I imagined a trip to the Greek Isles in my last post. I'd like it to be a month-long journey at least, so I could really drop out from my harried city life and revel in a slow life governed by the natural rhythms of day, night, and season.

It's not quite the same, but my Labor Day vacation will be an island getaway of a sort. Rob and I are flying out to L.A. and ferrying out to Santa Catalina, a hilly rock of an island off the southern Californian coast.

This is the first time in months Rob and I are going away together, and it's the first time in a couple of years I'm looking forward to spending time with him. What's different? I'm not sure.

I'm waiting and seeing rather than grasping for an immediate resolution to our discomfort. Rob is still working at therapy, and we're seeing a therapist together. We're both growing and changing. Apart or together? Not yet sure. But why not try to enjoy each other's company in the meantime?

Actually, this trip could be an important test. I've heard it's not a good idea to go away on vacation to try to fix a marriage because it's easy to get along in paradise, away from the stresses of normal life.

But if a successful romantic getaway can't predict successful romance back home, an unsuccessful romantic getaway — one plagued with fights or, worse, boredom — certainly can't predict one either.

So this weekend may be telling. Stay tuned.

Yay! I have a new place to live. Go figure, it was a rental company, not an individual, that was finally willing to overlook the horrible credit (with an additional deposit, of course) and give us a lease.

You know what? After all the searching and the eleventh hour panic about not being moved before the start of school, house for house, this cute little Cape Cod with the cute little garden (I have banana tree) in a cute little neighborhood, was the nicest place we looked at.

Now it's just me and my laptop on the floor in the final hours in my apartment. Only things still here are a few dust bunnies, okay, dust elephants, and the art on the walls.

I have moved 15 times since I left my parents' house for college in 1988. Fifteen! Usually the pictures and knick-knacks come down first because they're quick and easy and the blank walls always make packing appear much further along than it actually is.

Not this time. Putting this stuff up was the most symbolic part of my move-in and it took more than a month to give myself permission to get comfy here.

These wall feel kind of sacred to me. The only place I have ever lived alone, or, well, been the only adult. Close enough. In some ways, this place is me: a little beat after two years, but comfortable.

All the tears and sleepless nights and I've grown more here than all the 36 years before. Maybe even enough to face the problems in my marriage with enough humility and openness to make it work this time.

But, I'll tell you a secret. Despite the beautiful home I'm moving into, despite the sense of possibility I feel with Sam, despite the un-namable joy of not having to search craigslist today, I'm kind of sad to leave here.

I haven't been to a therapist in a while. I stopped seeing the last guy I was going to because he got a little too fascinated with me and gave me the heebie-jeebies. So I rid myself of the one person in my life whom I freely chatted with on a regular basis about my thoughts of leaving my husband.

I used to talk to my pastor about it quite a bit but my therapist talked me out of that.

I confided in a few friends and soon afterwards it felt like an awkward pity party.

I told my mom and now she dislikes my husband.

If I didn't have a blog to write I would be a big bucket of nerves. At least I have one outlet.

I don't know if I'll go see another therapist. I don't know how the last guy managed to do it, but he got me so wrapped around his fingers that I would save up situations throughout the week and only form an opinion on them after my therapist and I had a chance to mull them over together. 

I went to therapy trying to figure out a way to save my marriage and instead got roped into a codependent situation with the therapist. Why can't anything ever just be easy?

If I do go see another therapist I think I'll find a woman who has such a thriving practice that she won't cling on to one patient in particular and decide to become some sort of puppet master.

I feel like a real idiot for having fallen into that pattern with my therapist, and now I'm scared to see anyone else. Really, it's not like I need another complication in my life.

I dream of visiting the Greek Isles and navigating the twists and turns of the road — between mountain, town, and beach — on a scooter. I lean into turns that open toward vistas dotted with bright white villages shining in the intense Mediterranean light. From every vantage point, ocean surrounds.

