Isn't social networking great? Not only can I hop on the FWW Network and chat with women who are in a similar situation, but I have also reconnected with a bunch of people through other networking web sites whom I thought I would never speak to again. 

It's a little weird how ex-boyfriends and lukewarm friends from the past suddenly request to become "friends" on sites like Facebook. I had one friend look me up recently; things did not end well with her 10 years ago. She ended our friendship with a diatribe about how selfish I was and lo and behold now she's sending me messages saying she's so happy to find me, we really need to catch up, yadda, yadda, yadda.

My best friend from my early twenties found me online the other day. We were inseparable back when we were young and single, but job assignments took us to opposite ends of the globe and we eventually lost touch. Last night we chatted a bit and it's funny how similar our paths have been: We both got married, quit working, had kids, and became disenchanted with our marriages.

Here is where the differences become incredibly clear. She makes a swift decision to divorce her husband, gets offered a fantastic high six-figure job in an exotic country, travels the world with her child in tow and now spends her days writing a novel. By the way, she looks fantastic, like she hasn't aged a day.

Then there's me. I languish over whether to divorce my husband or not. I know that a divorce would mean a huge dip in income, and I would probably wind up in a tiny apartment with huge financial difficulties. I've gained a bunch of weight from the stress of the relationship problems, and no, I don't look as though I haven't aged a day. I look like I've aged about a billion days.

Tomorrow night we start marital counseling again. We finally settled on a schedule where our pastor comes over to our house in the evening after our kids are in bed. Now that's an accommodating pastor.

My husband isn't happy about the counseling. I guess I can't blame him. I do such a good of putting my emotions into a little box and ignoring them that as far as he knows it's business as usual until someone actually asks me what I'm feeling and won't take "I'm fine, thanks" as a realistic answer. 

In other words, even though I'm not as affectionate with my husband as I once was, it's pretty easy to live with me. I take care of stuff around the house and bring in an income, so if he wants to ignore the fact that we're having problems then it's probably pretty darn easy.

It's in counseling sessions that I start crying and carrying on about how desperate I feel in the marriage. With someone there to mediate our conversation, I feel more comfortable saying how I feel because I know it's not going to turn into the usual frustration fest that serious conversations become when my husband and I try to do this on our own...or, at least, when I approach him about something that has been bothering me and it morphs into me apologizing for being bothered by something.

Yes, tomorrow night should be interesting. We haven't been in marital counseling for months, and after my last debacle with the therapist who apparently had the hots for me, I'm a little reluctant to trust the process. As usual, though, I'm still willing to try again to see if the relationship can be salvaged.

I'm bracing myself. It should be interesting.   

Not only have I neglected to put the Leary theory into effect, but I've acted quite the opposite of a married woman who has taken separation off the table.

Tonight one of my fellow yoga teachers-in-training is hosting a dinner party for our group and our significant others to recognize our hard work and transformation — like a pre-graduation party. It's a chance enjoy each other's company before the stress of the final exam and practicum after which (if we pass) we'll leave the group and go into the world as registered yoga teachers.

And I never even told Rob about it.

This morning he woke up with a terrible cold, and I had an out. "Aw," I said, "I forgot to mention this get-together tonight, and now you won't be able to come." 

It's not that I'm embarrassed of him or want to keep him out of some part of my life. I just don't want to babysit. I want mingle and enjoy myself.  

When you have a child on your hip, it's harder to make real connections with people. Instead, you're busy interpreting for the child, cajoling him, attending to him. This is what I have to do with Rob. He just blanks out otherwise; he turns into the most uninteresting, white-bread guy you ever met. He says nothing at all, which I find stiflingly uninspiring.

Perhaps it not very yogi-like of me to say — maybe, in fact, I sound like a complete bitch — but I'd rather go alone than have him by my side tonight. 

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.