My dad and stepmom met Mike last spring, and they said they liked him, but, really, what else would they say? Since they visited my sister last week, I figured I could check in with her and make sure.

So I checked. And, yes, they do. But...

"They think you're getting married," my sister said.

"What?" I squawked.

This is me we're talking about. Put aside that whole not wanting to get married again — this relationship's barely a year old! We haven't even lived in the same city yet! We're not even ready to live together! Plus that whole my-divorce-isn't-even-freaking-final-yet thing.

I casually mentioned this.

"I know, I know," she said. "But Dad thinks so, because you're coming to visit me."

Since Mike and I will be spending Christmas on the East Coast, part of our travel plan involves stopping in Boston to see my sister.

"SO?" I asked.

"Well, when I said you were both coming, he got all thoughtful. You're at his place, then Mike's parents', then here. He said maybe you were making ‘the family rounds.' ‘She must have something to announce!' he said."

"Don't worry," she said hastily, as I started sputtering. "I set him straight."

"But, but...how could he possibly think that?  Doesn't he know me at all?"

"Please," my sister said, "this is our dad. He asked me my senior year of college if my boyfriend and I were pinned. His world is a different place than ours."

Thank God their conversation happened. Otherwise, Thanksgiving might have been awkward, without me even realizing. 

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.

Okay. I haven't written about the boyfriend in a while. Truth be told, I haven't wanted to jinx it. Things have been going so smoothly I sometimes wonder if there's something wrong?

In the past, I've kept my finger on the pulse of my relationships. If the heart wasn't racing so hard one of us was in danger of a heart attack, then the relationship didn't seem real. It was all emergency-room experiences.

Reality was at such a high pitch, such a fevered pace, there wasn't any down time or room for ambiguity.

Maybe it's maturity. Maybe I'm just exhausted post-divorce, but my new boyfriend and I have a rhythm that's positively lethargic. I'm loving it.

Here's the 411: I'm so busy rushing around with kids, job, music and meetings, that when I make a date with Mr. Right these days, I'm finding peaceful relaxation, safety, security, and the warm-fuzzies are what I'm looking for. Not a racing pulse.

First, I never worry where I stand. He thinks I'm wonderful all the time. Second, whenever I ask, "Would you like to go to such and such?" his response is always, "Are you going to be there?"

He continually assures me that the largest measure of his happiness has to do with being near me.

I remember when I was in my 20s, writing about how I needed a wife. That just goes to show how lowly the position was back then, because I was writing about needing someone to do my laundry, scrub my floors, and cook my dinners.

While Mr. Right isn't angling for the wifey position, he isn't above helping me with household chores. And, he does yard work.

Now you're saying that this sounds too good to be true.

Although divorce has damaged me to the extent that I find it hard to think of a romantic future of more than a single day, I can honestly say that, from a new-age perspective, you really can dream your way to reality.

Minutes after we'd been declared husband and ex-wife, Edgar was vigorously berating me, calling me a dumb, stupid woman. I looked up at him and wept.

"I'm giving you what you wanted," he said. "I kept my mouth shut."

I kept crying and trying not to think about the other people in the waiting area. They probably appreciated the entertainment.

It was my turn to keep quiet. I recognized Ed's fury as the typical reaction of alcoholics and addicts when something doesn't go their way: It has to be somebody else's fault. Ed was right, I'd gotten what I wanted. There was no need to remind him of how and why, with the destructive assistance of alcohol, we'd ended up in divorce court.

My ex actually, accidentally, did me some favors as our marriage came to an end. Over a year ago, he was the one who angrily asked if I wanted a divorce, never expecting me to say yes. Had he not asked, I'd probably still be working up the courage to say so.

On the day of the final hearing, he reminded me that he is prone to untruthfulness and to blaming others for his problems.

I felt really bad when I told the judge our marriage was irretrievably broken. Though I'd been over that question and over it and over it countless times, always finding the answer was yes, still I had a small doubt at the moment of truth.

It wasn't big enough to stop me, though.

I never thought I'd get divorced. I meant that business about taking Ed for the rest of my days. When I realized, though, that my days would be fewer if I stayed married to a man who couldn't quit drinking, I was able to break my promise.

