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.

I'm walking through the store, barely noticing the music they're pumping into the sound system, when all of a sudden I realize that I'm singing along with the tune that's playing: "Going to the Chapel." I used to love that song. When I was about 10 or 11 years old my parents gave me a cassette of Motown classics and I used to play it over and over, singing along and making up dances.

Back then I thought that was just the way it worked. You meet a boy, you fall in love, and "we'll never be lonely anymore." I'll admit that when that particular lyric hit the sound system I actually snorted out loud.

When I was younger I really thought that would be true. I thought that marriage was a partnership and I would never feel lonely for companionship or for the romantic gazes from a man who loved and adored me.

It wasn't even that I thought I would find a man and have his undivided attention forever, but I never thought that I would wind up married and lonely. Bitterly lonely. The kind of lonely where you sit in your house and think to yourself, "Who the heck is this guy that I'm married to?"

Back in better times, I wasn't lonely at all. We had a good social group and my husband and I would spend hours talking to each other and laughing and generally having a great time.

Fast forward to now, and we don't really have that much to say to each other. He'll tell me about his day and then listen politely while I tell him about mine, then he switches on the television while I work. So instead of "we'll never be lonely anymore" my lyrics are more like "we'll never feel connected anymore."

That stinks.

A while back I traveled in Mexico and removed my wedding band for the duration. I was in search of experiences unfettered by others' assumptions about who I am, what sort of life I lead, and what I value.

I was not looking for any romantic interaction of any kind with anyone I met, but still I knew removing the ring was in some ways unsavory, as well as entirely unfair to Rob, and when I returned I explored the situation and my feelings in a post "Let Freedom Ring."

I had the chance to expound upon that post in an assignment for Tango, a relationship web site — and learned the hard way that not all audiences are alike. The readers, most of whom I assume have not struggled with separation or divorce, were pretty sure I was a vapid, selfish, and idiotic for doing and writing about such a thing.

It may be true. One thing they can't say is I haven't thought about it from every angle. I have. And I don't take any of it lightly.

My first reaction to the other audience's comments was that I had better keep my most embarrassing and damning thoughts to myself from now on. But no. I've got a safe place to explore them.

The community at First Wives World is diverse in thought and approach to life, for sure, but here differences are the seeds of provocative discussion, not vitriol and disrespect. In exposing our journeys, and lending to each other constructive criticism and advice we are suddenly in it together, and "it" becomes something larger than ourselves.

Last week we looked at a house we loved in a great neighborhood with a great school, a few blocks from Lila's best friend.

And the landlord loved us. Told us we were her first choice, she just needed to do a quick credit check and get back to us. Then she fell right of the edge of the Earth. Stopped returning Sam's calls.

I knew she got the scores and decided to hold out for a situation where both the applicants AND there Equifax report were equally loveable. Five days later when I emailed to check-in, I got this response:

I'm so sorry Elaina but your credit reports came back with scores that were quite low and our financial guy recommended we not go in that direction. Simultaneously, another interested party decided that they also wanted the house. We ran their credit the next day and it was acceptable. We are wraping (sic) up the deal with them. As you know these things can fall apart at the last minute. If it does fall through, I will talk to my business partner about the idea of working together to see if we can figure out a way to make it work. Perhaps some way that you would pay a higher deposit or something.

Good luck to you and I must say that I also really enjoyed our interactions.

Regards, ....

I must say I wish she'd enjoyed our interactions enough to figure out a way make it work before wrapping up the deal with the applicants who came after us. Or at least enough to call back and say it wasn't working.

I get that rental houses are financial investments and have little to do with humanitarianism. The frustrating thing is we have excellent rental histories, both together and separately, And, irony of ironies, my credit sucks because paying rent on time is always top priority.

How much does a divorce cost? I don't mean the mental costs or even the cost of finding another place to live and all that jazz.

What I'm talking about is the actual cost of going to a lawyer, retaining his or her services, and paying for the lawyer to do whatever divorce lawyers do. I'm guessing they have to draw up documents, negotiate, and answer about a million questions from people like me who are confused and scared out of their minds.

So how much does this cost? I'm guessing it depends on what's involved. If I was to leave my guess is that the divorce would be contested and there would be custody issues. Does this cost more than an uncontested divorce?

When I did an initial search for divorce lawyers I was surprised to see that some of them offered payment plans. Financing a divorce? I was flabbergasted. It must cost a great deal of money if it needs to be financed.

