One day I'm up, the next day I'm down. One day I'm indifferent about my marriage, and soon after I feel some hope. When I first started writing this blog, this was often the case. Now the see-saw effect is back.

Today is a hopeful day. Rob and I are just back from a meditation and yoga retreat where we truly enjoyed each other's company. I liked it when we withdrew to the safety of our room to share notes on the dharma talks and secret feelings about the sometimes overwhelmingly enthusiastic New Age devotees surrounding us.

We made our own little world within the little world of the center, and it was a bonding experience. There was giggling, and even a bit of cuddling. New territory. Or at least territory we haven't visited in some time.

That the focus of the retreat was lovingkindness meditation probably helped. (Duh.) The point of the weekend was to grow our capacity for mindfulness and compassion. If there are two ingredients more critical to the health of a relationship, I don't know what they are.

So let's see how we do. Rob and I have been practicing this meditation off and on for a few years, and it certainly has helped me open up to my father, a former "most difficult person" in my life. But to transform a marriage?

The see-saw effect may continue, but perhaps more often we'll tip in favor of compassion...leading to true forgiveness...and (dare I say) true intimacy?

Speaking of personal growth, here we go. Rob and I are heading to the Kripalu Center in western Massachusetts for a weekend of yoga and meditation. While I wasn't willing to do a workshop specifically for couples, our time there will no doubt bring transformation of some sort. Everyone who goes comes back changed.

I'm already dreading it, which is weird, because I'm a yogi who usually welcomes the opportunity to study with new teachers. I love how the steadiness and equanimity cultivated on the yoga mat make meeting life's challenges off the mat easier, and how each teacher brings unique insight to that process. 

But I have big resistance toward growth with Rob. I guess that's what I was getting at in my last post. If you can muster enough compassion and forgiveness for a difficult or mismatched partner to get over your most serious conflicts, does that mean you have rendered moot the reasons you should not be together, end of story? 

Can you forgive your way out of marital strife and into martial bliss? 

Sure, but my question is: Is that the ONLY path? It's the only one any therapist has seen fit to send me down, and that has been bugging me. How about forgiving but still breaking up anyway? What about those couples who are like best friends and divorce without an ounce of acrimony? (Forget Date my Ex: Jo and Slade. There really are couples like this out there, right?)

That seems more like the path before me, though readers of my blog know I'm dragging my feet, too attached to my cozy life, fearful of separation.

I'll be back next week. Hopefully the Kripalu Center will be fantastic. I'll take the advice of a friend who said to have fun, just don't drink the Kool-Aid. 

I promised a report on my latest trip to upstate New York to take of my father who has Alzheimer's Disease, and the level of support Rob mustered around it. In a nutshell: Dad is much sicker, Rob is more supportive.

My father isn't the only one transformed by his disease. I'm enjoying spending time with him, the man who made my childhood miserable. And Rob is stepping up with phone calls to me while I'm away, flowers upon my return home, and the composure of a good listener and sincerely concerned friend.
Maybe being needed brings out the best in us.

My father's need opened my heart and allowed me to see things between him and me in a new way. I no longer resent his past mistakes or withhold my assistance.

Rob sees me sad over my father's messy decline, and he bolsters me up.

It's a ripple effect — the waves gently wash over our resistance, softening us toward each other.

There are moments when Rob is just the husband I need. 

By September I had tuned out the rehashing of the campaign's policy stances and the reporting on insignificant campaign minutiae as if each detail was an important political development. I made up my mind months ago who I would be voting for. So had all of my friends. Who were these "undecided voters"?

In an October Daily Show skit Jason Jones and Samantha Bee scream at a focus group of them: "Obama wants to socialize healthcare, McCain wants to buy your house. Tax cuts for seniors, or tax cuts for the middle class? One uses a Sharpie, one uses a ballpoint pen. One's black, one's white. One's young, one's old!" Clearly, totally different.

Sam Bee finishes: "Why. Can't. YOU. DECIDE!"

It's comedy, not political analysis. But the point remains: It's not like they are similar. They are nothing alike. Why, then, the waffling?

When is comes to choosing life with or without Rob, the vast differences in circumstances paralyze me. Change is scary, and familiarity comforting. But clearly, sticking with the status quo is not always best. Just ask the millions who elected Obama! 

I'm getting ready to leave for a few days...and dreading what this trip will do to our relationship. As I've mentioned previously, Rob doesn't do well when I leave him home. He drinks. But I didn't mention the lowest blow of all.

Last time I went away to take care of my father for a few days, we made it a topic of couples counseling. I was nervous about the potentially difficult days ahead, and our therapist felt we should figure out how Rob could support me during that time. We decided on a standing phone call every morning and evening.

Rob and I talked a few times that week, and the days passed quickly. I was relieved to get home, to see the guy whose phone calls had kept me sane and grounded. But it went like this:

It's midnight. I come into our apartment — after the seven-hour drive — laden with heavy bags. Rob is on the couch watching television, just a few feet away.  

"I'm home!" I say.

"Hi!" he says.

He doesn't get up. He sits there, staring at the screen. I come over for a kiss. Apparently he's watching something earth-shattering, because he keeps his eyes on the screen and doesn't notice me. I go unpack.

And that's it. I felt horribly neglected. I cried over it as I unpacked, in fact. It seemed to me he might have made a show of effort, to let me know he was as glad as I that the trip was over and I had made it back in one piece. But I got nothing. I'm hoping this trip won't end up in a repeat.

I leave in the morning and neither of us has said word one about a phone plan. What does that tell you? It doesn't look good.

