I had a very eye-opening conversation with my neighbor. She and I like to take our kids for walks after dinner, and the other day we were walking along and I noticed something: she kept making little comments about her husband like I used to make before I gave up trying to reach out to anyone. She wasn't saying anything horrible about him, but it was obvious that something was bothering her.

As we walked I told her, "I'm going to ask you something, and please don't get offended, but I'm only going to ask you because I wish someone would have asked me this a year ago." I took a deep breath and asked her, "Do you and your husband have some issues?"

I braced myself in case I had just offended her, but she stopped walking and looked at me. "We're beyond issues," she blurted out. "We're at the kill-each-other stage." 

She then proceeded to spend the rest of the walk telling me all about how she hasn't slept in the same bed with her husband for two years and how she's miserable in her marriage.

What a huge eye opener for me! We had just been over to their house for dinner a few nights ago and they seemed fine. Here I was thinking that I was alone among my friends in having serious marital issues, and the fact of the matter is that I'm not.

After she walked home I stood on the sidewalk looking at the houses on my block.  How many other people are sad? How many other people dream of someday leaving a relationship, or maybe dream about the relationship someday getting better? How many of these houses have couples who can't stand each other?

How did we all get so good at pretending as if everything is peachy? 

I forgot to add this wrinkle to my post about my non-anniversary. A few weeks out, I told Rob I had a business trip to Chicago just after our big day, and suggested that since neither of us had ever spent time in the Windy City, maybe he should come along and we could tack on an extra night in the hotel.

We have no love life at home, so you know, I figured it wouldn't hurt to see what playing around in a new city and retiring to a lovely hotel room could do for us.

He said he'd check about getting a day or two off from work to make it happen, and then promptly forgot, day after day, to do so. Sounds like a guy who is not up for a romantic whirlwind trip away to a new city with his much-adored wife, right?

The truth is we both find excuses to avoid romantic situations. And week after week we work with a therapist on improving our communication and figuring out our shared goals, and never speak of the fact that there's nothing intimate about our relationship. We're all about denial.

A friend recently admitted he has to make a conscious effort to have relatively frequent sex with his girlfriend. He says it's too easy to forgo it in the name of exhaustion or lack of amorous mood, and that he find he has to work at it, as you would in creating a new, good habit. He's never disappointed once things get going, and always happy he made the effort.

But it has been so long for me a Rob — a year and a half — that I can't imagine getting over that initial hurtle...or enjoying the experience, much less make a habit of it.

Okay, I'm making a pledge now to bring up sex at couple's therapy soon. If you think you're getting tired of me posting about my lack of a sex life, imagine being in my shoes (or bed). 

I get to take a little break from my life today and go out on the road with a couple of my girlfriends. An actual road trip with no small people in the back seat asking how much further and chanting "I want out of this car right now!"

Yay!

It's only for two days and it's almost all of it driving, but the truth is I wouldn't care if we didn't stop at all. I love to watch the world through an open window, the way movement makes my mind turn faster and how my spirit feels freer and all my songs come louder to the rhythm of road.

It's a five-hour drive down into Southern Oregon where we are going, down through the northern most tip of the Redwoods and to the coast, and what I remember is how the trees grow more and more impossibly big around the bottom the closer you get to the water.

How I can tilt my head back, look straight up the trunk and everything in my periphery, both directions, is the bark. Up in the canopy is a world that goes on its way oblivious to us, and the smallness it brings in me is perfect. Forty percent of all the world's animals live up the treetops, a hundred feet above the ground.

We're always down here trying to negotiate with the little bits of information we can gather in our limited view. And everything we're in feels so enormous. The weight of tangled personal drama that we can't get high enough above to see where the edges blur out.

I want to climb to the tips of the trees, one branch higher and one branch higher, to where I can see how the pieces all fit together and everything makes sense. Breathe in and understand what it is to be small in the world and the universe and let go of the ways our crippled little vision keeps us trapped in the illusion that our confusion is desperate.

