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. 

The husband I need showed up again a few times this week. Rob put forth a best faith effort in therapy, helped me prep the house and food for our annual fall party, and stuck to his drink limit through hours of festivities.

He has come far from the boyish drunkard who once frustrated me to the point of leaving. He deserves much credit. And yet the fewer our demons and the more even-keeled our relationship, the more it seems we are two really great friends who should probably call a spade a spade and look elsewhere for romance, intimacy, marriage.

I told our therapist last week that I don't think I can forgive him for the big things that first turned me away from wanting intimacy. He said I gained too much weight and was no longer attractive. He said my depression meant I'd never be a good mom. He secretly suspected he had an STD and counted on condoms preventing transmission to me, putting me at risk but keeping me in the dark.

I want to be capable of great forgiveness. I take responsibility for my part in conflicts and meditate to grow the capacity for compassion toward difficult people. But the more I see my relationship with Rob as fertile ground for working on this type of personal development, the less likely I am to move on. His betrayals turn into challenges to forgive under difficult circumstances, nothing more.

This could be the recipe to make a marriage last a lifetime, but it also seems limiting. "Stay where you are and work on it!" Determination and commitment are nice sentiments, but something about this seems very 1950s, no? 

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.

Drinking to the point of poisoning while playing computer games — that's Rob's weapon of choice. He wounds himself and points the finger at me. I don't pay enough attention, he told our therapist. And she has all the sympathy in the world for him. How nice.

After a whopping near-death episode last spring he stopped drinking for two months to examine his relationship to alcohol, and when he started again he put rules in place: He'd have no more than two drinks per day, and do that no more than two times per week.

That went really well for him. His memory and response time in conversation improved, and he seemed more confident. Then I went out to the Madonna concert last week and he retaliated. (It always happens when I go out with friends or leave town on business for a day or so, leaving him alone.)

Our therapist agreed with my hastily developed strategy to react to his recent setback with no reaction. I shouldn't admonish him, but I also can't take blame or be the one to make him feel better after he acts out.

Soon I leave again for upstate NY to take care of my ailing father for a few days. (Rob didn't think coming with me was worth sacrificing a few days of vacation time. Huh. Noted.)

I wonder what Rob will do while I'm away? Will he get drunk and play video games? If he did, it would put me closer to the door, that's for sure. I'm just not attracted to that behavior. Blame me? And our bond isn't strong enough for it to be worth putting up with.

But if I'm not supposed to discuss his drinking drama with him, how do I make clear to him those consequences? Any advice?

You know how I said having sex was like going to the gym? There's something else that fits the same bill. Visiting the in-laws. A good daughter in-law should make the effort. She may never want to, and may get out of the habit, but once she's there, it can be enjoyable, and she might even feel good about herself afterward.

That was my attitude when I went to see my in-laws last weekend. I made myself go because I knew it was the right thing to do. In fact, I suggested the trip! And it was infinitely bearable.

One major adjustment may have made all the difference: For once, we didn't make an overnight of the trip. Rob's parents live three hours away — a long drive to make twice in one day. But beyond the annoyance of his father's incessant stories, sleeping over in Rob's boyhood bedroom can bring up all sorts of bad memories. Like the time I heard his family talking about me downstairs. Or, so long ago, before we were married and they would let us sleep in the same room, how we had sex in his twin bed and giggled when we looked up and noticed the dusty cross looming above us. (Of course, that wouldn't be a bad memory in and of itself if the days of having sex are so far behind us now.)

But I'm skirting the issue here. The real story is that I was avoiding my in-laws as long as I was seriously considering leaving Rob. As long as we were heading for splittsville, I didn't want to get any closer to his family and run the risk of more heartache (for missing them) when we separated.

A friend forfeited her Madonna concert ticket when she went away on sabbatical to Italy. I'd rather be in her shoes roaming the Tuscan landscape, but since that's not possible, I was happy to accept her ticket.

I don't know Madonna's recent music, but can sing every word of her first few hits "Borderline," "Lucky Star," and "Holiday" — and even remember the grapevines and jazz hands of the routines I made up to go with them 25 years ago! Anyway, I knew the show would be a mixed-media extravaganza of video and dance — why not indulge in a little escapism, rock-and-roll style?

But hours before the show, Madonna publicist announced her and Guy Ritchie's plans to divorce. So what might have been for me a carefree evening of utter abandon, singing and dancing along with Madge, turned into constant analysis of her every move. Ooh, was that sadness in her voice when she sang that lyric? Was she referring to her own pain in that song?

When she spoke to the crowd I listened only for her to mention her impending divorce. When your own marriage is on the rocks, you are keenly interested to know how others in the same boat deal.

Certainly the crowd was responding to her specific situation and trying to buoy her through cheers when she sang the telling line "You must love me." But it wasn't abandonment she was feeling when she finally decided to address the elephant in the room.

"This song is for the emotionally retarded. Maybe you know some people who act like that. God knows I do." 

I'm switching gears for a bit from the thirtysomething woman who has contemplated separation to the adult child of divorce still dealing with the fallout.

Quick summary: To the extent lines were drawn, I suppose I sided with my mother. She left because when we learned my father cheated on her for 20 years with my best friend's mother. But now she has withdrawn from my brother, sister, and me.

We hear from her infrequently, and when we do, it's never to discuss our lives, but hers, which is moneyed compared to the rest of ours. She has remarried a man we don't get, in the sense that he's from the other side of the political aisle — from us, from her, from anyone I've ever known. (He's off the map. He's against Title IX!)

Meanwhile, my father is progressing into the middle stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and my siblings and I are left to manage his care. My parents defaulted on their shared mortgage around the time of their divorce, we moved our father into a small apartment for now, and there are no assets to help pay for his long-term care. (Phew! Got that?)

Here's the latest kicker — a quiet but ridiculous circumstance that breaks everything open again and makes it hard to swallow. Recently, my father wet his pants for the first time and the family dog, good old Betty — who kept him company and who he walked multiple times a day for lack of capability in any participating in any other activity — died. As this was happening, my mother was preparing to leave on her first cruise, sailing from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta, in celebration of her first wedding anniversary.