Madonna is about to find out that she can’t flex her muscles when it comes to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s parenting style. The self-described control freak reportedly gave a list of rigid rules documenting what Guy Ritchie could and couldn’t do when he has sons Rocco, 8, and David, 3.

The list reportedly included a ban on TV, no Miley Cyrus for these boys, no non-organic food such as microwaved pizza and soda, nor any clothes that were not 100 percent cotton and sent by her. She even wanted her total blessings on what water they drank — Kaballah preferred — and no toys that are “spiritually or ethically unsound.”

What this sounds like is a recipe for disaster.

Divorced women tell me all the time that the hardest part of divorce is not leaving the husband but leaving the kids with him. And if you, like Madonna, are used to control, it becomes agony to realize the limited power you now have over your ex-spouse’s parenting style. It’s as though handcuffs have been put on you just when you thought you were finally liberated.

“Moms go nuts about this but all they can do is write to Dear Abby or Firstwivesworld,” says noted divorce lawyer Raoul Felder. “The courts will not mini-manage or arbitrate parenting styles unless it involves safety or basic acceptable serious judgment issues.”

Such as?

“Other than allergies like peanuts, religion and sky diving, the hand of the parent who turned the kids over for their weekend with Pop has about as much to say in what the kids do there as Bush does in the choice of the next Secretary of State,” Felder says. “But isn’t that what week-end Dads are all about? Lot’s of hot dogs, chocolate and crummy blood and gory movies.”

Rebecca Romijn knows a thing or two about X-Men and wants to set the record straight. In an interview with Page Six magazine, Romijn, who starred as Mystique in the X-Men movies, refuted rumors that her divorce from John Stamos happened because she didn’t want kids.

“There is absolutely no truth to that,” said Romijn who has a recurring role in the hit television show Ugly Betty. “I desperately wanted kids. I was never a girl who dreamed about what her wedding day would be like, but I’ve always dreamed about decorating my baby’s nursery.”

Well, her dream is coming true. Now happily married to Jerry O’Connell, who played a detective in the TV series Crossing Jordan, she is seven months pregnant with twin girls and looks, as she says, like a “beached whale.”

Romijn was married to Stamos (best known from ER) from 1998 to 2005. But one can suppose that she may have had lingering doubts about the relationship, and wanted to wait until she was certain about the marriage before building a family. Sometimes you don’t really know someone until you live with them for a while. They can be fun boyfriends or even a romantic husband but a wife might wonder if they have the qualities to be a good family man.

As for O’Donnell, Romijn said, “I knew early on he would be a fantastic dad. He’s a pragmatic, smart, savvy, enthusiastic person. He really lives his life with tremendous integrity and he’s a healthy person in every single way.”

The couple married in 2007. O’Connell had to backtrack on a comment he made on Conan O’Brien’s show in September, when he called his wife “huge.” He told People magazine, "I meant to say that there are specific areas of my wife that are larger than normal and growing every day. All other portions of my wife are quite petite. I apologize to her and will be coming home with flowers."

Despite everyone’s assumptions, E! Network has renewed Denise Richards’ “It’s Complicated,” a reality show inspired by her contentious divorce from "Two-and-a-Half Men" star Charlie Sheen. As divorced women know, this life event can get complicated — but some break-ups have more drama than others.

And Richards divorce makes the title “It’s Complicated” perfectly apt.

Richards and Sheen have been battling in the tabloids since their break-up in 2006. Complicating matters, after she split from Sheen, Richards started going out with Richie Sambora, who was married to her friend Heather Locklear.

Richards told Larry King that she “did not break up the marriage” because Locklear had already filed for divorce. “Richie and I were friends and they were going through their divorce,” she said.

Her divorce alone provided plenty of material for the first season of her show. It averaged 1.1 million viewers a week, which is why E! has made a commitment for a second season.

Recently, Sheen unsuccessfully fought to prevent their two young girls, Sam and Lola, from being part of “It’s Complicated.” But Richards won that battle and claims she is not exploiting them.

“In making a decision to do a reality show, I needed to commit to that and I wanted it to be real,” she told King. “And the reality is I’m a single mom to two little girls. The show is not about my children. They aren’t featured in the show. They’re in it very little. We’re just doing every day life and it’s being filmed.”

Logic tells you that if you are a stressed-out pregnant woman, somehow that anxiety will become your baby's norm, and even seep into his or her personality. But for a long time, no research confirmed that. Well, until now.

Professor Marta Weinstock-Rosin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Pharmacy has been fascinated with this subject her entire work life, and now her experimental work with rats has demonstrated the connection in a conclusive, laboratory-tested manner.