I have one black hair that grows on my neck. Whenever I notice it coming in I pluck it using tweezers, but it always comes back. It annoys me to no end. I would go get electrolysis if it wasn't just one stinking hair.

Sometimes I forget to check for the hair, but then I'll be sitting there minding my own business and my hand will land on my neck and there's the hair again. It's my recurring reminder that I'm not the same gal in my early twenties who snared a husband and had my whole life ahead of me. No, I'm in my mid-thirties with two kids, a mortgage, and a marriage that runs hot and cold. Wait, no, scratch that...a marriage that runs lukewarm and cold. 

After all, this neck hair was nowhere to be found when I was younger. I never had to tweeze neck hair before heading out to dance clubs with my friends. When I bought my first car I'm pretty sure there wasn't a black hair residing on my neck. When my husband and I went out on our first date there sure as heck wasn't a dark hair nestled under my turtleneck.

I'm a different woman now. I can't go back to how things were before I got married or before I had kids. It's not like my contemplating divorce has anything to do with wanting to reclaim my past life — sans unattractive neck hair — but instead it has more to do with reclaiming myself. I want to feel sure about where I am in life. I want to live a day without wondering if my relationship is the thing that makes me feel so incredibly uncomfortable and helpless.

Yeah, I'm older now than when I was last single. I'm in a completely different stage of life. The younger, no-hair-on-the-neck me would probably think that the present version of me is pretty lame. Hey, if you aren't happy in a relationship, you just move on, right? 

Congrats to Alice on her recent anniversary! I just celebrated one as well: my fifth wedding anniversary. But since my friendly and comfortable relationship with Rob sorely lacks romance, the idea of making big deal about our fifth was a bit embarrassing.

Add to that how I gave Rob an honest yet hopeful note card last Valentine's Day and he gave me nothing (I know, it's a ridiculous holiday, but nothing whatsoever?), and you get full-blown AWKWARD!

A few days out, Rob actually checked in to see how we should handle it. Well, we had already justified our recent vacation by calling it an anniversary gift to ourselves. So maybe we were all set. Plus, we had a block party and another friend's house party to attend on the anniversary date. So we'd spend the day being neighborly.

When our actual anniversary arrived, this time I had nothing for Rob and he had a note card for me. It read in part: "I'm glad to be where we are today.... I'm glad we're on this path together and I love the family and home we've made together."

Oof! I felt guilty. I don't disagree with what he wrote, but even in the face of his transformation from drinker and gamer to more thoughtful partner and fellow meditation practitioner, my doubt about us surviving long-term remains strong. Congeniality and shared interests are important, but when there's no sex, it's nearly impossible to pretend everything is good, much less something to be celebrated. 

The other day I was cruising around online for success/failure statistics on re-marrying your ex and the closest thing I could find was an un-sourced article that said there are none. Helpful.

If I'd found the numbers, they wouldn't really apply to me anyway, being as I never technically divorced my ex before the reunification.

And, really, who cares about the numbers anyway?

What I found way more practical than a bunch of numbers that have little to do with my husband, my relationship, and my attempt to raise it up from the ashes was a list of 10 tips for making a second marriage work.

It's the kind of stuff we talk about in therapy every week. Right now the biggie for me is flexibility, figuring out how to integrate all my solo routines back into a partnership lifestyle without feeling like I've forfeited myself.

These first few weeks it's been rough transitioning back to being on as a mom everyday; I've mourned the me time I had half of every week and I realized I'm just as exhausted by the change in routine as I was when I left two years ago.

Aha, there's that aha moment. The change in routine. It's the transition exhausting me, the recalibration itself, more than specifics of how things are changing.

That whole first year of separation was a struggle to figure out how. How to do it all myself. How to get dinner on the table every night and kids to school on time every morning. The second year, I had it down.

Easy isn't the right word, but it stopped feeling impossible.

Flexibility for me right now is all about figuring out how to do it differently, and remembering that's okay. 

Want to hear the definition of uncomfortable? Try going to a movie with your husband that's chock full of sex even though you and your husband's level of intimacy is strained at best.

