Until now I had never had a comment on one of my blogs that elicited a definite "How dare you?" from me. I've been able to rationalize every comment one way or another, but a comment I recently received has me ticked off. I gave myself a week to see if I was still annoyed before sitting down to write a response just in case time made me feel better about it, but no...I'm still steaming.

"If you want to rescue this marriage, drop the writing until both kids are in school, and work at convincing your husband that he is #1."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's back up a minute here.

How many men are told to drop their careers in order to make their wives feel as though they are a priority? Would you tell a male doctor to stop practicing medicine in order to make his wife feel special? Would you tell a guy to stop going to the office everyday because he needs to work on his marriage? Probably not.

Maybe the problem isn't that I'm a woman, but that I'm a writer. You probably envision me lounging around the house during the day, sipping chamomile tea and leisurely composing The Great American Novel. Can I let you in on a little secret? I work hard. I have corporate clients and contractual deadlines. On any given day I'm writing for three or four different clients, and it isn't easy. I love it, but it's hard work.

I don't know what universe a person lives in when he thinks that it's okay to suggest that a woman simply drop her career in order to cater to her husband. Shall I simply stop paying bills? Maybe my mortgage company will allow me to skip some payments because I need to make my husband feel special. I'm sure preschool won't mind if my kids attend for free for a while. Oh, and the insurance companies? I'm sure they'll keep our policies active even though we're not paying because doggonit, my husband needs a foot rub.

Why didn't I think of that? 

Do you want to know which nights I get the best sleep? I get the best sleep on the night after I have sex with my husband. Not the night of the sex, but the night after. He initiates every few nights, but the night following an evening of sex, he doesn't expect anything from me — so he just drifts off. It's great.

Here's what it's like to go to bed when my husband wants sex:

1. I lay down and he rolls over, puts his arm around me, asks me how I'm feeling.

2. If I don't respond physically he starts running his hand up and down my arm or trying to rub my shoulders. He might ask me if I want a massage or if there is something I want to talk about.

3. If I still don't respond physically he'll start making suggestions about the things he wants to do. Unless I want to stay up for a few hours arguing with him, I have sex with him.

4. If we don't have sex, he intermittedly grabs and paws at me throughout the night.

Here's what it's like to go to bed the night following sex:

I lay down and my husband rolls over, putting his back to me. He doesn't say a word.

It's a pattern I'm used to. If he's physically satisfied then he doesn't stir when I come to bed. If he wants sex, he's suddenly awake when I come to bed no matter what time it is. Apparently I'm really interesting and intriguing when he wants to get some, but when he's satisfied I become a stealth ninja when I come to bed. Funny how that works.

On the nights that I'm really tired and just want to go to sleep — but don't want to get intimate — I've fantasized about sleeping on the couch just to avoid the whole song and dance with my husband, but I know he'll come looking for me and it will turn into a lengthy discussion that will evolve into sex if I want to get any sleep.

It really shouldn't be this complicated. 

My husband has accepted a position overseas for a year. The kids and I won't be going with him. We're staying put while he goes and gets an apartment and lives a life without a wife and kids.

It's a weird situation. We're going to be separated by distance but we aren't going to be separated as far as our marital status goes...at least I don't think we are. If that's the intent it hasn't been discussed. So I'll still be married, but my husband won't live with us. He'll visit once or twice during this time away, but for the most part we'll live separate lives during this work assignment.

I think this is a step in the right direction. I'm so conflicted over whether we should stay together or not that sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live without him for a while. Will I miss him? Will he miss me? Will the kids freak out without Daddy around? It's like a trial separation without all the hubbub of a real, intentional marital separation.

Honestly, I don't know if I could dream up a better scenario.

The last time he went away for an extended period of time for work — which was for a few months — I was glad he was gone. We were right in the middle of our worst difficulties and not having him around was a real relief. We have since been through marital counseling, but I don't know that it really helped all that much. I'd generally resolved to just muddle through and see how things turn out. This new development makes things very interesting indeed.

We still have a few months before he leaves, but we're preparing now for the time he'll be away. Can a damaged marriage survive a long separation? I guess we'll find out. 

I have back problems that sometimes spread up into my neck, and it gets really painful. I have two young children who I can't lift and a bunch of housework that doesn't get done because it hurts to lift stuff. Thank God I have a job I can do while sitting and not moving.

Luckily for me, the pain comes and goes and with the help of my chiropractor/massage therapist/sleepy meds I muddle through. I don't spend all my time in pain, but when it does hit I'm pretty useless.

