I have to admit, you have been a hard year to live through. I have felt more pain in your 365 days than I have in all other years combined! (Except, perhaps, for 1990… my freshman year in High school.) Although I grew a lot over the past 12 months and have many things to thank you for, I am quite happy to say goodbye to you. In these final days, I hope you don’t mind if I say goodbye to all the things I hope to leave behind as you draw to a close and a young and hopeful 2009 takes your place.

Goodbye profound sadness! I have felt you seeping away little by little as visions of the future start to overlay snapshots of my final days with Ahmed. You have been a noble yet predatory emotion. You pounced on me in the strangest places: in movie theatres and subway cars, in the shower, in the mirror, and in the bed right before I fell asleep. You always seemed to catch me off guard, but I don’t resent you. You are a measure of how much I have loved and how much I will miss certain aspects of my marriage. Your painful grip on my heart has reminded me that I am alive. Still, I am not sorry to see you go… you are meant to be vivid and brief. I hope we will not meet again for a good long time…

Goodbye uncertainty! I have chosen my path now! There is no need to linger any longer. You have been dismissed. I won’t miss you and, although I am sure you will continue to pop up intermittently in the coming years, I doubt you will have such an impact on my other endeavors. You may take your two-headed loud-mouthed cacophony elsewhere. I can’t hear you now.

My neighbor and I were talking about our perplexing positions in life. We are both in the same boat, contemplating divorce for a couple of years now with young children involved. She revealed to me that her husband had been physically abusive to her a few times throughout the marriage and that he continues to verbally assault her in front of her kids on an almost daily basis. 

When I told her that I think my husband may be either cheating on me or planning on cheating on me, she said, "Oh, that's where I draw the line. If he cheats on me, I'm out of here."

This got me thinking about the different thresholds we all have as women. Before I was married I always assumed that my threshold would be "If I'm unhappy in my marriage, I'm out of here."  After we were married and we had kids my threshold evolved into something like, "If he ever lays a hand on me in violence, or becomes verbally abusive, or cheats on me, then I'm out of here." 

I would assume that most women in my position have similar thresholds, but talking to my neighbor (who has been married longer than I have), butapparently it's completely possible to have the threshold pushed further to "If he cheats on me I'm out of here, but everything else is just annoying."

Why do we allow the threshold to change?

It's almost as if we are numbed by situations as they come. My neighbor is pretty numb to her husband's verbal abuse. I'm pretty numb to the way my husband twists everything into being my fault, and I'm afraid I'm completely capable of becoming numb to worse things.

It was while wrapping Christmas presents that I thought of him. The memories tend to sneak up on me like that now; something unexpected will trigger this explosion in me and they come flooding back in.

I thought of our last Christmas together. The one where Adrian was just twelve days old. That one, where I was still white knuckled, sick to my stomach, clinging to the hope that he wouldn't do exactly what he's done: leave us. I did everything for him, his way, hoping that he would stay. Right down to circumcising my son (which I didn't want to do) and giving Adrian his last name (which I've come to regret more than you can know). I understand now that desperation will do these things to you; make you give parts of yourself that you otherwise would never consider.

I thought of that day, how stressed out my body was from just giving birth and the lack of sleep that ensued, but how in comparison that was nothing on how stressed out my mind was. 

I remembered how I tried to push everything away and fight the reality of the situation. How I tried to make myself believe that everything would be okay despite how wrong everything felt. Despite how it felt like my whole universe had come undone.

"That was two years ago," I said aloud to myself.

Wow, two whole years and sometimes it can still hurt like it was yesterday.

But the pain is different now. I'm no longer that tortured woman. Now I wish I could go back and shake that lady that was once me. "What are you thinking?" I'd say to her. "Can't you see this is all about him? Where the hell did you put your self respect? Why are you compromising yourself for someone who obviously doesn't love you?"

That's what two years gives you — a lot of perspective and enough time for a fresh start.

Isn't social networking great? Not only can I hop on the FWW Network and chat with women who are in a similar situation, but I have also reconnected with a bunch of people through other networking web sites whom I thought I would never speak to again. 

It's a little weird how ex-boyfriends and lukewarm friends from the past suddenly request to become "friends" on sites like Facebook. I had one friend look me up recently; things did not end well with her 10 years ago. She ended our friendship with a diatribe about how selfish I was and lo and behold now she's sending me messages saying she's so happy to find me, we really need to catch up, yadda, yadda, yadda.

