I've changed a lot in the past few years. When my husband stopped paying attention to me I started writing professionally and the next thing I knew I was busy with a freelance writing career that became surprisingly profitable. At first I was making enough money to occasionally take the family out to dinner, but now I make almost as much as my husband does.

It's an interesting transition to go from stay-at-home mom to nearly-equal breadwinner, especially when it annoys my husband to no end. In the beginning he would tolerate my deadlines but roll his eyes and sigh about how I should really work more on keeping the house clean. For a while I managed to do both — I kept the house clean and met all my deadlines — but I got very little sleep and was really exhausted all the time.

Funny...he could have stepped up and helped me with the house and taken some of the burden off me, but he didn't. In fact, one time he blew up at me and said how unfair it was that I had agreed to be a stay-at-home mom but then went out and got myself a career. Damn that ambition of mine.

Fast forward to present day, with the economy going crazy and our money just not stretching like it once did. It's my income that allows us to meet our bills every month and for him to still have the niceties he craves. It's my income that pays for car repairs. My income pays for the preschool tuition for the kids and paid for our road trip to see my husband's parents last month. In other words, without my income we'd be in bad shape.

This doesn't change a thing. I'm still expected to do everything around the house. No matter how much money I bring in he still sees me as the same stay-at-home mom I was years ago. I guess it's what he wanted, and still wants to this day, so that's what I'm always going to be in his mind.

Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.  —Lou Holtz

I read this quote the other day, and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. So impossibly easy. So terribly true. I wonder, how it is that this very same thought has never struck me a million times before?

It's easy for me to get lost in a bad moment, conjuring up worst case scenarios at the rate of one per second. My therapist says that when you grew up like I did (in a less than stable environment) that this is often the case. That we anticipate the shoe dropping as a method of protection. Like, if we prepare every second for it, it will be an easier blow to deal with.

But I seem to have suddenly realized that all of this fretting, all of this nervous energy, is at best wasted energy and at worst an accomplice to the "inevitable" disaster.

You see, it also seems that people like me may even subconsciously sabotage a good situation, as a means to end the worrying.

If you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.

I wonder now, how this thinking may have affected my relationship with Levi.

It was recommended that I read a book called How to Get the Love You Want.

I am told that the book suggests that as adults we will recreate a situation that was bad for us in childhood. Sort of like a, get-it-right-this-time kind of a deal.

My mom left when I was little — similarly to the way that Levi left Adrian. Sadly, no matter how hard I've tried, we don't really have much of a relationship today. My mother has another daughter 13 years younger than me, that she shares a bond with, that she provides for (and then some), that she never left. Exactly the way that Levi has a daughter that he provides for and cares about, and a son, my son, that he doesn't do either of those things for.

When Jake and I first split up, my strongest feeling was of floating. I felt disconnected, set adrift. There was no pinball groove in which to fall back. There was nothing to tie me. Suddenly, the world was this huge, huge place, and I was just this little dot, all alone. There was nowhere that was home. 

Of course, it wasn't that rational a feeling. I have a family. I have friends. If I fell down the stairs and broke my neck chances were good someone would notice my absence before the cats started eating my face. But it didn't feel that way.

It's different now. My apartment feels like home now, even though I'm the only one who lives there. Maybe especially because I'm the only one who lives there: Everything in it is mine and where I want it to be. I like being alone enough now that too much time without it makes me uncomfortable and twitchy. I feel more capable, in general.

Still though, drifting scares me. That period of time when I felt as though I was just trying to hold on to the planet before I spun out into space, that was hard. Feeling that alone was hard.

So I'm really struggling with this idea of moving to another city. In all rational ways, I want to. I love New York. I want to go back to school. I want to try living somewhere different. I want to be around my friends. I want to be closer to Mike. I want to see if I am capable.

But leaving everything that is known and safe is hard. Since college, I've lived here. I know how to find things. I have a career and contacts and health insurance and a favorite park and an apartment I love on a quiet street that is close to a not-quiet street. I know where to find a darkroom. I know where to get good cheese. I know where to buy paintbrushes and cheap Shakespeare costumes. I love this city, too.

I am not good with change. I am not good with big decisions. I am not comfortable with compromising my own safety. I am afraid of going back to being a dot.

I'm switching gears for a bit from the thirtysomething woman who has contemplated separation to the adult child of divorce still dealing with the fallout.

Quick summary: To the extent lines were drawn, I suppose I sided with my mother. She left because when we learned my father cheated on her for 20 years with my best friend's mother. But now she has withdrawn from my brother, sister, and me.

We hear from her infrequently, and when we do, it's never to discuss our lives, but hers, which is moneyed compared to the rest of ours. She has remarried a man we don't get, in the sense that he's from the other side of the political aisle — from us, from her, from anyone I've ever known. (He's off the map. He's against Title IX!)