My back pain was in full force the other day, so I was happy to finally make it to the evening and lay down to go to sleep. My husband was already in bed so we chatted a little. He asked me how my back was feeling (code for "Can we have sex?") and I replied that it hurt pretty bad (code for "Please don't make me do that right now").

"You know," I said, "maybe I should get a pillow like yours." He has one of those pillows to keep the back and neck aligned. The thought occurs to me that maybe we can switch pillows for the night and in the morning I can go buy my own. He doesn't have back problems, and it would be great to try something — anything — to make my back feel better.

Before I can propose the idea he replies with, "Yeah, maybe you should get one," and then rolls over on his side to go to sleep. He's done with me. I can't offer him what he wants, so that's that.

Years ago he would have thought about switching pillows long before I did. He would have gone to great lengths to help me get comfortable. I laid there thinking about what a different man he is now, but then the thought occurred to me that maybe he was thinking the same thing; after all, when I was 25 years old I didn't have back problems and didn't have to deny sex because of my aches and pains.

A comment on one of my recent blogs said this about the things I write about my husband: "I don't recall one post that mentions loving, appreciating or cherishing him."

Maybe I'm not making myself clear, and that doesn't surprise me. I spend so much of my time lately in a confused state that sometimes I really don't know how I feel about my husband. I'm not surprised that someone who takes the time to read through my posts would start to wonder whether I actually love my husband anymore or if I don't. You can't possibly assume that this isn't something that I haven't labored over in my mind over and over again.

Do I appreciate my husband? Yes, I do. I've written about how he's a professional man who supports his family well. I've written about how he's making his way through graduate school. I realize that a lot of different aspects of my life would be much more difficult if he wasn't around.

Do I cherish my husband? I've written about how I cherish watching his interactions with our children. He can make them burst into giggles quicker than anyone else.

Do I love my husband? Holy cow, that's going into a really gray area. I once loved my husband very much. He has since changed into a different man, and I have changed into a different woman. Does the New Me love the New Him? Yes, there is some love there. Is there as much love now as there once was? No, not even close.

My husband spent a great deal of time not appreciating me and not cherishing me, and although he said he loved me there was really no proof there.  That's devastating, and it's still very painful to revisit. That's probably why you don't read many blogs from me singing my husband's praises. 

In an ideal world I'll someday get to the point to where I'll have no problem blatantly loving, appreciating, and cherishing my husband. I just don't know if that will ever happen.

My husband is juggling graduate school and work right now, so he's a pretty busy guy. Luckily he's taking the classes online, so while I write at night he does his school work.

Why is he taking graduate classes? There are two reasons, I think. The first is because I want to start my graduate classes, but I don't want us both in school at the same time because I think the kids would get short-changed if both Mommy and Daddy were scrambling to get their homework done.

I told my husband that he needed to decide what he wanted to do because if he didn't enroll in classes soon then I would start up my graduate degree. After all, I'm really itching to get back to school and I do truly love being a student, so if he wasn't interested than I certainly was.

Lo and behold, he enrolled in classes.

The second reason why he is in graduate school didn't come out until just recently. He was complaining about how busy he is, and how hard he works, and how difficult it is to juggle everything (which I certainly don't dispute...he's working very hard right now).

Then it comes out during a discussion that the only reason he's enrolled in classes is because he thought it was what I wanted. He says he wasn't even sure he wanted a graduate degree, but I pushed him into it.

"Won't a graduate degree help you in your career?" I asked him.

"Yeah, I guess," he responded with a shrug.

I told him that he should make his own decisions, that he shouldn't do something major like enrolling in school if it's not something he wanted to do. He threw his arms up in the air and exclaimed, "I'm just trying to make you happy!"

My husband walks across the kitchen floor. I hear a crunching noise and look down, and he has tracked in big clumps of dried dirt on the bottom of his shoes. I say, "Hey, hang on, you're dragging dirt in here." He looks down and says, "Oh, sorry about that," and then picks up a couple of pieces. He then hightails it out of the kitchen, leaving me with several clumps to pick up for him.

Look out; here comes a metaphor.

One of the biggest problems I have with my marriage is the fact that it feels like my husband really did a number on the relationship and essentially screwed everything up, and then once he decided that he wanted to work on the marriage he did his little mea culpa and then left everything for me to clean up.

I'm the one who needs to get over the resentment I have from his behavior. I'm the one who needs to work toward healing my heart enough to trust him to be a loving husband again. As far as he's concerned, everything is peachy because he apologized and decided he wanted to make the marriage work.

But what about those clumps of dirt he dragged into the relationship?

