With the confidence of a captain of the girls' basketball team, Sarah Palin swished her way into the office of Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, took a jump shot at being Governor of Alaska, and then slam dunked the nomination for the Republican vice presidency.

Along the way, she’s accomplished a feat that often sidelines powerful women. Throughout her impressive career, she has never made her husband look diminished.

How she has dribbled her way around this challenging issue is a subject truly worthy of debate. After all, studies in Social Forces and The Journal of Marriage and Family say that women who are more successful than their husbands have higher divorce rates.

Many powerful women have come forward to admit that their careers have sent their relationships to the bench, including Pink and Reese Witherspoon. Amy Adams in this month’s "Vanity Fair" says she’s looking for a guy who won’t look at her success as his failure.

Sarah Palin, however, seems blissfully unvexed. Using her arsenal of charm like a lethal weapon, she is showing America that you can be powerful and sexy at the same time. And you can keep your studmuffin by your side, looking happy.

Hillary Clinton, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel — none of these women’s relationships with their husbands conveyed much marital heat in public. The husbands were more likely to get their wives into hot water, or have been so lukewarm, no one paid any attention to them.

Now we have Todd Palin, the hot political hubby.

At campaign stops, Todd Palin looks macho while doing nothing more than standing there holding their baby.

As we say at FWW, you have to love your kids more than you hate your spouse after divorce. Now Elizabeth Edwards has applied the same logic to why she is staying in her marriage following the admission of her husband’s infidelity.

In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, Edwards acknowledged that rebuilding trust "is probably the most difficult hurdle” to overcome following John Edwards’s affair with Rielle Hunter.

But there are reasons to clear that hurdle: the children.

As a woman living with stage four cancer, she knows in the back of her mind that her husband will be the children’s caretaker. She says that she wants the kids to look at their father as “an advocate for poverty, not for this current picture of him, to be the one they carry with them ... I need to create the picture for them that I want them to have."

Edwards is now applying her crayons to all the ambiguous blanks in their life’s coloring book, trying to shade in the blanks that exist and make an enduring family picture. By sticking it out with her husband, who has been shamed and is also in need of forgiveness, she is teaching her children acceptance and resilience and making the best out of a bad situation.

At those moments when the hurt sucks the color from her face, looking at her children, Cate, 26, Emma Claire, 10, and Jack, 8, must fortify her, and stir those feelings that she must keep her family life intact. The alternative, leaving him, pales in comparison to having him for whatever time they have left.

As our blogger Gi Gi once wrote, you are never mad 24 hours a day. Gi Gi is most forgiving of her husband when she sees him be loving to her children.

It is no secret that many who divorce make certain mathematical calculations. If I have 10 good years left, do I want to be with this guy? Maybe not.

In California, pets are protected from outright abuse during divorce and marital problems. But there is increasing evidence that divorce itself, even without abuse, is stressful for pets, especially cats and dogs. (No one has yet proven that hamsters, parakeets, rabbits, turtles, and fish are particularly affected by family tensions, but perhaps some day a study will show that.)

It’s easy to understand why divorce upsets pets as well as children. There is tension in the home. There are arguments and slammed doors (which can sound like a gunshot). People disappear. There may be a move to a new home. And all of the usual routines are interrupted.

Dogs and cats know their routines: a time to wake up, a time to eat, to play, to go outside, to go to bed. Anyone who has forgotten to feed a cat will know just how insistent that cat will be that, Hello! It. Is. Time. To. Eat!

Dogs may be more flexible, at least some dogs, unless it’s time to go for a walk.

But there are dogs who are particularly nervous. And the older the dog, the less likely that he or she will adjust.

Sometimes, couples can actually put the pet’s needs before their own. Raoul Felder has noted that one couple getting a divorce agreed to stay in their apartment to continue to care for their sick dog. “Here,” Felder told PetPlace, “instead of making the dog a trophy in the divorce case, they stayed together until the dog passed away.”

According to David “David the Dogman” Klein, dogs are particularly social animals, long domesticated, able to read emotions, expressions, and to react badly to shouting and arguments.

They may be Fluffy and Woofy to you, but to a divorce court it’s pet 1 and pet 2, and those pets are considered property, not part of the family. If the spouses can’t settle the matter, the court will usually assign custody to whichever spouse bought it, fed it, or brought it into the relationship.

