In honor or of Earnest Hemmingway and my virtual sinkhole de jour, today I'm attempting to write the story of my marriage, separation, and reunion in six words.

Marriage. Separation. Reunion. That's half my word count right there.

I'm no Hemmingway, and even though you can find some fantastic sentences by googling "six word stories," neither are any of the other writers attempting to do what he did. As the story goes, Hemmingway was challenged to craft a complete work from six words, and came up with his favorite: "For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn."

Thought it was the best thing he ever wrote.

Tough to top that.

Margaret Atwood did nicely with: "Longed for him. Got him. Shit." I mean, who can't relate? There's a story in there for sure, but not a gut puncher like Hemmingway's.

I love Joyce Carol Oates' "Revenge is living well without you," but it sounds more like a motto than a story.

Same with Arianna Huffington's "Fearlessness is the mother of reinvention."

So, yeah, I don't have delusions topping those women, but I can still have some fun with the challenge.

Here goes: Got married. Got undone. Do Over. Nah, sounds like a cryptic telegram.

Or: Dog bit kid. Marriage severed. Re-enter.

How about: Thought I knew what I didn't.

Ah, well. I gave it my best.

There are my tries, now you. 

Thanksgiving week has all the wind knocked out of me. Could just be my reaction to going down, down, down the rabbit hole. The Holidays are here.

Only thing I know is the only thing I want to do is curl up under my big old comforter and sleep. It’s the lack of time that has me feeling so defeated. My kids don’t have school all week and we don’t have childcare, don’t have the money for the extra child care, I should say, so what happens? I don’t have time to work.

We are caught right smack in the center exactly what I feared getting back into this. I have no time to work because we can’t afford to cover the business hours I need so jobs are left unfinished leaving me feeling further defeated and my pay further behind, which adds up to less childcare that we can afford and fewer things completed. It goes on like this until I’m right where I am now.

One big miserable puddle of blah. And I blame it on the marriage, when actually I should blame it on me.

My reasoning, skewed as it may be, is that when we were apart a couple things were absolute: I had several days every week to work because the kids were with Sam and I had to make it work because the alternatives were homelessness and starvatation.

This week, I’m giving thanks for my two beautiful, healthy girls, and the ability I have to back up, reconsider, and try it again. But I'm also questioning how much of my current situation is a self-fulfilling prophecy and why I can't have the structure to make room for work in the same way I did when I was separated.

It's Friday. Weekend is coming and I'm down deep in my on-going Libra head-trip. The endless quest for balance.

If you are a mom, if you are divorced, separated, remarried or somewhere in between, tell me please, I have know how you do it.

How do you juggle it? What do you do to create and maintain balance in your life?

Really, please, I'm begging here.

What do you do? 

Two months into the school year and every week Roxie's homework is due on Friday. She gets these four-page packets on Monday, has all week to work them. This is the routine. It does not change.

Ten-word spelling list, journal page, math page, reading log, and a page to practice her 10 spelling words. Never mind that I think this is a ridiculous amount of work for a first grader.

Never mind that Roxie has visual processing stuff — like everyone in my family has processing stuff — and it makes writing a bear for her. This week she did so much by Tuesday, I gave her Wednesday afternoon off.

Plenty of time, and not much to finish with Sam Thursday night.

Accept they didn't.

Maybe this should not infuriate me. We do this every single week, this homework routine. It does not change.

Sam and I work with her 50-50. I told him Wednesday exactly what needed to be done Thursday. I get home late Thursday night, kids are in bed and it still needs to be done.

I want to be furious with him, but I remember something. Sam has an auditory processing disorder. He does not learn by ear and he does not retain information given verbally — he does not think this is true. But it is.

Most of his family is this way. I've never sat at a quieter dinner table.

And here's impact of learning/processing differences on a relationship — my relationship. Because me, I'm just the opposite. Just like Roxie. My ears are everything.

How I understand the world is conversation and I need lots of it to thrive. Reading is tedious, I'm slow and remember almost nothing.

Sam knows the world with his eyes, it's all visual. The way I get little from a book and don't remember it anyway, that's what conversation is for Sam.

I know these things. If I don't write it down for Sam he will not remember. It's completely counter intuitive to me though, so I forget. And I'm not angry with him, but...

Ha! Figured out my new blog goal. Turns out it's the same as the old: to have a place to be to-the-bone honest with myself to constantly keep moving forward.

Sometimes I get so caught up in looking for the problems to write about, that it feels like if I'm not working through the problems, I not being real with myself. Feels like it's what I'm supposed to do. But, the thing is, right now the relationship is smooth.

Good even. Better, in a lot of ways than the best of it ever was before, even before I started hating Sam right down to his pinky finger. And, give thanks for that, right. Maybe, just maybe, we'll store up enough good to boulder through the bad when things shift.

And things always shift. Of all the couples I know well enough to know the truth, I can't name a single anyone who hasn't gotten so far out of their grove that divorce was a real thought. A brief thought for some, but everyone, everyone I know has contemplated divorce.

This morning I woke up empty, they way I do when I get too much sleep (read: eight hours).

Mornings are like that for me, everything wrecked in my head and the big empty hollow in my body. When I wake with Sam and feel that all over empty, I think "Oh my god. It's the marriage. I've made a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mistake and I am stuck in my decision."

A few in breaths and I remember. Felt the same in the morning without him. Felt it before him, after him, and with him. It's always been there. It's not discontent with the marriage. It's just plain discontent.