I can't make my dream getaway happen right now, but I'm not waiting around, either. I've manifested a bit of the experience here at home: I bought a Vespa to get me around the city in a style reminiscent of my dream, and at a fraction of the cost — to my wallet and to the earth (75 miles per gallon!).

I scoot between neighborhoods, from yoga studio to post office to library. My skin soaks up the sun but is also cooled by the breeze I create as I open the throttle. It's...freeing.

I haven't always felt free in my marriage. But freedom isn't about having the most comfortable arrangements — living in the house, working the job, and with the partner we always imagined. Freedom is an inside job, and inner freedom cannot be buffeted about by the vagaries of life. It is steady and true.  

I can't deny, however, that a solitary ride on a late-summer afternoon — waning sunlight and warm breeze on my face — doesn't jump start things for me.

Out on the leafy streets I capture a momentary sense of freedom. The Vespa is...my new joy toy.

My husband served in Iraq for a few months back when our first child was a young baby. I was really proud of him for what he was doing even though I was scared out of my mind for the dangerous situation he was getting into and also because I was really new at the whole mommy thing and was about to do it all on my own.

When he came home he was different. I know you've all probably heard about how people go away to war and then come back somehow changed, but unless you've experienced it firsthand then you probably have no idea what it's like.

It's not like in the movies where he sits in a dark corner and smokes cigarettes while grumbling about the ills of war. Instead it's as if he went away one man and then came back another.

The only way I can describe it is that he came home himself, but a different version I had never seen before. Less patient. More prone to anger.

One minute he would demand attention and the next minute he would shut down and want to be left alone. He laughed less and was much more critical of everyone around him.

He's gone to counseling and the therapist told him that although he probably has some PTSD issues; chances are he'll bounce right back eventually. That was five years ago, and most of the time I still feel like he's a stranger.

What kind of woman leaves a husband who changes after serving his country? He may be a different man, but he changed because he went off to fight for the liberties I enjoy daily.

I struggle with this all the time. Is it his fault that he's different? Why can't I adapt to his changes? Should I have to?

A friend of mine who has a life coaching business dropped me a line recently: "Hi, thinking of you, what's up?"

His quick and light email ended with a thud: "Remember, being single is not a burden, it's an opportunity!"

Nice sentiment, but what? I had just made the decision to stick around in my marriage and try really hard to improve it, so the note seemed ill-timed, if not downright rude. I wrote to remind him, maybe not gently enough, of my change of tack.

Well, apparently that line was just his automatic signature, phrased to inspire the bulk of his clientele, and not a message to me personally. Oops. Hee. 

We sorted it out easily, but my quick and strong reaction was telling. I'm super-sensitive about my situation, and not always open to advice. Gotta relax.

It's hard, though. When I was young, marriage was made to seem a happy inevitability, a final destination where, having found my one true mate, I would dwell in peace. When instead it's a road pitted with doubts, the going can be rough, and I can get moody.

Life may be a highway, but ride it all night long? I need rest areas, exit ramps! 

A few months after leaving Sam, I reclaimed my name professionally. I was on the verge of filing for divorce (which I never did) and I was starting to write again (which I'd done very little of in the second half of our marriage) and I didn't want his name in print above my work.

I was on deadline one afternoon, reading back through a story and there it was at the top: "By Elaina Blacksmith." I thought: That's not true. That's not me. Felt like his name was sticking its tongue out at me.

A few quick keystrokes and I was back to the woman I'd been forever, the woman I swore I'd always be. Sure, it was just a symbolic change. But there's a big lot of truth in symbolism.

When I got married, I didn't give much thought to giving-up "Goodman." I figured I'd always write under it, so no big deal if I became Blacksmith for everything else. Huh! What total crap. Or as my good friend says, TFBS — you can figure what it stands for.

I had the foresight to recognize and to tell Sam my writing comes from all the people who came before me. Even if they didn't publish or do this for a living, I come from generations and generations of writers and the name on my work should honor the family it comes from. "Blacksmith" had nothing to do with it.