Rob and I have been cutting back on driving lately, so until we were barreling north toward New Hampshire this weekend, I had forgotten the pact I'd made with myself to always be the driver when the two of us are in the car.

Rob doesn't get road rage, but he drives as if other drivers were the punks who bullied him in grade school, and this is his chance to show them who's boss. He is unforgiving, and never allows other drivers or even pedestrians the go-ahead.

He vies for the better position in a merge though it puts the passenger side in danger of being hit. He tailgates, a dangerous move made more so because his reflexes are molasses slow. For my own safety, I watch for brake lights on the highways so I can tell him to STOP! It takes him forever to notice and react on his own.

When I was learning to drive, someone told me to look farther ahead. It changed everything. Take your gaze another 200 feet forward, and you get to see what's coming much earlier, giving you more time to react if needed. Your peripheral vision will pick up what's immediately surrounding you anyway. When I gave Rob this tip, he thought I was nagging. When I try to talk to him about changing some of his driving habits, he never does.

So this weekend on the road, as Rob made one dangerous move after another, familiar thoughts returned. Does he respect me so little that he thinks nothing of putting me in danger? What if we had a child? I couldn't possibly allow him to drive anywhere with the baby in the car. Or, if he suddenly became a safe driver for the baby, could I forgive him for not treating me as carefully? 

And that's when it hit me. That's exactly what I already can't forgive him for — all the small moments in which he has betrayed my safety and trust. With us, it's not one big thing, but an accumulation of disregard. Our healing journey is a rough and pitted road — we get by one hazard to find many more ahead. 

Breaking up is hard to do. I've just been through a big one...with my therapist.

I've had plenty of therapists through the years, but we always parted ways for reasons beyond our control. Either I moved out of town (twice), or my therapist did (once).

I broke up with one therapist because I could no longer afford him. He didn't take insurance and the weekly $75 sliding scale fee was too much on my non-profit salary. I told him goodbye, he told me what a shame because I clearly had much work to do around my relationship to money. I didn't really buy it.

This time was different. I worked with Alice for two years. She celebrated my triumphs and honored my heartache like no one ever had, and I learned to embrace my feelings rather than bury them deep. She practices the same meditation as I do, vipassana and metta, so these became tools in my toolbox that we could talk about and play with.

When she stopped leasing space in a Boston office once a week and started seeing clients only at her home office in the suburbs, I adjusted schedule to make the hour-long trip to keep seeing her.

We finally parted ways because it felt like our work was done. When I first went to her I was discontent and anxious, but I didn't know why. Soon I came out of my isolation and re-established ties with good girlfriends, buoyed by the practice socializing in her office.

I discovered I had been denying the dissatisfaction in my marriage to Rob. I stopped feeling like a hurt and needy child when my mother neglected me, and I learned to feel compassion for my ill father, who never treated me well but who now needs my help.

I remember long ago my mother telling me and a good friend — as tears of teenage anguish flowed down our horrified faces after breaking up with our first boyfriends — that boys will come and go, but we girls will be friends forever.

Twenty years later, I'm still close to Hillary. She's fantastic — smart, generous, fun-loving. But she has a pig-headed husband. Her four lovely children are more anxious by the minute for being in a household with their angry father. I wonder why she's never said word one about leaving him.

It might be their house big enough for six, insurance and benefits, and the double income that can comfortably feed their clan. Security is not to be scoffed at.

Take my friend Angela. She's cool — artistic, determined, down-to-earth. But she knows she's not in love with her live-in boyfriend. In fact, he has proposed and she has declined. She stays. Why? They share a mortgage on a great loft. The down payment came from his father, and she worries if they separate she'll lose out and be back to student-like living - sharing an apartment with strangers. Ick.

Rob was away last weekend, and I spent a good part of it plodding around my apartment, relishing in its comforts, perfecting homebody-ness. "Mine, mine, mine," I thought, smiling, wrapped in my favorite blanket in my favorite chair. Actually, if Rob and I split, I could never afford the apartment myself.

Like Hillary and Angela, I stay because the unknown - single parenting, messy roommates, fewer comforts - seems worse than a bad relationship. 

If that scale tips, though, and I choose freedom over comfort, I know I'll still have my girls. And if Hillary or Angela ever make the hard decision to leave, they'll have me. My mom said so. 

Kate Hudson and Heather Mills. Britney, JLo, and Jen. They got divorced in the glare of the paparazzi cameras and scrutiny of the public eye. That's unfair and painful, to be sure.

But the lives of wealthy celebrities are so unimaginable to me, I can't get interested much less relate to their journeys through marital strife. And the stories of them triumphantly coming out the other side? Complete turn-offs.

Am I alone in this? Because, I mean, of course they came out okay. They have gobs of money.

I don't mean to belittle their heartaches; they are people who hurt like the rest of us. And no, money certainly can't buy happiness.

But it can buy a lot. It can buy a new lifestyle, completely assembled. It can buy new mansions, personal chefs and trainers, cars and nannies, and vacations away from it all, to say nothing of top-notch lawyers and mediators, spiritual guides, and unlimited therapy sessions.

What about the rest of us? For a typical woman to separate from her spouse, it might require saving for an apartment security deposit, suffering higher grocery bills, and finding new solutions for transportation between home, daycare, and work. Newly separated women often struggle to make ends meet. And having the number of visits to a therapist determined by an insurance company isn't very helpful either.

I haven't left Rob, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I would be living elsewhere now if last spring at the height of my marital struggles I had enough money to strike out on my own. Luckily, we're relatively content at the moment, visiting a therapist weekly and trying to make our way back to a healthier marriage.

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.