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. 

This is the big one double zero post for me at FWW, so hang in there a while I get through the mushy-mush.

Thanks for being on this journey with me and letting me ride along on all of yours. Thanks for the solace and thanks for telling stories that re-arrange how I understand myself and the world.

I read back through 99 posts, and then through all the journal entries I blogged privately the year before, trying to understand what happened. I'm still not sure, but I want to hold every step and even more I want to hold the moments I was on my belly crawling through it.

Because it's true what they say: The only way out is through.

Two years ago, the night I drank Cosmos with my girlfriends until we were drunk and spilling was the same day I listened to this Michael Franti song on repeat for hours: "Never Too Late." He sang "don't fear your best friends" and "don't fear to walk slow"; "don't fear your teachers" and "don't fear you own self." I was terrified.

I told my friends, "I can't."

I said, "I work nights four days a week, sometimes five and it's part time and the pay is crap."

"I have no money, no car, no way to pay first, last, and security."

I said, "I will, soon, but not now, because how?"

They all knew the details in too much detail already and they said, "We will stock your cupboards full, girl. Nobody is going to let your babies starve."

"Maybe in a few months," I said, "If I get this job I'm waiting to hear back on." Everything was on that job. It would double my income, give me a more flexible schedule. If I got that job, I could leave. That's how.

Except they took a former intern instead of me.

Before I agreed to move back in with my ex, Sam, we spent more time breaking down the "how will this work," than we have ever negotiated anything in all our 15 years years together (and apart).

Communication still and after all this therapy (and I suspect forever) is our biggest problem — the problem at the root of all other problems. We just don't talk it out enough, and when we do, we seem to get two entirely different things from one conversation.

But before we moved back in together a couple of weeks ago, we negotiated a detailed "love contract."  Okay, we didn't actually write it out and sign it, but talked about it, and so far we are honoring it.

I have an office that is just my office, and Sam is all for it. I'm thinking up a two-day trip with a girlfriend next month and he says go for it.

It's working out beautifully, just like it would appear on paper, if there was a paper it appeared on, except it's not because I don't know how to make this work.

I don't know how to have my children in the house and check out into my own little work world. I feel guilty when they are banging at the office door and then I feel pissed-off that Sam is not stopping them.

Could be a big case of the grass is always greener, but right now there's a lot I miss about co-custody single parenting, and most of is the down time I had three days a week. Every week. I miss my down time.

I miss knowing I will come home to an empty house Thursday night and not be in charge of the morning shuffle on Friday.

I don't know how to set the boundaries I need to take the space I claimed in that contract. I just don't.

Help!

It's 2:24 am when I wake up on the futon, upstairs in my cozy little office with the brown paper boxes still monopolizing all the real estate along the north wall and the cool night breeze blowing in through east facing windows. Crickets chirping over the quiet and a train whistle blowing far in the distance.

I wonder how I got here. How did I get here?

Not here to this office. Here to here, here to this place in the life I left two years ago.

I don't know where I am tonight.

Feels like I've just come through the narrows of a slow, tight birth, forced through the slender dark back to someplace familiar and altogether strange.  I keep asking myself what happened. What the hell just happened?

And, I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't assign it bad or good, I just don't know what I'm doing here. Not here in this room. Here in the existential way of here.

My daughters sleep one on top of the other stacked in new bunk beds across the hall. My husband — I call Sam my husband again after two years of almost-divorce and the word feels a little less foreign on my tongue — my husband is asleep downstairs in the big bed.

It's been two weeks in this house now.

The moon is full and in the light shadows on my floor I believe in Edgar Allen Poe, what he said, and I wonder, too, as Poe wondered, could any of this be true or, "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"

I put my wedding ring back on this week, just to see how it would feel. Sam and I have been apart almost two years, but we never fully split, never filed for divorce, or even for legal separation.

This whole time, I've considered us divorced. I've thought of myself as a single woman and envisioned life on an unknown path.

But Sam never gave up. He begged me to go back into counseling — the same man who once sat in that office, week after week, telling me "he was who he was."

He said, "You met me in line for Grateful Dead tickets. Who did you think you were marrying?"

I thought I was done. Told myself it was just legal fees that kept me from filing. Maybe it was true for a while or maybe it was always an excuse to stay together.

If I've learned anything about myself in the last two years it's this: When I want something, really want it, I make happen.

I never even called a lawyer.

I don't know what kind of category we fit in anymore. The marriage never ended. We still live apart, and the kids split time 50-50 between our houses. I'm still single parenting, but now Sam and I are looking for a place together.

I consider what we're doing a second marriage.

I'm not the same woman who left and I won't tolerate the marriage I had. We've been part way into a relationship and just as far out for almost a year now.

But we have been sleeping together.

The kids have grown re-accustomed to family dinners and camping trips. All along I thought I was waiting for the right time to end it for good. The right time. In the three years I agonized over our relationship before moving out, I learned there really is no good time. There's always a birthday or a holiday or summer plans or some other something to make you think leaving would be easier somewhere down the line.

Never is.

God, how I hate being the single mom on Friday nights. Stuck home with sleeping kids while all the free world plays. I can't leave even for five-minutes to get ice cream from the quickie mart.

Even if I could, 14-hours into being mommy, after making three meals and washing three sets of dishes, after all day wiping butts, and a night of reading stories, my get up and go is gone.

This afternoon my friend Sequoia called. She's spent hours in the back yard watching her Blondie-girl splash around the kiddie pool. It's all you can do in this Portland heat wave.

We have the kind of hot that feels like being stoned. Too hot to think. Too hot to move. Too hot to breath. Way too hot to single parent alone. So you find water and wait it out. If you're solo, you try to find another mother to help get you through.

