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. 

I keep waiting for that feeling in my stomach. The one that tells me I made a horrible mistake moving into this lovely little house with the husband I left two years ago.

But so far nothing.

So far, so good.

So far, just boxes, boxes and more boxes.

I swear these things multiply in the night while I'm sleeping because every time I unpack one, another pops up full in its place. I could open a children's resale shop with all the toys and kids clothes piled up in my office.

It's like I'm trying to self sabotage. Before moving in I made a very big deal about how my office would by my space and don't come-a-knocking. It would not multi-task as anything but an occasional guest room, for the occasional out-of-town visitor. It would not be a thru-way, kitchen nook, or, well, anything but mine.

"So," Sam said, "What you want is to re-create your apartment, in miniature, in your office?"

"Exactly," I said. "I want the futon, my desk and the good living room rug. Maybe a dorm fridge."

Then we move in and the first thing I do is deem my don't-come-a-knocking room command central, line the walls with more than a dozen boxes of toys and games and tiny little clothes.

So far, the only person in this house who's not respecting my space and my very clear request is ME.

The only couch I can actually see is pink and 10-inches long and perfect if you are a Groovy Girl or the little plastic horse sleeping on it. The real one is buried under stuff.

OMG. I have recreated my apartment in this room.

Feels just like home here, and so far my stomach feels fine.

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.

The other night I lay in bed with Sam at his place. The bed that used to be my bed, my favorite piece of furniture. The nightstand that used to be my night stand. The husband that used to be my husband.

And none of it felt like mine anymore. Laying there, body next to body, I was thinking: This man is my husband. And the words surprised me.

I don't feel married. Haven't worn a ring since before I left.

This man is my husband. I don't know what that means anymore.

There's no judgment, no longing. Just the thought. This man is my husband?

It's close to two years we've been apart together. I haven't dated anyone else. Haven't kissed anyone else. Haven't had sex with anyone else. In 15 years there hasn't been anyone else.

When I write these posts, I always feel like they should to go somewhere deep. Land on some wise thing.

I don't have that. No clarity to offer.

I'm just keeping with these words, meditating on the thought: This man is my husband.

This man is my husband.

If I repeat them enough, they'll lead me to the truth.

Wanda's post last week about living in the real world rocked! Ice cream for dinner? You are my new hero!

So thanks, Wanda. I'm taking it to heart and making peace with my piles.

I'm tired of holding myself up to ridiculously unattainable standards. I read and re-read about the detrimental ways super-mom syndrome is killing women, all the reasons it's okay — healthy, even — to let the house be a mess, but I just can't tell that obnoxious internal judge to sit down and shut the hell up.

Grilled cheese, soup, salad, and fruit for dinner instead of elaborate homemade gourmet makes me feel like someone should call child services and take my kids to a better home.

Why? It's a healthy meal.

I'm so embarrassed about the tiny size of my one-bedroom apartment and the piles of papers and toys and clothes, I haven't invited one of Roxie's friends here to play this year.

I grew up in an impossibly spotless five-bedroom house. I'm talking David Lynch freaky clean. We sat down as a family for a home cooked meal. Every night. Always. Eight of us, when all the kids were home.

My parents, brother, two sisters, me, my uncle and grandma Rose, for whom Roxie is named. (My grandmother and my developmentally delayed uncle lived with us.)

Both my parents, and my Grandma Rose and my uncle worked full or part time. Still the food was homemade and nothing was out of place. Ever.

How'd they do it?

I'll tell you how. Two words. Cleaning lady.

There were four adults pitching in on meals, house work, and yard work. FOUR! When the adults were all working, there was enough income to hire outside help.

Even in my smaller space, with less people, how can I expect to do the work it took four (five, including the cleaning lady) adults handle in my parents' house?

When Sam and I split 18 months ago, agreeing to "leave it open ended," our therapist warned that 80 percent of separations end in divorce

I thought, "Well, that's okay. At least those people who were unsure or unable to move directly to divorce gave themselves some time and space for thinking."

The statistic seems like a big "So what?"

I mean, at that point, the only things on the table were separation or divorce. Staying in it wasn't an option. So my 20 percent chance was better than the other option — a zero percent chance.

Now I wonder, of the 20 percent who reconcile, what happens to them down the line? Are their relationships any more or less susceptible to dissolution because they've already been to the brink without falling over?

A few weeks ago we were at friend's dinner party, the whole family. And we weren't the only couple there who'd come all the way undone without undoing everything.

Another couple had been separated several months and have been back in one home for a couple years now. A friend of mine was separated for two years and got back together for seven or eight.

I wonder: Do "second first marriages" face better odds than other second marriages? Is the seemingly higher rate of reconciliation just proportional to the high rate of divorce?

I also wonder if any of those numbers matter anyway. Just like the statistics our therapist threw out, they all kind of seem like a big "So what."

The straw that broke the camel's back in my marriage was the dog that bit my 4-year-old's face.

Because the dog wasn't just some dog, he was our dog, a wedding present. Ten years old and he'd traveled the continent with us, climbed to the top of the highest Mayan pyramid deep in the Mexican jungle with us.

Maybe Bilbo was sick the morning he bit Roxie. Maybe he was aching and she touched a tender spot. It doesn't matter. What matters is he didn't hurt her badly. The bite drew a little blood but, no stitches needed, no scars left.

I made myself crazy trying to find a rescue shelter where he could live out his life. But, try placing a pit bull that's bitten a kid? Not possible.

Euthanasia was the only option. I investigated all of them, had dog trainers to the house. The unanimous answer: Put him to sleep.

But Sam couldn't. He said "I'll take my dog and go."

He said: "If you murder my dog I'll hate you forever, anyway."

I understood why he fell apart, his dog issues, all the animals he'd lost. Starting with the golden retriever his parents gave away when he was a kid, not one of Sam's pets ever lived out its natural life with him. Somehow, understanding the root of behavior is little solace.

In the end, he came around. We agreed euthanasia was best for Bilbo. I would take him and Sam would never, NOT EVER, say I murdered the dog.

Putting him to sleep is the hardest thing I've ever done. He died in my arms. When I got home, exhausted and sobbing, I asked Sam for a hug.

He just kept walking. I said, "You look like you need a hug."

He said: "I need my dog."

Two years later, I still won't give him the ashes. Is that wrong?

The first time — no, the second time — we went to marriage counseling, our therapist gave us an assignment.

At one of the first sessions she told us to each ask the other for one small thing that would make life easier. Something to show support.

We were working opposite schedules, Sam during business hours and me 4 pm to midnight four nights a week. We rarely saw each other, but it allowed us to keep the girls out of childcare, which we couldn't afford anyway. And I believed my job would lead to something better.

He said he wanted me to get a new job, a day job. The therapist suggested he ask for something more reasonable.

We settled on this: Once a week on a day he worked and I didn't, I would make a really nice dinner. No boxes or cans involved. Once a week on a night I worked, he would pick up the entire house and clean the kitchen. I said I didn't care if it was on a night the house was mostly clean, I just wanted to get up one morning a week with nothing left over from the day before.

Weeks went by and he didn't do it. I kept making my meal every week, sometimes two or three nights instead of one.

Months passed and when I asked him about cleaning up, he said, "If you spent half the energy doing it yourself as you use nagging me, it would be done."

I'm not saying he never lifted a finger. He was fantastic at deep cleaning, when he felt like it.

But this was about honoring something because I wanted him to, because it would make my life easier. And he didn't.