Thanksgiving week has all the wind knocked out of me. Could just be my reaction to going down, down, down the rabbit hole. The Holidays are here.

Only thing I know is the only thing I want to do is curl up under my big old comforter and sleep. It’s the lack of time that has me feeling so defeated. My kids don’t have school all week and we don’t have childcare, don’t have the money for the extra child care, I should say, so what happens? I don’t have time to work.

We are caught right smack in the center exactly what I feared getting back into this. I have no time to work because we can’t afford to cover the business hours I need so jobs are left unfinished leaving me feeling further defeated and my pay further behind, which adds up to less childcare that we can afford and fewer things completed. It goes on like this until I’m right where I am now.

One big miserable puddle of blah. And I blame it on the marriage, when actually I should blame it on me.

My reasoning, skewed as it may be, is that when we were apart a couple things were absolute: I had several days every week to work because the kids were with Sam and I had to make it work because the alternatives were homelessness and starvatation.

This week, I’m giving thanks for my two beautiful, healthy girls, and the ability I have to back up, reconsider, and try it again. But I'm also questioning how much of my current situation is a self-fulfilling prophecy and why I can't have the structure to make room for work in the same way I did when I was separated.

"Sometimes I fantasize about getting married again," I said to my friend Rachel. We both looked at each other stunned — even I couldn't believe the words that had just come out of my mouth.

"But," I continued, "I don't really see the point."

Both statements are true.

There is a part of me that dreams of sharing that bond with someone again. This is the more emotional part. But the other part — the more cynical part — says, why even bother?

Consider the cost of marriage (which can really be anywhere from fifty bucks to fifty thousand bucks — and even more if you're totally insane), factor in  the sky-high rate of divorce, then throw in the cost of getting a divorce. Truthfully, marriage can seem like nothing but a bad investment. And that does even cover the emotional energy that you'll spend, the heartbreak that you'll endure, or the cost of your therapist.

It's 2008, and the rules have changed. People live together for years without being married — something that once upon a time was frowned upon. Now, single women give birth to babies every day. Quite simply, times have changed and sometimes it seems that marriage is becoming more and more outdated.

But then why does that other piece of me yearn for it?

What is it about marriage that despite the obvious pain in the ass that it can be, that keeps up coming back for more? 

There's nothing like posting your procrastination on a blog to give you that needed nudge. Today, I sold what I referred to recenly as my post-divorce jewelry — the gifts that Jake gave me over the course of our marriage.

The thing about the Internet, it really leaves us no excuses. There's no use pleading, "But I don't know where to go!" Logging on to yelp.com makes it difficult to get away with that kind of thing.

I dumped my wares before the jeweler: a necklace, earrings, and anklet set in amethyst and gold. The giant gold pendant that won the My Husband Gives Me Uglier Gifts Than Your Husband contests for years. A dozen pearls I never got around to stringing. And my wedding ring.

Much of it the jeweler didn't want. Pearls, he said, he's seeing "by the buckets." No one wants pearls these days, he said. The amethyst set he didn't want either, but gave me the card of a place that might. The pendant he took. And the ring he took.

I hadn't initially thought to bring the wedding ring. All that other jewelry, I never wore. I had never liked any of it. I kept it all in a box and never thought about it. Strangely, I had never thrown the ring into that box. I grabbed it last minute, an afterthought, as I left the apartment.

Seeing it there on the counter, waiting to be weighed — it was a strange feeling. As the jeweler and I filled out the surprising amount of paperwork involved in the transition, it just sat there, looking at me. And I had a pang. I'm not sure why. I've hardly looked at it since the day I put it away. That whole last year, I found excuses not to wear it. I'd been glad to take it off permanently.

One thing I can say about my divorce is that it was surprisingly civil. We worked with a mediator and our accountant to work out the financial details, kids visitation issues and the nitty gritty of who got what. Then our individual lawyers looked over the paperwork, blessed our disunion, and we signed on the dotted line. A year later, we were divorced and the whole business cost about $5,000.

Compare that with S, now into year two of his nasty divorce and endless depositions, attorney meetings, court dates. His ex has been playing the delaying game because he is paying all her bills until they reach an agreement. They get close to a settlement, she decides to switch lawyers. Another retainer check (ka-ching), another delay. I can't even begin to imagine the final tab on this divorce.

But then a funny thing happened in the Ex Wars.

After a long term relationship ended, S's ex went back trolling on the Internet where she soon netted a number of potential catches.

One, she decides to meet at a local restaurant. He joins her, they engage in small talk. "I'm a matrimonial lawyer," he said.

"That's funny, I'm going through a divorce right now," she responded.

"What did you say your last name was?" he asked.

When she told him, he abruptly rose and "recused himself" from the date. Seems he was on S's legal team.

Her lawyer immediately made a motion to force S to hire yet another lawyer, which was — thankfully — denied. But the incident did open an interesting can of worms.

One of the sticking factors in coming to an agreement has been her aversion to work. She is much too ill from various ailments, she maintains, to ever again hold even a part time job.

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.

Okay, I've got a new house for the animal family and me. Now: What to do with the old one? The plan is to ready it for sale or rent. I've talked with a couple of friends to see if they might want to buy it or maybe even rent it at a reduced rate just to keep it from standing empty.