In one case in San Diego, when Stanley and Linda Perkins fought for two years over Gigi, a mix of pointer and greyhound, the judge awarded custody to the wife after she showed a video, “A Day in the Life of Gigi.” The video showed her relationship to Gigi, who slept under her chair at work, and played fetch on the beach.

Sometimes you wish people would take as good care of their children.

Last year the courts in Wisconsin began following a new Solomonic rule on animal custody. The couple decides who gets the pet, or the judge decides custody, and if that doesn’t work, the animal goes to the local Humane Society.

Husband and wife are invited to apply for ownership of the pet there.

But that’s all about what’s best for the humans. What about what’s best for the pets?

Animal rights is one of the fastest growing areas of law. And many of those laws come into play in divorce. For one thing, there is a close correlation between spousal abuse and pet abuse. Anger about the marriage is deflected onto the pet who is kicked, abandoned, kidnapped, or even killed.

Ever notice the girls who mature quicker?

It's easy to chalk it up to an evolving society. Everything happens quicker, faster, earlier for the generations that follow. Exposure to the media, the Internet, and an immediacy for information puts our children (or in some cases, our children's children) in fast forward.

New research, however, shows that environmental factors of early puberty might hit closer to home than you think.

International studies have cited divorce as the culprit behind a range of medical conditions, from asthma and eczema to diabetes — in addition to deteriorating the environment.

Now you can add early puberty to the list. The University of Arizona, in conjunction with New Zealand's University of Canterbury, studied the effects of absentee fathers and divorce on adolescent development, and found that young females without a positive paternal influence developed earlier — sometimes as much as one year's difference.

Early puberty has been linked to teen pregnancy and various health issues, including breast cancer.

Researchers haven't determined why this is so, but have suggested an evolutionary biology link. Says the University of Arizona article:

"The idea is that children adjust their development to match the environments in which they live," Ellis said. "In the world in which humans evolved, dangerous or unstable home environments meant a shorter lifespan, and going into puberty earlier in this context increased chances of surviving, reproducing and passing on your genes."

Some women wish they’d never been married. We’re sure Sandra Boss, the London management consultant whose 7-year-old daughter was famously kidnapped in July by her ex-husband, must feel that way.

But wait. What if she was never married?

Now we begin with the quote marks: Boss “married” her “husband,” “Clark Rockefeller” (born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter), in 1995 in a small Quaker ceremony in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Nantucket is real. So are Quakers.

Somehow they got divorced, last year, in Boston, and a court-appointed evaluator gave custody to Boss. “Rockefeller” refused, we’re told, to reveal his actual identity, and Boss gave him $800,000 in go-away money.

So Rockefeller (we’re quitting with the quote marks now) grabbed his daughter on a supervised visit and has since said that he just wanted to spend some quality time her, like the rest of their lives.

He was arrested in Baltimore, and returned to Boston, where several other identities became known.

Now that authorities are trying to figure out what charges to lodge against Rockefeller – being a jerk, liar, phony, and weasel not being statute crimes – they have petitioned to see the sealed divorce and custody papers.

But Rockefeller’s lawyer, Stephen Hrones, argued that the papers should remain sealed, because they contain “private” and “personal” information. Besides, he said, "They weren't legally married. How do you divorce when you're not legally married?"

The Washington Post recently reported on Japan's declining marriage rate. Short story: Men are looking to wives to take over maternal roles, and that scenario isn't very appealing to most single Japanese women:

"There is the rarely stated but almost universal expectation of Japanese men to be fed, clothed and picked up after. 'I am willing to take care of and give comfort to a man whom I care about, but that does not mean I want to be his mother,' she said."

In fact, WaPost found that women who had married were less likely than their male counterparts to remarry after divorce. The article states that post-divorce, men are unhappy and remarry quickly, while "the women are relatively happy and often delay remarriage." Perhaps it's the "burn me once" theory?

In addition to the lack of women looking to take on the mommy role, a stalled economy and a posh home life are keeping adult children in their parents' homes. A Calgary Herald piece from early August reported that Japanese parents — fed up with housing, feeding, and taking care of their single adult children — were taking matters into their own hands and organizing events exclusively for parents to find mates for their children.