Funny thing, though: The further I got into marriage, further I got from myself, the less it mattered. "Goodman" became "Goodman-Blacksmith" in print and eventually, when I discovered it wouldn't fit over a single newspaper column, I dropped Goodman. By then, I was so far away from my original self, I didn't care what I was called.

I know a lot of women who regret taking their partner's name, and a few who have recently taken back their own. They've incorporated it with a hyphen or reverted to it for professional purposes while keeping their partners name for personal matters.

I took introduction to psychology in college so I have a general idea of what the term "passive aggressive" means. It wasn't until recently, however, that I really got to witness it in person.

Apparently my husband has decided that this is his newest way to complain about the things I do without actually complaining about them.

Here are a couple of examples, which could easily be compiled with a slew of others for a "passive-aggressive husband reference manual":

The other day my kids and I went out to lunch with a couple of other moms and their kids. I don't eat out for lunch all the time, and this was an impromptu get-together. I had packed my husband a lunch that morning for him to take to work so he had leftovers. When he gets home he tells me this: "The guys at work said, 'Let me get this straight...she gets to eat out for lunch and you have to eat leftovers? Man, that's messed up!' Ha-ha!"

Translation: He's ticked off that I got to eat out and he had to eat leftovers.

My husband recently did some volunteer work with the guys at church that involved a lot of physical labor and when he got home he said, "Bob told me he was so glad that his wife and daughter were out of town because after we finished up he was going to go home and take a long nap without interruption. Ha-ha!"

Translation: He wants to take a nap but knows that we already agreed that he would take the kids so I could get some work done. He's hoping I suggest he takes a long nap and I'll just stay up until two in the morning working.

How do I know it's all passive aggressive? These comments don't even go with the flow of conversation. They come out of nowhere, and he gives a long pause afterward as though he's waiting for me to fall to my knees and beg his forgiveness for going out to eat with my friends/not offering him a four hour nap/whatever else I do that ticks him off.

If life is a journey, it's no weekend jaunt to the beach. It's an around-the-world expedition riddled with dangerous passages and course corrections.

My marriage is a journey, unfortunately quite a rough one of late. My relationship to my ailing father and my siblings who also help take care of him is always under construction.

Like many people, I also grapple with work-life balance: how much of myself do I put into my job or even any given project, and how much do I hold in reserve?

I've added another journey. Crazy, right? But stick with me...this one might be worth the added trouble.

I've embarked on a six-month yoga teacher training, and it's intense. The amount and level of physical, academic, and emotional study only seems to grow, week to week. At one point early on I said to a classmate that this might not have been the right time to engage in such a difficult program. Then we started our course of yogic philosophy.

Now I'm chartering more twists and turns in my mind than on the mat. While the training is physically challenging, this journey goes within, and the steadiness of mind I'm building benefits every part of my life.

So this one's a staycation. And there couldn't be a better time for it.

These last few weeks I've been reading and re-reading every word I've written in my journal since my separation. The thing I want most in moving back in with my ex is to hold tight to me, not forget one step of this journey or the tangles of Witches Broom I belly-crawled through to get here.

I moved out when Lila was 23 months old. In the early morning hours of her second birthday I did something huge. As I move back into life with her dad, the one thing I most want to keep is this:

21 Nov. 2006

It's warm tonight. Sweet condensation pooling on the windows. Moist chocolate smells baking in the oven. Home. Forty-one days out and 41 days in, this is finally my home.

I'm sitting in the same the spot I sat last night, back curved into cushy blue glider, feet on a chair under the table, one leg crossed over the other, keyboard on my lap, fingers on the keys, monitor claiming half the real estate on my kitchen table. Same as last night and the night before that and every night for the last five-and-a-half weeks. And, not the same at all. Everywhere I look, art and love and pieces of me collected on the journey color the walls with stories spoken across miles and years.

Decades.

A lifetime.