And, my soon-to-be-ex Edgar has volunteered to rent it.

Edgar tells me I have to hang onto it. "That house is the only thing you have." Well, sort of.

I like to think of things like friends and family, years of experience in the kind of work I love, even my books and music as things I "have." But he's right. The old homestead is certainly my biggest material asset, even though its value has been dropping like a stone.

"This isn't the time to be selling your house," he told me.

I didn't buy the house as an investment, per se. I bought it 11 years ago because I'd always wanted a house, and needed a nice, quiet place to keep myself and my stuff. I kept it even when strangers approached me in the yard during the real estate boom and offered me several times what I paid. 

But they were offering only money. This is my home.

And though it is worth much, much less than it has been, I should still make a profit if I'm able to sell the place.

But that's a big If. I'd love to be able to rent it to Edgar and keep it. He does have a stable job, he knows the house's idiosyncrasies and might take better care of it than I have.

However, I also remember worrying, when he lived here, that he might set the place on fire during a drunken episode.

Typically, Ed is presenting himself as the solution to my problems, even though he says he can't afford the full mortgage payment. I'd have to pick up the shortfall. "But if you'd be willing to lose your house over a couple of hundred dollars a month," he said, "that's just stupid."

Jake had a thing about giving me jewelry. In his head, this is What Husbands Did. If one had a Wife, one got her Nice Things.

No matter that the wife in questions said, "I don't really like jewelry." No matter that she said, "I don't like to wear jewelry." No matter that she said, "At the very least, please don't ever get me anything gold."

"Happy anniversary," he'd say. "I know you don't like gold. I know you never wear jewelry. But I got this for you anyway."

So, I have this jewelry box, and it's filled with things. Gold things, mostly. Expensive things. Things I never wear. Things I didn't want in the first place. Things I have no use for.

And yet — two years later — I still have them.

Why? Is it because dealing with the process of appraisal and sale will take some effort? Is it because just the idea of yet another errand dealing with this divorce exhausts me?

Or is it that the idea of losing those presents is hard? Because — even though they speak so much to Jake's lack of understanding of me, lack of interest in what I liked and cared about — they were still given out of love.

So much pain is left when a marriage ends that it's hard to look back at what was good and happy without those memories being tainted, somehow, by all the hurt.

This could be grad school tuition, here in this box. This could be a vacation, or a couple of the cross-country plane tickets I'm burning through these days.

What will it take to open it up and take some action?

OK, I give up. I surrender, I confess, I admit it: I cannot afford my home anymore. By my home I mean both my house and the crazy city that I love, where I've lived for the past 20 years — longer than I've lived anywhere else, nearly half of my life.

I went "back home" to North Carolina last week, to attend my 30th high school reunion (!) and spend a week with my parents. I ended up using a lot of that time looking for a place to move my remaining family, the three dogs and three cats.

And I found something, a tiny little house in a great, big fenced yard. The rent is just over half of what I'm now struggling to pay for my mortgage.

For years I'd been scrambling for work, and just getting by, with the inconsistent assistance of Ed. It occurred to me, as I gazed at the satellite image of Hurricane Ike covering the entire Gulf of Mexico, that homeowners insurance — already prohibitively expensive - will never get any cheaper in Florida.  

My beautiful house, the cherished fulfillment of a long-held dream, needs work that I can't afford. Relatively speaking, it's a wealthy person's home. 

Relatively speaking, I am not a wealthy person.

Also, my parents also are not getting any younger. I'll feel better being closer to them — though I will decline, at least for now, their generous offer to let me live in their basement for a modest rent. I would not feel better being that close.

Speaking of which, I'm not opposed to putting several hundred miles between myself and my soon-to-be-ex-husband.

I don't want to move, I don't want to leave, but I can't afford this life any more.

I give up. That much is certain. Now all I have to do is work out the details. 

"Why is it," my mother asked, "that you can get married for $10 or $15 but it costs so much more to get un-married?"

"Because they know how badly you want it," I replied, and we shared a laugh.

Apparently, I want out of my dead marriage badly enough to actually do something about it. Nothing momentous, but this is where momentous begins. I marched myself up to the Self-Help Center at a civil courthouse and secured the packet of forms I need for my simple Florida divorce from Edgar. 

"Simple" being a term of art, of course.

The packet cost $65. Filing for dissolution will be another $409. In this county it actually costs $93.50 for a marriage license, a mere $61 if you complete the premarital preparation course.

I think that's a good investment. I've often wondered if premarital counseling would have prevented the train wreck that my marriage to Ed became.

Anyway, a clerk asked a couple of questions ("Do you have children with him? Do you own property with him?") and ultimately gave me what I asked for, a manila envelope containing 18 printed sheets. I actually only have to do something with 11 of them; the rest are instructions and receipts.

Unfortunately, one of the tasks I must complete is getting my husband served. I know where he works and could deliver his papers by hand myself, but it seems I still have to have his new address.

So far he's declined to give it to me.

Once I get that straightened out, it looks like I'll have to go to the courthouse twice more: once to go over the documents at the Self-Help Center and have them stamped by the clerk, and once for a Final Hearing.

The forms say they'll mail me notice of that date "in about four to eight weeks."

Okay, I've got the papers. However, I've already headed off to see my parents for a week. So I won't be filing anything until I return.