I hate that I'm the one who is left to pick up the pieces. I'm the one who needs therapy to "reopen my heart" — which, by the way, is the phrase our therapist used — but as far as I can tell my husband doesn't have any problems with opening or closing his heart. For a while he didn't seem to care whether I lived or died as long as the kids were taken care of and there was food on the table.

Now he's Mr. Let's-Make-This-Marriage-Work. He wonders why I can't just rejoin the marriage with the full gusto that he displays now.

It's probably because I'm too busy picking up all the dirt he tracked in. 

Do you ever find yourself staring at your wedding ring? I remember when my husband first proposed I worked in a store that had great lighting so I would sit and stare at my engagement ring whenever I had the chance. It was so beautiful and sparkly and it represented such a bright future ahead of us.

Before we had kids I fantasized about my baby someday staring at the sparkles in the ring while wrapping his or her little fingers around it. When my babies came along, they didn't get to see much of the ring because my fingers were so swollen that I couldn't wear it. 

This was around the same time the marriage started to face some real trouble. When I lost the baby weight and got the ring back on my finger I hoped it would renew something. Maybe we could reclaim the love we once had just like I had reclaimed the right to wear my wedding ring.

I know I put way too much emphasis on symbolism. I don't know why my brain works that way. By the way, he presented the ring to me when he proposed while we were watching The First Wives Club on television. I'm pretty sure there's some irony there.

I find myself staring at my wedding ring a lot nowadays, too. I think about what it felt like to put that ring on my finger for the first time and how I never thought in a million years how our relationship would someday evolve (or deteriorate) into what it is today. I wear the ring because I'm married, but I don't see it as a symbol of a bright marital future.

I know many women in my situation don't even bother to wear their wedding rings anymore, but I do. I'm married. No matter what my heart says I'm still married. The ring announces this to everyone, and I'm fine with that. I just can't make the claim anymore that when I stare at my ring I'm thinking about all the glorious years ahead of us in wedded bliss.

I've changed a lot in the past few years. When my husband stopped paying attention to me I started writing professionally and the next thing I knew I was busy with a freelance writing career that became surprisingly profitable. At first I was making enough money to occasionally take the family out to dinner, but now I make almost as much as my husband does.

It's an interesting transition to go from stay-at-home mom to nearly-equal breadwinner, especially when it annoys my husband to no end. In the beginning he would tolerate my deadlines but roll his eyes and sigh about how I should really work more on keeping the house clean. For a while I managed to do both — I kept the house clean and met all my deadlines — but I got very little sleep and was really exhausted all the time.

Funny...he could have stepped up and helped me with the house and taken some of the burden off me, but he didn't. In fact, one time he blew up at me and said how unfair it was that I had agreed to be a stay-at-home mom but then went out and got myself a career. Damn that ambition of mine.

Fast forward to present day, with the economy going crazy and our money just not stretching like it once did. It's my income that allows us to meet our bills every month and for him to still have the niceties he craves. It's my income that pays for car repairs. My income pays for the preschool tuition for the kids and paid for our road trip to see my husband's parents last month. In other words, without my income we'd be in bad shape.

This doesn't change a thing. I'm still expected to do everything around the house. No matter how much money I bring in he still sees me as the same stay-at-home mom I was years ago. I guess it's what he wanted, and still wants to this day, so that's what I'm always going to be in his mind.

My state has been making the news lately because of a really lenient law regarding child abandonment. Apparently, any child can be dropped off at a safe haven, so laws that were designed to protect newborns only apply to all children, regardless of age.

Suddenly people can give up their kids to authorities, without persecution, no matter what age the kids are. Are you having a bad day with your rambunctious toddler? Drop him off with the authorities. Is your teenager driving you crazy? Pack her bags and send her away.

There was a story of a man dropping off his kids that made national headlines because he surrendered nine children of varying ages. Authorities were left scratching their heads because according to the law the children belonged to the state now and there were no ramifications for the dad.

Why is it so simple to wash your hands of your children but walking away from your spouse takes thousands of dollars and countless hours of legal mumbo jumbo? Imagine a law where spouses could just look at each other and say, "You know, this really isn't working," and then they walk down to the courthouse and are declared divorced. Voila. It's like a magic trick.

I'm not saying this is the best idea. I'm personally a fan of trying to make things work before throwing in the towel, but I'm left scratching my head over this law that lets you walk away from your own flesh and blood. Do you want to leave your spouse? Prepare for myriad legal bills and confusing laws. 

Do you want to leave your children? If you live in the state I live in, you're in luck.