Maybe it's too soon to tell ... and I hope I'm not jinxing things by mentioning it here ... but perhaps Edgar, my soon to be ex, and I can have a polite relationship.

We've included each other on the list of recipients for the political stories and jokes we've been emailing like crazy of late. My updates on efforts to move our divorce forward — by the way, have you noticed that you cannot get through to self help in family court by phone, because they don't answer the phone, so you have to go down there? — have not drawn the nasty responses I would've expected.

"I'd like to be friends with Ed one day," I said to my therapist, the Good Doctor. She fixed me with a dubious look. "I may not live that long, of course," I acknowledged.

My roommate, who has followed this divorce drama for about a year now, saw a friendly sort of email from my estranged husband the other day and suggested, "Maybe somebody has taken him aside and told him, ‘It's going to be okay.'"

I hope so.

One of my students mentioned that she and her ex-husband have a great relationship now; they're like best friends. When she said that I couldn't imagine it, but now I dare to hope for something similar.

I mean, Ed is still the only guy I ever married; I must have seen something in him, though I've spent the last many months concentrating on the irretrievable breakdown of our marriage.

Part of me still thinks that hoping for a good relationship with my soon-to-be-ex-husband is like believing in the Easter Bunny. But the rest of me believes it's okay to want that — as long as I don't hold my breath.