True story.

Last night my husband and I went to see Choke. If you go to see it then expect to see plenty of sexual situations. It's not like I wasn't expecting it since I read the book beforehand, but it was the first time my husband and I had been to a movie together that featured so much naked fun during a period in our life when our sex life consists of once a week or so me nudging him and saying, "If you want to do it, go ahead before I go to sleep." Ahh, romance. 

It's tough to watch a movie that so blatantly displays one of the very things we have tried to deal with but can't seem to fix.

You've heard about not talking about the elephant in the room? This was like the elephant sat in front of us at the theater and bellowed loudly from its trunk every few minutes.  And wore a big hat. And threw popcorn at us.

Stupid elephant.

My husband is enough of a gentleman to not nudge me and say something vulgar about how he's glad someone is getting some enthusiastic sex once in a while, but I've been with the man long enough to know what goes through his mind. 

Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to turn off emotions and just have a passionate romp in bed with him while our relationship flounders. I wish I could, though, because it would certainly make going to the movies a lot easier. 

I noticed Sarah McLachlan's song about divorce made the First Wives World news blog, so I thought I'd give a shout out to pop singer Pink. Not that she needs it. Her single "So What," in which she sings about her divorce from her husband, motocross racer Cary Hart, has reached No. 1.

I don't know much about Pink, but clearly she has, um, balls. I'm not referring to her bad-ass styling and punky sound. I'm talking about how she not only exposed her raw and unsettled feelings about her ex-husband to the world through song, but she put her ex in the video!

But while the lyrics belie her need for a bit more closure ("So what...I don't need you...And now that we're done, I'm gonna show you tonight") in the video it's clear, these ex-spouses have moved beyond anger to place where they can deal with each other, as friends.

In fact, it's rather sweet. Even as she sings: "You weren't there, You never were, You want it all, But that's not fair, I gave you life, I gave my all, You weren't there, You let me fall," Pink and Hart go from play-acting, to playful, to a bittersweet caress. Check it out here.

Aww.

According to People.com, Pink wrote on her website that her divorce was "‘not about cheating, anger, or fighting" and that she still considers her ex a ‘good man.'"

All week I've been reading posts about the hardest of the hard stuff here. Women who face forfeiting financial security for themselves and for their children, lose health benefits and homes if they leave their marriages. Women who much decide: Is it more damaging to the kids to go, or to stay?

I don't envy any of us.

Sometimes I'm over opinionated, weigh in where I don't understand, in the way we can never understand the nuances and complexities of other people's situations. Breaking points or the circumstances that lead a woman to stay, or to go.

Today, I don't have anything to say. Not about my life, nor anyone else's.

Just empathy for the suffering.

May everyone reach greater peace, no matter how that looks. 

I went to an art gallery last night with some friends and was having a nice time looking around at all the paintings and sculptures. 

All the art was by local artists so there was nothing there that I can reference that you might recognize, but some of the pieces were pretty impressive while some of them were relatively forgettable.

I was by myself when I stumbled upon a painting that was a flower with a phrase scratched into the side. I don't know if this is a famous quote or something the painter came up with, but it said something to the effect of "There came a time when the strain of staying safely wrapped within the bulb was harder than letting go and blossoming." If I'm horribly misquoting your favorite quote then please forgive me, but it was something like that.

So here is this thing. There I am, standing at this painting with people walking past me and I want to cry. It just hits too close to home. I'm not saying

I'm some delicate flower, but the idea that sometimes we stay nestled within a confining situation because we're afraid to see what happens when the bloom occurs is all too familiar.

I quickly composed myself and returned to my friends, but I was mad. It was a lovely piece of art, but I hate how I am at a point in my life where a phrase scratched into a painting can reduce me to tears. 

I'm not usually the boo-hoo type, but lately it really doesn't seem to take much to hit me with something poignant that makes me get all self-reflective — and in some cases — a little weepy.

It would have been nice to have just been moved by the art instead of touched in such a raw way by it. I'm starting to wonder how much worse things will get before they improve.