Some time ago I wrote about my disappointment over not being able to join my church's board of directors. I had been nominated by some people in the congregation but the pastor quietly removed my name from nominations because he knew about the marital problems. It hit me hard because I really wanted to join the board, and it ticked me off that my life was apparently such a mess that I couldn't be considered for the position. 

Fast forward to present day. I got a call from my pastor who told me that my name had come up again. He wanted to let the nomination go through, but he needed to know if I was ready. It was really a bizarre conversation.

Usually my pastor and I have a really easy rapport with each other but I could tell that he was uncomfortable. He started mumbling about how he wanted me on the board but people on the board have certain expectations, and while the church is not necessarily opposed to divorce I would be in the public eye.  I stopped him and said, "If you're asking if I'm going to divorce my husband anytime soon, the answer is no.  I can't guarantee you that I won't leave him in the near future, though." 

He accepted my answer and this Sunday I expect to be confirmed onto the board. 

I'm really pleased that I finally made it onto the board, but here is the thing: My pastor knows that my husband and I are on shaky ground. Heck, we've been trying to coordinate schedules for the past few months so that the three of us can get together for some marital counseling.

I don't really get why he would ask me a question that he kind of already knows the answer to. Maybe it was a formality, or maybe it was a veiled warning, something along the lines of "If you leave your husband, you're off the board." Trust me, though...if I leave my husband I think the church board will be the least of my problems.

So I'm all divorced now. Still not quite ready to discuss the event itself, which was pretty emotional, but I can report on the early aftermath.

Frankly, it feels much the same as the before-math, though I think I'm getting along better with the ex. (I must say it feels good to write that and know it is actually, legally, true.) The worst thing that could happen to our marriage is over, and now we're free to build a new relationship. We communicate frequently and easily via Facebook.

My father, however, is not taking things so well.

"I don't know how I'm going to deal with Sondra as a divorced woman," he said, according to my mom. That's odd. I don't seem to recall any similar uncertainty when my brother got divorced, and that was in the last century.

But I fear my father regards marriage as a form of ownership. I think he was relieved when I finally became somebody else's property, so to speak. And now look: if I'm not legally connected to some other man, guess he feels he must be responsible for me again, even though I am almost 50 years old and a homeowner.

My mother sent me a link to an article on goal-setting for the newly divorced. I thanked her and promised to read it with interest, but also told her honestly that downsizing into this much smaller house has been far more difficult than getting unmarried.

I added, though, that I might view things differently after I'd been divorced for a whole week.

My religious brother called to...touch base, he said in a message. I don't think he'd tell me I'm going to hell for ending my marriage, but I'm not quite ready to find out about that, either.

My divorced brother never mentioned the end of my marriage. "Mom told you the divorce is final, right?" I asked. "Yep," he replied, and that's all he's had to say about it. Not a word of advice, or encouragement, or consternation, or solace.

I have back problems that sometimes spread up into my neck, and it gets really painful. I have two young children who I can't lift and a bunch of housework that doesn't get done because it hurts to lift stuff. Thank God I have a job I can do while sitting and not moving.

Luckily for me, the pain comes and goes and with the help of my chiropractor/massage therapist/sleepy meds I muddle through. I don't spend all my time in pain, but when it does hit I'm pretty useless.

My back pain was in full force the other day, so I was happy to finally make it to the evening and lay down to go to sleep. My husband was already in bed so we chatted a little. He asked me how my back was feeling (code for "Can we have sex?") and I replied that it hurt pretty bad (code for "Please don't make me do that right now").

"You know," I said, "maybe I should get a pillow like yours." He has one of those pillows to keep the back and neck aligned. The thought occurs to me that maybe we can switch pillows for the night and in the morning I can go buy my own. He doesn't have back problems, and it would be great to try something — anything — to make my back feel better.

Before I can propose the idea he replies with, "Yeah, maybe you should get one," and then rolls over on his side to go to sleep. He's done with me. I can't offer him what he wants, so that's that.