My best friend from my early twenties found me online the other day. We were inseparable back when we were young and single, but job assignments took us to opposite ends of the globe and we eventually lost touch. Last night we chatted a bit and it's funny how similar our paths have been: We both got married, quit working, had kids, and became disenchanted with our marriages.

Here is where the differences become incredibly clear. She makes a swift decision to divorce her husband, gets offered a fantastic high six-figure job in an exotic country, travels the world with her child in tow and now spends her days writing a novel. By the way, she looks fantastic, like she hasn't aged a day.

Then there's me. I languish over whether to divorce my husband or not. I know that a divorce would mean a huge dip in income, and I would probably wind up in a tiny apartment with huge financial difficulties. I've gained a bunch of weight from the stress of the relationship problems, and no, I don't look as though I haven't aged a day. I look like I've aged about a billion days.

Tomorrow night we start marital counseling again. We finally settled on a schedule where our pastor comes over to our house in the evening after our kids are in bed. Now that's an accommodating pastor.

My husband isn't happy about the counseling. I guess I can't blame him. I do such a good of putting my emotions into a little box and ignoring them that as far as he knows it's business as usual until someone actually asks me what I'm feeling and won't take "I'm fine, thanks" as a realistic answer. 

In other words, even though I'm not as affectionate with my husband as I once was, it's pretty easy to live with me. I take care of stuff around the house and bring in an income, so if he wants to ignore the fact that we're having problems then it's probably pretty darn easy.

It's in counseling sessions that I start crying and carrying on about how desperate I feel in the marriage. With someone there to mediate our conversation, I feel more comfortable saying how I feel because I know it's not going to turn into the usual frustration fest that serious conversations become when my husband and I try to do this on our own...or, at least, when I approach him about something that has been bothering me and it morphs into me apologizing for being bothered by something.

Yes, tomorrow night should be interesting. We haven't been in marital counseling for months, and after my last debacle with the therapist who apparently had the hots for me, I'm a little reluctant to trust the process. As usual, though, I'm still willing to try again to see if the relationship can be salvaged.

I'm bracing myself. It should be interesting.   

Not only have I neglected to put the Leary theory into effect, but I've acted quite the opposite of a married woman who has taken separation off the table.

Tonight one of my fellow yoga teachers-in-training is hosting a dinner party for our group and our significant others to recognize our hard work and transformation — like a pre-graduation party. It's a chance enjoy each other's company before the stress of the final exam and practicum after which (if we pass) we'll leave the group and go into the world as registered yoga teachers.

And I never even told Rob about it.

This morning he woke up with a terrible cold, and I had an out. "Aw," I said, "I forgot to mention this get-together tonight, and now you won't be able to come." 

It's not that I'm embarrassed of him or want to keep him out of some part of my life. I just don't want to babysit. I want mingle and enjoy myself.  

When you have a child on your hip, it's harder to make real connections with people. Instead, you're busy interpreting for the child, cajoling him, attending to him. This is what I have to do with Rob. He just blanks out otherwise; he turns into the most uninteresting, white-bread guy you ever met. He says nothing at all, which I find stiflingly uninspiring.

Perhaps it not very yogi-like of me to say — maybe, in fact, I sound like a complete bitch — but I'd rather go alone than have him by my side tonight. 

Some time ago I wrote about my disappointment over not being able to join my church's board of directors. I had been nominated by some people in the congregation but the pastor quietly removed my name from nominations because he knew about the marital problems. It hit me hard because I really wanted to join the board, and it ticked me off that my life was apparently such a mess that I couldn't be considered for the position. 

Fast forward to present day. I got a call from my pastor who told me that my name had come up again. He wanted to let the nomination go through, but he needed to know if I was ready. It was really a bizarre conversation.

Usually my pastor and I have a really easy rapport with each other but I could tell that he was uncomfortable. He started mumbling about how he wanted me on the board but people on the board have certain expectations, and while the church is not necessarily opposed to divorce I would be in the public eye.  I stopped him and said, "If you're asking if I'm going to divorce my husband anytime soon, the answer is no.  I can't guarantee you that I won't leave him in the near future, though." 

He accepted my answer and this Sunday I expect to be confirmed onto the board. 

I'm really pleased that I finally made it onto the board, but here is the thing: My pastor knows that my husband and I are on shaky ground. Heck, we've been trying to coordinate schedules for the past few months so that the three of us can get together for some marital counseling.

I don't really get why he would ask me a question that he kind of already knows the answer to. Maybe it was a formality, or maybe it was a veiled warning, something along the lines of "If you leave your husband, you're off the board." Trust me, though...if I leave my husband I think the church board will be the least of my problems.