"There is an enormous advantage in working with rats," says Weinstock-Rosen. (No, she's not talking about cheating ex-husbands but the animal kind.)

Researchers were able to compare offspring of stressed rat mothers with offspring whose mothers were not stressed. They also were able to compare the results of administering various types of stress at different periods during gestation to see which period might produce which behavior.

And guess what they discovered?

Stress during pregnancy caused developmental and emotional problems for the rat pups, included impaired learning and memory, less capacity to cope with adversity and symptoms of anxiety and depressive-like behavior.

Weinstein-Rosin says that all these symptoms parallel impairments that occur in kids born to mothers who experience stress during pregnancy.

According to Science Daily, further experiments by Weinstock-Rosin and her students have shown that the culprit was the hormone cortisol, which is released by the adrenal gland during stress and may reach the fetal brain during critical stages of development.

On the campaign trail, Gov. Sarah Palin proudly holds her baby son, Trig, who has Down syndrome, and promises “to help families who have children with special needs.” You don’t have to know trigonometry to realize what that adds up to.

Gov. Palin addressed that issue in a speech today in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to groups that deal with special needs. " ... [T]he truest measure of any society is how it treats those who are most vulnerable," she said, and brought up another way special needs has affected her family: her sister Heather has a 13 year old son with autism. Gov. Palin proposed three ways to better serve families with physical or mental special needs children:

• School choice for parents, with federal funding that will follow the child.

• The full funding of government's obligations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act

• Strengthening the National Institutes of Health, to work on long-term cures and providing better information to families

Gov. Palin also urged extending the Vocational Rehabilitation Act to teach special needs children the skills they need to live independently. But having a special-needs child not only requires expensive, life-long therapy for the child — it requires marital therapy as well.

A little-known fact is that the divorce rates for parents with special-needs children is tragically high. According to the documentary Autism Every Day, the divorce rates for these parents soar to as much as 80 percent. A recent study in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology revealed that parents of a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are nearly twice as likely to divorce by the time the child is 8 years old.

And when I contacted various special needs organizations to get a figure for divorces, spokespeople were reluctant to give a firm number, but acknowledged that it’s “very high.”

The material girl is going to pay some Madonnamony. That is our term for when a female celebrity like Madonna has to pay manimony in excess of $30 million. It was reported this weekend that Madonna and her soon-to-be-ex husband Guy Ritchie are close to an agreement on assets and custody arrangements.

Ritchie, who has been married to Madonna since December of 2000, will probably get the 1,200 acre country estate in Wiltshire — worth $25 million — the English pub called Punchbowl in Mayfair, worth $4 million, and another $17 million in cash in exchange for her keeping their townhouse in Marylebone, London, the house next door and two mews cottages. It’s clear the RocknRolla director, who is now shooting Sherlock Holmes in London with Robert Downey Jr., will not be hurting financially, although reports say that in return for the money he’s agreed not to talk about his marriage to Madonna.

Madonna will keep her New York and Los Angeles homes as well as her cash — hundreds of millions — and her cachet of being such a popular and enduring superstar. According to The Sun, "the negotiations were relatively painless." Guy knew what he wanted and “Madonna knew what she was keen to keep. There was a spell when Guy was in a mood to dig his heels in, but he decided this arrangement seemed reasonable and a long battle over money would make life unbearable."

Although Madonna’s publicist said that the details are not final, reports in The Sun and The Daily Mail indicate that Madonna is likely to get custody of her son with Ritchie, Rocco Ritchie, 8, and David Banda, the 3-year-old they adopted from Malawi. Ritchie will have liberal visitation rights with the boys, who will live with Lourdes Leon, 12, Madonna's child with Carlos Leon.

After going through the stress of many in vitro fertilizations, I vivdly remember signing a paper giving the unused embryos to scientific research. In my mind, it was the least I could do since, thanks to this modern day miracle, I could possible conceive the child I so desperately wanted.

But I also realized that the pain — both physical and emotional — of this process could also break couples apart. It was right there in front of me, as I witnessed the cumulative strain on people in the waiting room.

What, I wondered, would happen to their embryos if indeed they broke up? A woman on fertility drugs can produce as many as 20 or 30 eggs. Who would get them?

The nurses would smile and tell me not to worry about it, especially since my husband and I were, they said, such a happy couple. Naturally the reporter in me wanted answers. Where exactly did the embryos go? Did they go into one large unpatrolled laboratory where a rogue nurse would sell them elsewhere. And then, in years to come, I'd meet my lookalike in the mall.

Yes, I know, it seems like something out of a Robin Cook medical thriller, and I laughed at how fertile my imagination could be. So did the nurses. Everything, they assured me, was properly monitored and nothing could happen to the embryos without both parents’ consent.

