It's Friday. Weekend is coming and I'm down deep in my on-going Libra head-trip. The endless quest for balance.

If you are a mom, if you are divorced, separated, remarried or somewhere in between, tell me please, I have know how you do it.

How do you juggle it? What do you do to create and maintain balance in your life?

Really, please, I'm begging here.

What do you do? 

Sometimes I want so badly to have a happy, intimate marriage that my heart feels like it actually hurts. The cynic in me says that no marriage is actually happy, and anyone who claims to be happy in a marriage is either lying or living in denial. The realist in me, however, knows that there must be something to this whole marriage thing because otherwise we wouldn't all be doing it, right?

Sometimes I just want to scream, "HOW DO I GET HAPPY IN THIS RELATIONSHIP?!" I want someone to tell me what to do to fix things so that I can stop living this life of emotional Atari. I want someone to take my hand and tell me that eventually, everything is going to be okay.

A big part of why I haven't ended things is because I want to believe that there is hope that this can work. What a fantastic thing it would be to someday look back on how we almost split up but then were able to repair the relationship and stay together. I think about how much stronger we can potentially be as a couple after going through all this and then coming out of it all okay.

Then I look at how lukewarm we are toward each other and I wonder if couples ever really recover from something like that.

When does a person decide to actually give up hope and file for divorce? Does it feel like a loss of hope, or does it feel more like a triumph of having made a decision finally? Is it terrifying, empowering, or both?

If my editor at First Wives World one day decides to decrease my word limit all the way down to one, no problem. I could still convey my feelings about my marriage. In a word: meh. Rob drinks too much — meh. We don't have sex — meh. Now Rob is turning things around — meh. Life ekes on, and it's hard for me to muster anything other than indifference over my lackluster marriage.

Indeed, sometimes I wonder if the only reaction my posts about my endless indecision elicit is a big "meh" from readers.

There was never a wife so wishy-washy. It's not without justification entirely — my husband was indifferent to my needs and feelings for the first few years of marriage — but it's embarrassing nonetheless. Some days I wonder what's wrong with me.

So I had to laugh today when I read that the powers that be (in this case, HarperCollins, publisher of the Collins English Dictionary) legitimized the expression. Yep, "meh" is in the dictionary. (So is "yep," by the way.)

When I read it I thought of our honeymoon. (I believe we had sex once the entire week — and that includes our wedding night. I should have known then to expect trouble ahead.)

Our lakeside cabin came replete with a fireplace, canoe...and one fluffy orange cat as neighbor. We laughed whenever Buttercup came around. "Meh...meh...meh," she cried at the porch door.

We thought it was adorable that she couldn't muster a complete "meow." But now I have to wonder, were our little friend's pleas a warning? Maybe she knew something we would remain in denial about for years. Smart cat. 

I have to fess up. My secret is not much of a surprise, I'm sure, which hardly makes it a secret, but still I'll feel better straight out saying it. I want my apartment back.

Hold on, now. I'm not saying I want to leave Sam again. That's not it. And I'm not saying I don't want to live with Sam anymore. That's not it either.

I do want to live with him, just not all the time. I do not want to live with anyone all the time.

Maybe this makes me a loser, but it's the truth, so I'm saying it.

I spent all morning re-arranging my office and you know what? In the end I realized creating what I want there is impossible. No matter how many ways I move the furniture, it's all still in that one room, in that one house where we all live. All of us. Together. All the time.

Here's my fantasy: Sam and I get an apartment a few blocks from our house, and we furnish it with the leftover stuff we didn't sell in the garage sale we never had after we moved back in together.

I stay at the apartment a couple nights a week, he stays at the apartment a couple nights a week (if he wants) and three or four nights a week we all stay together, one big happy, nuclear family, at the house.

The girls have each parent five nights a week and two parents about half the time.

Before we separated I'd never lived alone, had no clue how amazing, how liberating, solitude can be.

We have all these ideas about how marriages and families should look, but the reality is parenting small children is brutal. Many of our families are fragmented, parceled out across the country. Thousands of miles apart.

There's no reprieve coming from grandparents, aunts and uncles, or older cousins. No one to take the kids for a couple nights or a couple hours. No villages to raise our children. Our therapist is always asking what we can do to create more space for ourselves.

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? 

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 told my mother-in-law a little lie on the phone last weekend when she called to talk about which American Girl doll should she get Roxie for Christmas. Sam's parents are visiting for the holidays.

We decided on Kit, the Depression-era girl. I said I thought Roxie would like that. Kit would be fine.

I said, "I'm so excited you are coming out for Christmas." It was a lie. And I said it again.

Not a total lie, but mostly more false than true. It's been weird with my in-laws since the split and reunion.

I used to say Sam's parents were much easier visitors than mine. Even enjoyed them. They like their time in the mornings and they stay in a hotel, not my house. Most of the places where my parents are anxious, they are easy-going.

At least, I thought they were easy going.

Actually they're just unwilling to acknowledge anything difficult. My mother-in-law has built herself a happy little Donna Reed world and just you try smuggling any unpleasant kind of truth past that white picket fence.

Try having a conversation about anything real. Oh-no-no. Ignore it, whatever it is, it will go away. If not we can always pretend.

Early on in my separation I gave her a stuttering, obviously uncomfortable five-minute apology for something I thought I'd mishandled. Said this was unfamiliar ground, and I was sorry. Nothing I did or didn't do was meant to hurt or offend, it was just, I didn't know what to do.

She said, "We'd like to have portraits taken of the girls, if that's okay."

Not "Thanks." Not "I appreciate your candor." Not even "OK."

I wasn't sure I'd spoken out loud.

It can make you crazy.

We haven't talked about the separation. We sit down like I did not leave Sam for two years. But it's there in the room, just under the over-stretched veneer.

Probably be there for ever. Unresolved emotions always at the door.

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. 

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?