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.

My bedroom walls are yellow. Two months into this new place and still the only thing on those walls is the sunshine paint job.

It's the least finished room in the house. I'm attempting to not assign any kind of significance or symbolism or whatever to the bare walls in that room. Chalk it up to most of our artwork is out of the past, out of the places we lived together before we lived apart and even the most beautiful pieces have dragged little bits of ugly along with them.

These walls are no place for those ghosts.

We have some great photos of the girls, too, but my wise friend and informal feng shui consultant advises that, energetically, hanging them in the bedroom is a no-no. The kids have laid claim to every other space in the house, she says, my bedroom should be about the adults. A sanctuary.

The art should be lush and sensual, reflect energy of partners and of lovers not of mommies and daddies. What I'm going for is more love-den than pre-school.

I could tell you the walls remain naked because we don't have the money to buy new stuff for them — and that's a true, true thing. But it's not the whole truth.

The whole is, I'm always looking for just the right something, even if I can only afford to fantasize about actually buying it. And two months in, nothing. I don't even have a gauzy fantasy of how that room should be.

Sometimes, I guess, you just have to grow into a space, same way we sometimes have to grow into ourselves and no matter what we wear it all feels like a costume if it doesn't reflect the truth.

Sunshine and open space. I guess that will do for now. 

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.

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.

There are the times, usually carefully chosen, when I feel I have to say something to my husband, even if it hurts. On the way home from a recent dinner party: "Honey, the Carters have been telling us since last fall that their son Justin has his heart set on Brown."

"They are calling in all their chits in hopes of getting the dorky kid in there," he says.

"So when you dis Brown, and say his choice of college doesn't really matter, well sweetie, it kind of brought the dinner party conversation to a dead halt.

"Did you notice? Brown seems very important to them. Maybe next time you could say, 'Brown — great school. Fingers and toes crossed for you!'"

That's when he will jam on the brakes a block from our house and call me elitist. And then he'll get defensive: "I'll say whatever I want to say."

"Honey," I respond, "let's just play the game. Even though the less-than-brilliant Justin will never get into Brown.

"Who are we to burst their bubble?

"This is not rocket science, honey. It's just a social grace. Can't you just play along?"

Things like this are minor irritants, taken one at a time. But if he thinks those things don't add up in a small town, he is mistaken. I point that out — again, because these are the people we have chosen to live among.

The town we picked, the street we claim as ours. With neighbors — flawed like the rest of us. It's our village.

All I am asking for is peace in the village. Where our kids, a few years down the road, will dream big, dream a bit beyond our means.

So I want him to quit embarrassing himself. Actually, to quit embarrassing us.

Rules: Keep it down to two glasses of wine.

Skip the tequila.

We can always get snarky about poor Justin on the ride home.

If he does that one more time, I am calling a lawyer. That's it. He's been asked politely, with the proper phrasing from the couples counselor: "Don't say ‘You forgot to get the milk.' " Instead say, "I feel bad when you forget things like this, honey."

I remind myself: "The word 'always' rarely applies."

When he leaves the sprinkler on all night, and soaks the yard turning it into a muddy marsh, I don't always say, "We've got a gusher in the back yard ... again."

Usually I notice it when I'm up first in the morning, as I'm pouring the kids' cereal. So I dash out in my bathrobe and turn off the sprinkler.

By the time he's up and rushing to catch the train, I forget to even mention it.

I don't always use the midnight car ride home from a party to tell him that he raised his voice a tad too loud about Obama in a room full of known Republicans.

Usually I just make a joke: "Wow, you sure told them everything they didn't want to hear, sweetie."

Or, "Remember, these are the people who sponsored us for the golf club last year."

Or, "Maybe you could just tone it down a bit."

Usually, I say nothing, and silently vow to buy a pricy hostess gift, and slip it in front of the host's front door the next morning, without ringing the doorbell.

A few months ago I read a Newsweek article written by a woman who was in the middle of a divorce. She and her husband had both come to the realization that the marriage wasn't going to work, so while they still remained friends they knew that divorce was inevitable.

Instead of splitting up the household goods, working out a custody arrangement for the kids, and then going their separate ways, they still lived together in the same house they bought as a married couple. They had separate bedrooms, but they still maintained the home concurrently. The kids knew the parents were divorcing at that eventually they would be split up into two households, but until the house sells they'll all stay together under one roof.

I remember thinking to myself as I read the article, "Is this feasible? Can two people who are divorcing share a house and not be freaked out the whole time?" I figured it must be an exceptional situation, and didn't give it much more thought until a friend recently told me about her neighbor who is doing the exact same thing. Apparently they're afraid to put the house on the market because of the current real estate environment, so they've set up separate bedrooms and they've already filed the divorce paperwork.

Does anyone else think this is weird?

If I filed for divorce I would not want to live in the same house as my husband. Maybe it's different for me because my husband absolutely does not want a divorce, so it would be weird to live with him and deal with the whole, "Are you sure you want to do this? Can't we work it out? How could you do this to me?" thing that I would probably get from him every single day. Not being able to be physically away from him would be bizarre, considering the circumstances.

I just learned about Living Apart Together (LAT). Interesting idea. (Isn't that what Woody and Mia did, only to have their sense of family diluted enough that Woody took up with his wife's adopted daughter? Eww.)

But from the sounds of it, others make it work, and in living apart, they find the freedom to stay together as a couple.

What about the opposite? Allow me to coin the term Living Together Apart (LTA!). As in someone moves into the guestroom and the former couple shares the apartment equally as roommates, and no intimate relationship continues.

I bet Rob would go for it. And this way I get to keep my favorite study intact, continue to receive the affections of my cat, and stay in my beloved neighborhood!

But would it be fair to Rob? I've been opening up to the idea that we have helped each other grow but might need to grow in separate directions in the future. While living together could eventually impact our moving on and dating, what about in the near future? Is it possible this could ease a transition?

Or is it a cop out when the fear of change and loneliness related to moving out are too tough to imagine? I'd love to hear from others who have given it a try.

The other day was a doozy. The kids were both stir-crazy because of the rain, and when they get stir-crazy they get awfully clingy and needy. I had three deadlines looming and I had to go to a meeting. The house was a mess and I couldn't figure out a time to go grocery shopping even though the pantry was pretty much bare.

All in all, it was the kind of day where I felt stretched to the limit and although I wanted nothing more than to curl into bed and hide from the world it just wasn't an option.

Too many obligations, and not enough of me to go around.

After the kids were in bed I sat down to punch out the work that I had to do. I figured if I worked for two hours straight I could get to bed before midnight, then the next day I could try to tackle the housework and maybe get to the grocery store if everything worked out.

I had been working for a few minutes when my husband stopped flipping through the television channels and looked over at me. "I need to talk to you about something," he said, and then proceeded to tell me that I wasn't paying enough attention to him.

Now that's bad timing.

I was already on edge because I was trying to deal with so much at once. Sometimes it gets overwhelming: kids, work, keeping up the house...I understand that when I have so much to deal with my husband's need for attention might take a back seat. There are just some times when I have to get stuff done and I don't have the time to fawn over him.

That either makes me a realist, or it makes me incredibly insensitive to my husband's needs. Or maybe I'm an insensitive realist.

I work hard. It would be great to end an evening with my husband saying something along the lines of, "I know you've been stretched thin lately. What can I do to help?" instead of, "Pay more attention to me."