With in vitro fertilization (IVF), doctors usually implant no more than four fertilized eggs to prevent high-multiple births. In Oregon, a divorced couple split on what to do with their six frozen fertilized eggs, and the case ended up in the Oregon Court of Appeals.

Laura Dahl and her former husband, Darrell Angle, had stored their “embryos” with Oregon Health and Science University, where she had undergone IVF. (For the sake of argument, the court called the fertilized eggs “embryos,” although they said that, technically, they would become embryos only once implanted in a woman’s womb.)

Here's your pet's pet peeve. Your beloved animals suffer anxiety when you separate or divorce, just as you do. In fact, the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals in London has added divorce to the list of events that can lead to "acral lick dermatitis."

Other causes of ALD – a constant chewing, sucking, and licking of a part of the body – are dogs who are isolated or bored, punished continually, or who have nervous and stressed owners. Sean Wensley, a senior vet at the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, says, “As a result of such licking, the area can become raw and itchy, which in turn leads to further licking or chewing."

Pets mirror our emotions. If your parrot plucks his feathers feverishly, your poodle pouts with downcast eyes, your calico cat meows mournfully, vets translate these things as a form of depression because, folks, they are "furry" upset by the disruption in the house.

And why shouldn’t they be?

As Wensley says, “Cats and dogs, like young children, are sensitive to adult human emotions and, when these become tense or unpredictable, this can cause stress-related heath problems.”

What are more symptoms?

"Dogs that are stressed can show signs of compulsive disorder,” he says, including chasing their own tails. Cats, he says, “can be prone to 'wool sucking' which, as the term suggests, involves sucking or chewing on woolen items such as blankets.”

Parrots sometimes pull out their own feathers after losing a mate — which, in a way, includes a human live-in companion — or experiencing some other type of trauma.

And that’s not all. The hospital’s studies show that when their owners split, pets can develop serious long-term nervous symptoms, including chewing on and biting themselves.

You are parents forever, even after divorce. That conventional wisdom resonated this week with the new dust-up between Peter Cook and Christie Brinkley. As we reported this week, Cook apparently violated a confidentiality agreement by deciding to appear on 20/20 with Barbara Walters tonight.

Brinkley swiftly tried to then bar the philandering father from seeing her two children, Jack and Sailor, this weekend.

But a Long Island judge played Solomon and found a solution. Cook can take the children but as Brinkley's lawyer explained, he "has to be away from his home and he can't expose them to the 20/20 broadcast."

Cook claimed he wouldn’t have exposed the children in any case, but the children are seen in the 20/20 broadcast.

A person close to Cook said, "I find it silly that someone who not only allows her children to be in the media but encourages it would have a complaint like this."

The people who should have a complaint are the children.

I’m glad that Sailor and Jack have each other as confidantes since they are caught in the middle like fish in a net while their parents continue their hostilities. Children want to love both parents, and when thrown into an ocean of he said/she said charges, they are left confused, conflicted and hurt. At least they have each other as they swim through these murky waters.

That is no small thing. Often siblings in divorce form enduring bonds.

Forgiveness is difficult when you are co-parenting after a hostile divorce. Christie Brinkley clearly didn't want to have those wounds reopened by a Barbara Walters interview with her ex.

Peter Cook’s goose may be cooked. By dishing to ABC’s Barbara Walters, the porn-loving ex of Christie Brinkley broke a confidentiality agreement not to discuss his divorce. But his temper, he says, was boiling because he felt that he got unfairly grilled. The interview will be aired on 20/20 on Friday.

So why did Peter Cook carelessly cavort with an 18-year-old and also resort to on-line porn? Seems he felt that the Mrs., one of the most gorgeous gals on the planet, wasn’t making him feel desired.

"I was seeking a connection I could not find in my own marriage," Cook said to Walters. "I think the emotional aspect of our lives had changed. I think we were both feeling more like we were living with a brother and sister than a life partner."

So, he said, he suddenly realized something was missing.

"I wanted a little acknowledgment, a little attention, a little thank you every now and then for my efforts, for the amount of time I took to care for her and my family, for the wealth I was building," he said.

At times, the architect and builder said, “I pulled up [to] the driveway to the home that I found, that I built, that I lived in, and I felt like I was a guest in someone else's life."

Well guess what? He is now a guest who’s not welcome anywhere.

Cook has found his life systematically dismantled now that he doesn’t have Brinkley by his side.

As we reported in July, Brinkley divorced Cook after finding out that he was fooling around with Diana Bianchi while also spending up to $3,000 a month on Internet porn.