"A government report from 2005 showed 71.5 percent of men aged 25 to 29 were unmarried, compared with 47.1 percent in 1990. For women, 32 percent from 30 to 34 years of age were single, compared with half that number in 1990."

Most American 8-year-old girls are thinking about The Suite Life with Zack and Cody and not a married life with a man in his fifties. But in Saudi Arabia, girls just can't have fun, and how they're treated is no laughing matter.

According to the BBC, an 8-year-old girl is pleading to a Saudi Arabian court for a divorce. She was married off to the man without her knowledge — by her father. (How do you say jerk in Farsi?)

Child-protection organizations say Saudi children are sometimes given away in return for large dowries, or as a result of beliefs that marriage to cousins or other known persons will protect young boys or girls from illicit relationships.

What should be illicit is selling a daughter before she becomes of age to make her own choices and treating her like property instead of a prized individual.

Now, following the publicity, the child's mother is reportedly asking for an annulment. Although women have limited power in Saudi Arabia, annulments have a precedent with underage children.

Last April, a court in neighboring Yemen annulled the arranged marriage of a 9-year-old girl to a 28-year-old man.

Perhaps the court of public opinion will help make a ruling in Saudi Arabia as well that young brides have an age requirement.

Republican First Lady wannabe Cindy McCain has always said she's an only child — which came as a painful shock to her two half sisters. McCain's parents both had a child from previous relationships, but as was often the case a generation ago, these children were really treated as second class citizens.

Kathleen Hensley Portalski, 65, is the product of Arizona beer baron Jim Hensley and his first wife, Mary Jeanne Parks. Hensley and his second wife, Marguerite "Smitty" Johnson, had Cindy 11 years later. Cindy's other half-sister, Dixie L. Burd, was born to Johnson before her marriage to Hensley.

Kathleen Portalski told National Public Radio that being ignored by McCain has made her angry and hurt. "It makes me feel like a nonperson," she said.

How sad that anyone has to feel that.

Unlike today, where divorce settlements allow ample time for fathers to see their children — and many dads now are asking and getting joint custody — agreements years ago gave fathers little time with their children. Also, there wasn't as much effort by fathers to see these children and integrate them into their new family because there was a stigma around the word divorce (the divorce rate remained below 1% throughout the 1940’s) The idea of a "perfect" intact family and living up to that image was the driving force in society.

Portalski has told reporters that her father Jim would see her a few times a year, usually around Christmas and birthdays, and called “occasionally.” He also helped with school clothes and tuition. Later, he would also send some modest sums to Portalski’s kids.

Since there was no Firstwivesworld.com then — nor stricter laws enforcing child support payments based on income — many children like Kathleen were not integrated into their father’s new family.

Michael Phelps proved that children of divorced parents can achieve swimmingly.

With his record 8 gold medals for the Beijing Olympics, the 23-year-old Phelps is considered the greatest Olympian in world history.

The tribute goes to his mom Debbie, a school administrator, who diligently drove him and his two sisters, Whitney and Hilary, to swim in their hometown of Baltimore. As a single mom, she also helped him through his ADD and proved to be a loving, supportive parent — and a smart one too.

Since Michael’s father Fred, a retired state trooper, was an invisible presence in their lives after the 1994 divorce, Debbie realized that swimming was a great release for her young son.

When he was 11, Michael Phelps bonded with swimming coach Bob Bowman, who became a surrogate father figure to the young boy. This often happens when a father figure is absent. A smart mother often tries to find another male figure, either in a relative such as an uncle, or perhaps a coach.

Only 9.2 percent of households are run solely by single moms and the challenges often result in higher high school drop-out rates and behavioral problems. However, with the right parenting, focus, and outlets, children are less impacted and can learn other lessons from the experience.

When asked about his father in interviews, Phelps has said that they occasionally “email” but shrugs his big shoulders when asked how it impacted him. He always refers to the love his mother Debbie gave him and his sisters.

But a philosophy of coping did emerge from this experience. Although a fierce competitor, Phelps is known to take the rare defeats in stride or even the pressure of constant competing. His famous saying is, “Whatever happens, happens.”

It is no surprise that a boy who didn’t have a father throwing baseballs, going to swim meets, or playing lacrosse with him had to find ways to make sense of this disappointment.