles in the demise more clearly.

5. This is the big one — I rediscovered myself, my strength, my sense of me, and learned it well enough to protect it.

The truth is, I did not separate with the intention of getting back together. Ever. At least, not consciously.