Meanwhile, my father is progressing into the middle stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and my siblings and I are left to manage his care. My parents defaulted on their shared mortgage around the time of their divorce, we moved our father into a small apartment for now, and there are no assets to help pay for his long-term care. (Phew! Got that?)

Here's the latest kicker — a quiet but ridiculous circumstance that breaks everything open again and makes it hard to swallow. Recently, my father wet his pants for the first time and the family dog, good old Betty — who kept him company and who he walked multiple times a day for lack of capability in any participating in any other activity — died. As this was happening, my mother was preparing to leave on her first cruise, sailing from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta, in celebration of her first wedding anniversary.

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.

I'm going to return my husband, Edgar, but I wouldn't mind keeping his mom. She's always been good to me, and positive about me. She knows that, while her son has many fine qualities, like all the rest of us he's far from perfect — that is, she understands why I'm divorcing him.

She's a survivor, no-nonsense, and we like the same off-price stores. It was my idea, once, to take her on vacation with Ed and me. I miss driving to visit her in Central Florida, seeing her new plants and the stuff in her yard.

And then there's Ed and my family. Last year, I left Ed with the rest of my family while Mom and I stayed at a hotel for her birthday.

Ed was drinking in those days, but largely refrained that weekend and participated fully in the celebration: taking a leading role in assembling the porch swing we got Mom, driving my father around shopping, running errands, hanging out.

"He was just like a real member of the family," my father said when Ed and I had been married almost seven years.

"I have a piece of paper around somewhere that says he is," I answered.

In a recent email, Ed said something about my parents not being his kin. I had to differ.

Every time I visit my family, I'm struck by the number of Ed's gifts on display as part of their daily lives. When I first realized I'd be divorcing him, I reflected that breaking up a marriage is like saying to somebody "Get out! Get out of the family!"

Well, it's not the family I want to rid of Ed, just me.

I think my father is a little wistful about his only son-in-law. "I imagine one day our paths will cross again," he said. "And I'll shake his hand and be glad to see him."

Around the same time, Pop said it might have been a good thing if we had divorced sooner.

What happens when a Midwestern land-lubber and her daughters take their maiden voyage with a life-long sailor and his son? The best vacation of their lives!

Of course, it could have been a disaster. All of us cooped up on a 47-foot sailboat in the middle of Caribbean for eight days: no TV, no TiVo, very spotty Internet and cell phone service. We'd taken trips together before, but nothing more than a weekend, and always with a full assortment of techno toys to keep the kids occupied. I also worried about seasickness, squabbling, whining and boredom.

Plus there was the issue of different parenting styles: he, more indulgent with just one; me, with three, decidedly less so. And J was four years younger than my youngest and delighted in playing the annoying little brother my girls never had. Oh, this could be really, really bad.

Or really, really great.

I needn't have worried. The kids delighted in their quarters, as cozy as they were, especially the escape hatches in the ceilings that they popped up and down through like prairie dogs the entire trip. We'd occasionally hear some bickering among them, then J shrieking that the girls "are killing me....hee  hee hee!"  At which point, they would dive in the water, swim to shore, build sand castles and then swim back to the boat.

Every day, a different cove or marina to explore. Every day more beautiful than the one before. And every day at 5 o clock, an elaborate cocktail hour. How veddy veddy civilized. The crew would prepare two pitchers of fancy tropical drinks, potent for us, a virgin version for the kids, and delicious complicated hors d'oeuvres. "Oh, Mommy," my youngest asked. "Can we start doing this every night back home?" Ah, she is so to the manner born.  And I am so not.

My state has been making the news lately because of a really lenient law regarding child abandonment. Apparently, any child can be dropped off at a safe haven, so laws that were designed to protect newborns only apply to all children, regardless of age.

Suddenly people can give up their kids to authorities, without persecution, no matter what age the kids are. Are you having a bad day with your rambunctious toddler? Drop him off with the authorities. Is your teenager driving you crazy? Pack her bags and send her away.

There was a story of a man dropping off his kids that made national headlines because he surrendered nine children of varying ages. Authorities were left scratching their heads because according to the law the children belonged to the state now and there were no ramifications for the dad.

Why is it so simple to wash your hands of your children but walking away from your spouse takes thousands of dollars and countless hours of legal mumbo jumbo? Imagine a law where spouses could just look at each other and say, "You know, this really isn't working," and then they walk down to the courthouse and are declared divorced. Voila. It's like a magic trick.

I'm not saying this is the best idea. I'm personally a fan of trying to make things work before throwing in the towel, but I'm left scratching my head over this law that lets you walk away from your own flesh and blood. Do you want to leave your spouse? Prepare for myriad legal bills and confusing laws. 

Do you want to leave your children? If you live in the state I live in, you're in luck.