Years ago he would have thought about switching pillows long before I did. He would have gone to great lengths to help me get comfortable. I laid there thinking about what a different man he is now, but then the thought occurred to me that maybe he was thinking the same thing; after all, when I was 25 years old I didn't have back problems and didn't have to deny sex because of my aches and pains.

A week or two after I filed the papers for my uncontested divorce, I received notification of the date of my final hearing. This week! Whoa.

The instructions I got at the courthouse said it'd be three to eight weeks before the letter arrived. I was up in North Carolina, trying to get settled in my new place. Suddenly I had to scurry back to Florida.

That meant a long car trip, which gave me plenty of time for rumination. So I went over my situation again.

When I was an active alcoholic, I fell in love with and married and active alcoholic. We both got worse over the following several years until two things happened: I became convinced I needed to quit drinking and I lost hope that my husband, Edgar, would stop.

One of the hardest things I ever did was pitch him out of the house we shared. After that, a year went by, during which I stayed sober and Ed continued his pattern of falling off the wagon and jumping on, falling off and jumping back on... 

I became confident that my decision to divorce was the right one. Watching Ed kill himself on the installment plan would probably kill me, as I might resume drinking in an attempt to cope with it.

It was the right decision, but not a comfortable one. I'm not divorcing Ed because I don't love him. We had some good times together, too; smart conversation, lots of laughs, the best road trips I've ever taken. We weren't able to have children, but we opened our home to countless animals, some of which are still with me.

I guess my marriage was like everybody else's — some good, some bad. Like many other spouses, I decided to pull the plug when the bad overwhelmed the good.

Would I marry Ed all over again? Knowing what I know now, of course not. But I'm not sorry I did it that one time, nor am I sorry to be divorcing him, however sad I may be.  

My husband is juggling graduate school and work right now, so he's a pretty busy guy. Luckily he's taking the classes online, so while I write at night he does his school work.

Why is he taking graduate classes? There are two reasons, I think. The first is because I want to start my graduate classes, but I don't want us both in school at the same time because I think the kids would get short-changed if both Mommy and Daddy were scrambling to get their homework done.

I told my husband that he needed to decide what he wanted to do because if he didn't enroll in classes soon then I would start up my graduate degree. After all, I'm really itching to get back to school and I do truly love being a student, so if he wasn't interested than I certainly was.

Lo and behold, he enrolled in classes.

The second reason why he is in graduate school didn't come out until just recently. He was complaining about how busy he is, and how hard he works, and how difficult it is to juggle everything (which I certainly don't dispute...he's working very hard right now).

Then it comes out during a discussion that the only reason he's enrolled in classes is because he thought it was what I wanted. He says he wasn't even sure he wanted a graduate degree, but I pushed him into it.

"Won't a graduate degree help you in your career?" I asked him.

"Yeah, I guess," he responded with a shrug.

I told him that he should make his own decisions, that he shouldn't do something major like enrolling in school if it's not something he wanted to do. He threw his arms up in the air and exclaimed, "I'm just trying to make you happy!"

Last Saturday in Toronto, the Motherhood Movement was officially launched. Camera in hand, juggling cables and questions, I shot 30 hours of film and video, from the hip, as I tried to get answers from some of the world's foremost feminists. The subjects included mothering, violence, militarism, war, and social justice; mothers for equal rights; virtual mothering; feminists for a gift economy; maternal depression, and queer parenting.

"Wow," you say? Or, maybe "Why"?

Perhaps I'm trying to sort through my own confusion and ambivalence about terms like "feminist mother,"  "single mother," and "girlfriend," and to capture this unique moment in Herstory.

After three days at the conference, sponsored by the Association for Research on Mothering at York University in Toronto, I was inspired and exhausted.

Let me say, I was the only one there with pink hair.

Some 300 women met in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, to initiate the suffragist movement and win the right for women to vote, a right that did not come to be until 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment. This gathering was much larger, the first International Motherhood Movement meeting. Here were women who cared passionately about their roles as workers, wives, and mothers. What's amazing is that the subject of partnering was just as hot as the subject of parenting.

There wasn't one attendee who spoke of wanting to erase the entire male population. Generally speaking, participants had a warm spot for the opposite sex.