Sequoia is married, but hour for hour she single-parents more than I do. She does it all week. I'm on 24 hours for half the week, but the other half, I am free, free, free. And for tonight, I’m free.

It's close to dinner time, Sequoia’s husband's out of town, Blondie-girl goes to bed around eight, and then its empty hours ahead. There’s that hollow belly feeling that settles in around sunset.

Roxie and Lila are at the beach with their Gammy and PopPop, so I tell Sequoia, "Yeah, hell yeah, I'll come drink red with you."

Heat blows though my open car windows and Mt. Hood glows pink in the rearview mirror. This is the kind of summer day it was two years ago when I first knew.

Calf-deep in the wading pool at some sun-baked park, Lila in a swimming diaper at my feet and Roxie on the merry-go-round. One eye on each of my babies, and right there I realized the truth of how staying in that marriage would bring more pain than parenting alone.

When Sequoia opens the door her fingers are bare, wedding rings off. I wonder what she's been weighing today.

The longer I'm half-in, half-out of this thing, the clearer I see myself.

I have a good friend, a therapist, who says we don't keep returning to the same type of man with the same type of issues (the ones our parents had) only because it's familiar, we keep going back for more because we're trying to work out our own issues and these are the places we can do it.

She's always right.

I was telling her the other day over lunch that I hesitate to get all the way back into it, because Sam had this underlying negative something that looks totally different than my parent's negativity. But's it exactly the same.

With my parents the glass isn't just half empty, it's cracked and leaking slowly. Present them any scenario and they go first to what could go wrong.

When my niece who just graduated high school was "hang a good paper on the fridge" age, my dad once looked at a her spelling test up there, 99 percent, and said to her "Oh, Ella, how could miss .... You know how to spell that."

She's a fabulous student. National honor society. One misspelling and it's what he sees before everything that was right.

Like I said, Sam is a different kind of negative. It's more an undercurrent, not so overt.

But it has the same effect on me. The way it feels heavy, like something weighting me down.

Whatever it is I'm trying to work out, if I leave this relationship, I plan on working solo for a long time to come.

I've been separated from Sam for 20 months now, living separately, anyway. We're not divorced and we're not even truly separate. We don't know what we are.

I don't know anyway. Sam, he still wants it all back and me, I don't know how to finish letting go.

This Arizona vacation was my second family visit since the split. The first was Thanksgiving, a month after I left and I was too numb then to remember much of the trip.

In that year of firsts, everything is hard. Everything takes re-calibration. Everything is viewed through the lens of change. The difference is so glaring it's difficult to feel anything else.

This visit was the reminder about how time heals. Doesn't feel like it in the long slow recovery, but it's true. Regeneration comes.

Being with my family, just my kids and I, felt natural and comfortable and right. Now I realize during that first year when I went to Arizona without him, to friends' parties without him, to holiday celebrations without him, so much of what I missed was the familiarity of things being as they were.

For 13 years he was by my side. A lot of those times weren't so good.

With the habit of being together faded, I don't miss having him on trips, at parties, at holiday celebrations.

I realize something. I like myself better on my own. I like who I am and how I relate to other people better this way.

Right now there's false sense of something, because the transition isn't done. Whether we get all the way out or move back in, I still have to negotiate change.

Either way, I know — and I want you to know — transition is temporary. And, as they say, the only way out is through. But there is another side.

Being on it feels pretty darn good.

I don't waste much time feeling sorry for myself anymore. Not usually.

That path goes the wrong direction, a downward spiral. Self-pity is the opposite of gratitude and learning gratitude has been a challenge but I'm there. Most days.

Not today. I'm sitting in a big leather chair in my brother's new house, boxes all around, and I don't want to get on a plane and fly back to my life tomorrow. I've been in Arizona a week, which is usually about four days too long, but I think about going home tomorrow. I'm wiping tears with my sleeves. Rubbing my eyelids dry with my forefingers.

Most days I accept my best for what it is. I believe in self acceptance lies the openness to achieve and grow and cultivate gratitude. Know that I'm good enough.

My brother and his partner have an outdoor fireplace that looks like it should be a fountain. It's a long, narrow basin filled with blue glass chunks. The wall behind it is white tile, so you'd think water should cascade down it into the glass. But under the glass, in a layer of sand you don't see, there's a gas pipe. Turn it on, light and flame burns on the glass.

Their dining room chandelier is from Holland. They saw it in a window last winter and had to have it, Googled compulsively until they found it. The soap dispenser by the kitchen sink is motion activated, put your hand under and the gel drips out.

My brother and his partner have offered to pay for all the vision therapy Roxie needs to "train her eyes to keep up with her brain." So her hands can do what her eyes can see.

I'm grateful. I have a list of learning differences that have never been addressed. I'm hopeful in the long run this means Roxie won't spend her life struggling to survive, as I do, because of challenges no one can see.

Yay! Vacation. Bring it on!

Well, not vacation, exactly. But as close as I'm getting anytime soon.

We're headed to Arizona for some quality family time and my niece's high school graduation.

My girls and I have been packing this week. OK, technically, Roxie and Lila have been packing and I have been unpacking the inappropriate things they've chosen for the trip.

Replacing long-sleeve dresses and heavy jeans with tank tops, skorts, and cotton capris.

I love traveling alone with my girls. The adventure. Three girls alone on the road, or in the air, as it were. It's empowering to know we can do it ourselves. Even if, technically, I'm going to my family where my kids stay with the grandparents, I stay with my brother or sister and I have way more help than I do at home as the only adult.

Still, even on these totally scripted trips, where little room is left for spontaneous activity, travel feels like possibility.

Even on the "easy" trips, you can't leave home without learning more about yourself. Travel is the ultimate crash course in self discovery.

And there a few things I already know.

We can go anywhere. Do anything we want. Don't need anyone else.