Here's what's changed.

This morning I woke up, and before Sam's eyes were all the way open I was deep into listing off all my middle-of-the-night worries: Not enough time. Not enough money. And how can we do this?

I'm having a small identity crises. Not identity, exactly; it's more like a crises of purpose.

When I started blogging at First Wives World, I'd been separated from Sam for 14 months and we'd just started dating again (read: having sex together, because we rarely had an actual night out by ourselves without the little creatures we procreated climbing all over us, ahem, me — but I digress.)

I began blogging with a couple specific goals. I wanted to either be divorced or back together within one year.

I wanted a space figure to out my relationship in a way that would keep my procrastination-loving butt moving forward — whichever direction that is. And I hoped doing it here for the gods, and all the divorcing world, and everyone to see would let someone else out there a feel less homeless in it.

Also, I was self-conscious about the molasses pace of my process. Having people along for the ride kept me honest. Kept me thinking, I can't keep going round over the same things, complaining the same complaints without changing something.

I'd already spent four years deliberating. Four years. It was time to decide.

So, goal one. Check. Week after week I came to this place to be real with myself. I scrutinized Sam and I scrutinized me and I studied the ways I was with him and the ways I was on my own. Eight months after starting this blog, I moved back in with him.

Goal two. Check? I hope so. With every post I hoped someone out there sat through my indecision saying, "Yeah, me too."

But now, now goal one is met and I need a new purpose. And I'm wondering, if anyone out there still relates.

I found this old notebook the other day, a legal pad with mostly blank pages, and started using it for lists without looking at the previously scribbled notes.

Then I'm  flipping through and a couple letters catch my eye. Drafts of letters I never sent to Sam. Grievences, now five years old, from the first time we attempted counseling, or maybe even earlier.

Pages and pages of my early anger.

The first therapist, the one we saw back then hated Sam. No secret. She spent our sessions arguing his ridiculous, self-centered ideas and in the end, when he refused to go, she told me she'd be out of line with him. Said he pissed her off so much she couldn't help it.

She said some men just never get until their wives are leaving, then they're willing to do anything, but it's too late.

Sam was one of those. He never got it until I left. Never believed I'd leave until my stuff was in the truck.

I don't know if it's too early to call our re-unification a success. We've been back together in the new house for about six weeks and so far so good.

But I have some thoughts on why our separation "worked" as a marriage saver.

1. We didn't date other people. We never said we wouldn't. We just didn't. Sam was 100 percent focused on saving the marriage and I was too busy and tired and depressed for dating.

2. We went back to therapy (different therapist) about half-way through the separation and pledged to see her until we were either all the way back in or all the way out.

3. We lived 10 miles apart and kept out lives and finances separate, but parented together.

4. We gained the distance to see our roles in the demise more clearly.

5. This is the big one — I rediscovered myself, my strength, my sense of me, and learned it well enough to protect it.

The truth is, I did not separate with the intention of getting back together. Ever. At least, not consciously.

I'm sitting in the backyard the other night and it's late, past midnight, the house is dark and the full moon is one bright spot in the clouds. Crickets chirping and quiet all around them. The little white garden shed my girls have claimed as their one-room school house for playing "Mary and Laura" complete with bonnets and petticoats — lots of Little House going on at my house these days — and it hits me, I'm okay.

I'm okay.

More than that. I love my little house and my beautiful yard and I'm comfortable being here as a family of four again.

I keep searching for the reasons I shouldn't be. I don't know if the reasons I seek are for me or for everyone else. Not that anyone wants me to be miserable.

The thing is, I'm always feeling a little guilty about rebuilding my marriage, like somehow I betrayed everyone who stood by me while I pulled myself together and ripped my life apart a couple years ago.

My girlfriends heard the details, moment by excruciating moment, for three years before I left and they pooled their resources to help me when I finally arrived at that place where leaving is the only option.

They got me out. There was no leaving, would have been no leaving, without them.

So here I am again, back in. My friends are supportive and I am mostly happy.       

But, even now while Sam and I are in good grove and our biggest issues are temporarily dormant, I can't quit looking for what should be wrong.

After all these years, I'm not sure I know how to be okay with being okay.

The other day I received an email from an old friend whose been reading my FWW posts. We were college pals who hadn't been in touch at all in the 15 years since I graduated from Ohio State and pull up stakes from Columbus, until I found her via the all-powerful Internet.

Most of what she's knows about my life today is what she reads here.

She said a couple things about a recent post that I've been thinking on since.

First, she's never known anyone doing what I'm doing, returning to a marriage I left two years ago. Also, she said I seem ambivalent about it.

Funny how when you get a new car, you suddenly see them everywhere. I know a few other people who've been down this road. My eyes are keen to these situations these days. I have a couple of friends who were in and out of their marriages for shorter periods and another who was separated for two years, just like me.

She also wanted to know if I was in it for good now. Two years ago I would have said "No way." Actually, I would have said it was still "open ended," but what I way thinking was, "No. No. No going back."

Then time comes along and does it's thing, and here I am. It ain't easy, that's for sure. But I take it the same way I'm learning to take everything these days, as it comes and with a good bit of openness.

With remembering how suicidally bleak it felt to be hopeless in that marriage with no obvious way out. Heavy in my body. Shipwrecked.

That's the ambivalence. I know where I've been. The truth is, had we not been bound together by kids, I would have left without looking back. And yet, I did not reconcile "for the kids."

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.