With 20 organizations and hundreds of individuals presenting papers, studies and speeches, there were, of course, bound to be differences.

Covered in dust, grime, and campaign buttons, I took a break from preparing for tomorrow's move to vote early. While I'm both concerned and excited about the presidential race, there was another issue on which I was eager to cast a ballot: the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment.

This proposal seeks to codify marriage as "the legal union of only one man and one woman."

I remember a conversation with a couple of coworkers shortly before I married Ed eight years ago. They congratulated me, and Osvaldo mentioned that another friend, Ernie, was married. I hadn't known that, so I congratulated him, finally noticing the plain gold band on his finger.

He shrugged, saying "As married as I can be." It was only then that I finally realized it wasn't possible for same-sex couples to marry. "That's bullshit!" I said.

I'd known gay men and lesbians all my life and had never considered their marital options. I guess I thought they just didn't want to marry. But Ernie and Justin had been together for years. They had the rings, but no spousal rights.

I was appalled.

I was raised Baptist, but a lot of church stuff didn't make sense to me, and I grew up to be a Buddhist. Like Sarah Palin, I tolerate a number of world views among those close to me.

I've asked devout Christians why Ernie and Justin can't get married and have yet to get an answer that I understand.

On the other hand, one of my conservative Christian friends surprised me by saying he opposes legal prohibitions against same-sex marriage. He thinks homosexuality is an abomination, but he also believes what happens in the bedrooms of consenting adults is not the business of government. 

I'm pretty sure that "protecting marriage" by forbidding it to Ernie and his boyfriend wouldn't do a thing to save my failed union with Ed or anybody else's. So it gave me great pleasure to vote against the proposal.

As you may know, my pals at FWW and I are engaged. Yes, we've made a commitment to changing the face of divorce and creating new terms to define this life event.

Divorce is a change that whether you wanted it or not, transitions you to something else. Often that transition becomes a springboard to a new career, a new love, a new way of looking at life and yourself.

It no longer is the end but a beginning.

When I split from my first husband, I never thought of myself as a divorced woman. I just thought of myself as a free woman. Free to do anything I wanted. Free to have a life full of possibility instead of predictability. Free of someone who criticized what I did to keep me connected to him even though his opinion hadn't mattered for a long time. Free to reinvent myself and find someone who was truly compatible with me instead of someone who fit a resume I was programmed from childhood to care about. The liberation was intoxicating.

Oh yes. I was one of those people you rarely hear about. I was someone who settled. Okay, I admit it. I was 30. All my friends were getting married and suddenly it hit me that along with finishing college, finding a paying job, and being single in the city for a few years, it was now time to find a husband as part of a life trajectory that resembled synchronized swimming. But early on in the marriage I knew I was drowning.

So I got out. Despite my friends telling me that I should stick it out because a) I may not meet someone else or b) he wasn't that bad. But something deep inside knew that we weren't in sync as though a VCR tape was shoved into a DVD player. Nor did I want to live my life knowing that I had settled. It felt like cheating.

I'm a Democrat and my husband is a Republican. It's never been that big of a deal because we're both pretty moderate in our beliefs and we aren't really the kind of people to sit around debating for hours about the issues, so it was more of a cute thing we bragged about in our early years.

"I'm a Democrat," I would say and then look at my husband, "and he's a Republican." Then we'd snuggle and everyone would laugh about how two people could have a bipartisan relationship in peace but the Senate can't stop arguing. It was like a cool parlor trick.

My husband and I talked about who we will be voting for this year a little, but for the first time ever there was some tension in our conservation. I would say it actually bordered on a debate. He hinted that he might be open to voting for either candidate. 

I said we should watch the debates together and talk about the issues and all the other stuff people do when trying to decide on a candidate. I wound up watching the debates alone and then when my husband recently sent in an absentee ballot he announced he voted with his party.

I made a comment — jokingly — about how I was glad he voted for Palin to become president, and he exploded. "Just wait until you make your vote," he snapped, "and see what I say about your candidate."

Apparently we no longer joke about politics together. I wish I had received the memo warning me of such.

I'll be glad when the election is over.