I'm sad about it, but I'm not sorry about it.
 

Until now I had never had a comment on one of my blogs that elicited a definite "How dare you?" from me. I've been able to rationalize every comment one way or another, but a comment I recently received has me ticked off. I gave myself a week to see if I was still annoyed before sitting down to write a response just in case time made me feel better about it, but no...I'm still steaming.

"If you want to rescue this marriage, drop the writing until both kids are in school, and work at convincing your husband that he is #1."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's back up a minute here.

How many men are told to drop their careers in order to make their wives feel as though they are a priority? Would you tell a male doctor to stop practicing medicine in order to make his wife feel special? Would you tell a guy to stop going to the office everyday because he needs to work on his marriage? Probably not.

Maybe the problem isn't that I'm a woman, but that I'm a writer. You probably envision me lounging around the house during the day, sipping chamomile tea and leisurely composing The Great American Novel. Can I let you in on a little secret? I work hard. I have corporate clients and contractual deadlines. On any given day I'm writing for three or four different clients, and it isn't easy. I love it, but it's hard work.

I don't know what universe a person lives in when he thinks that it's okay to suggest that a woman simply drop her career in order to cater to her husband. Shall I simply stop paying bills? Maybe my mortgage company will allow me to skip some payments because I need to make my husband feel special. I'm sure preschool won't mind if my kids attend for free for a while. Oh, and the insurance companies? I'm sure they'll keep our policies active even though we're not paying because doggonit, my husband needs a foot rub.

Why didn't I think of that? 

"If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase."  —Epictetus (55 A.D.–135 A.D.)

This is the way that I have been trying to live. It seems that out of all of this — the sadness, the despair, the desperation, the lonlieness, the worrying, the anxiety — that the anger has been the one emotion that no matter how hard I try to shake it off, it continues to hang on.

I've written so much about how angry I am at Levi. How I'm angry about what he's done to me, to us, to our son. How I'm angry that this divorce left me bare, stripped of all of my innocent beliefs of true love and Prince Charmings.

But what I haven't written too much about, haven't even really realized on a conscience level myself, is how I am angry with myself.

How could I have been so stupid? is something that often comes to my mind. How could I have not seen the forest through the trees?

I told my therapist that if I met Levi for the first time today, I know that I wouldn't even like him. In fact, when I first met him, I didn't really like him...at all.

It was the idea that — this man loves himself so much there must be something great about him — that kept me coming back for more.

Last night I got home after working for 12 hours, my kid had pink eye, the house was a mess, and my cat had puked all over the floor. It's nights like these that I become angry with myself for ever even believing in Prince Charming and happily-ever-after in the first place.

Except now, as I feel the anger washing over me, I give it nothing, I do not feed it and I feel it fade away faster and faster.

I hope maybe if I keep this up, I will find a way to let go of the anger.

Speaking of personal growth, here we go. Rob and I are heading to the Kripalu Center in western Massachusetts for a weekend of yoga and meditation. While I wasn't willing to do a workshop specifically for couples, our time there will no doubt bring transformation of some sort. Everyone who goes comes back changed.

I'm already dreading it, which is weird, because I'm a yogi who usually welcomes the opportunity to study with new teachers. I love how the steadiness and equanimity cultivated on the yoga mat make meeting life's challenges off the mat easier, and how each teacher brings unique insight to that process. 

But I have big resistance toward growth with Rob. I guess that's what I was getting at in my last post. If you can muster enough compassion and forgiveness for a difficult or mismatched partner to get over your most serious conflicts, does that mean you have rendered moot the reasons you should not be together, end of story? 

Can you forgive your way out of marital strife and into martial bliss? 

Sure, but my question is: Is that the ONLY path? It's the only one any therapist has seen fit to send me down, and that has been bugging me. How about forgiving but still breaking up anyway? What about those couples who are like best friends and divorce without an ounce of acrimony? (Forget Date my Ex: Jo and Slade. There really are couples like this out there, right?)

That seems more like the path before me, though readers of my blog know I'm dragging my feet, too attached to my cozy life, fearful of separation.

I'll be back next week. Hopefully the Kripalu Center will be fantastic. I'll take the advice of a friend who said to have fun, just don't drink the Kool-Aid.