Yes, I'm naïve. I haven't built up the nerve to actually make an appointment with a divorce attorney because I'm terrified of starting the process. Going in to see a lawyer and asking the question of how much it will all cost means that I'm really going through with it, and I just don't know if I'm ready to do that.

So instead of getting an educated estimate of the costs involved, I worry about if it's something I can afford or if I'll wind up financing it.

What a thing to finance. The very thought scares the heck out of me.

Last week in "Since You Asked," Cary Tennis's advice column on Salon.com, a young woman in a sad marriage suspects she shouldn't be married at all and wonders how to be happy again. The poor thing is caught between the guilt born of a religious family of origin who believe divorce is a sin, and a self-evident truth that she got married too quickly and simply doesn't love her husband.

She even says her husband is a perfectly nice guy. Huh. Sounds familiar.

Tennis's response blew my mind. It validated her (and my!) discomfort as perfectly legitimate and pointed out that leaving the marriage is not a selfish act but instead rectifies the previous selfish act of marrying for the wrong reasons.

Staying in a marriage that cannot be fixed is continuing to patch something that is monumentally broken.

Further, leaving would release her husband from marriage to a wife who doesn't want to be with him any longer, and he could move on. In this case, if the act of leaving is not an act of service to another, I don't know what is.

Cary also talks about how we all carry with us something like a personal truth — he describes it as a package we clutch to ourselves through thick and thin — and suggests that in her case that truth, the thing that defines her and that she is compelled to honor in her life, might be the spirit of freedom.

Perhaps she is a free spirit and marriage in general is not a good fit. Amen. I don't know if he has her figured out, but he sure has my number.

We've been looking for a place to rent for almost two months, but we're still in the same broke boat, with the same crappy credit we had two years ago when I left.

And just like when I left, and all the long years leading up to it, the weight of financial pressure creates this ongoing competition for resources that exacerbates all of our other problems.

Sam says I'm more stressed about it than he is.

He says it to me and he says it to our therapist, then we walk out of the appointment and he accuses me of wanting more than I actually want, of wanting to keep up with the Joneses, when actually I could not care less about anyone else's lifestyle.

I don't want a McMansion. I just want to get by without struggling.

It's the same old fight.

Not being able to support our family makes him feel inadequate, and I know it's true because when I left because he owned up to it. Admitted the nasty things he said were about being angry with himself, not me.

So I call him on it, and he apologizes. It's an improvement I'm willing to work with.

Our therapist once told me finances are cited as a key factor in 80 percent of divorces. Money is the number-one point of contention in marriages. I'll buy that. There's so much stuff bound up in dollars.

Like they say, money is power. So, of course, there's contention about who spends it and how. That's assuming there's money to be spent.

Those arguments feel luxurious to me. We don't get to fight about whose spending irresponsibly. More likely, I ask Sam to ask his family for a loan; he refuses. Or what we are going to do about child care this fall because we owe Lila's pre-school more than it cost me for a year of college back in the day, and until we pay it down, we can't use their before and after care program.

Sam and I both work hard at jobs we love, but we don't make much money doing it.

What would happen if I just made up my mind to leave? How would life change for me and for my family? Would I find the inner peace that I lack right now? Would everything magically get better?

I'm not delusional. I know that it would be ridiculously hard. Most of all, I know that it would be a really difficult transition for my kids. They're young and as far as they know, mommies and daddies stay together.

Did I say it would be "difficult?" Maybe I should change that to "horrible." "Tragic." "Life-altering."

"The end of a secure life."

Am I being dramatic? I just try to think of what it would be like if a life truth was suddenly changed for me. What if my house burned down? What if I lost my arm? I can only imagine what it's like to suddenly have everything change.

I know that I would recover just fine. I know the process would be painful, but in the long run I think that it would make me happier overall. Then again, how can I be happy when I cause so much pain to my kids?

What a tangled web.

If I one day suddenly blurted out, "I can't take this anymore. I need a divorce," then it would be a bizarre combination of a huge weight lifted off my shoulders while also opening the door to a bunch of new drama and turmoil. It’s like I know what I want the eventual outcome to be, but I don't want to deal with all the stuff in between.

So what happens if I just make up my mind to leave? The world will be turned upside down. My life will never be the same again. The question then becomes, will the new life be better, and worth the effort?