After going through the stress of many in vitro fertilizations, I vivdly remember signing a paper giving the unused embryos to scientific research. In my mind, it was the least I could do since, thanks to this modern day miracle, I could possible conceive the child I so desperately wanted.

But I also realized that the pain — both physical and emotional — of this process could also break couples apart. It was right there in front of me, as I witnessed the cumulative strain on people in the waiting room.

What, I wondered, would happen to their embryos if indeed they broke up? A woman on fertility drugs can produce as many as 20 or 30 eggs. Who would get them?

The nurses would smile and tell me not to worry about it, especially since my husband and I were, they said, such a happy couple. Naturally the reporter in me wanted answers. Where exactly did the embryos go? Did they go into one large unpatrolled laboratory where a rogue nurse would sell them elsewhere. And then, in years to come, I'd meet my lookalike in the mall.

Yes, I know, it seems like something out of a Robin Cook medical thriller, and I laughed at how fertile my imagination could be. So did the nurses. Everything, they assured me, was properly monitored and nothing could happen to the embryos without both parents’ consent.

With in vitro fertilization (IVF), doctors usually implant no more than four fertilized eggs to prevent high-multiple births. In Oregon, a divorced couple split on what to do with their six frozen fertilized eggs, and the case ended up in the Oregon Court of Appeals.

Laura Dahl and her former husband, Darrell Angle, had stored their “embryos” with Oregon Health and Science University, where she had undergone IVF. (For the sake of argument, the court called the fertilized eggs “embryos,” although they said that, technically, they would become embryos only once implanted in a woman’s womb.)

Here's your pet's pet peeve. Your beloved animals suffer anxiety when you separate or divorce, just as you do. In fact, the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals in London has added divorce to the list of events that can lead to "acral lick dermatitis."

Other causes of ALD – a constant chewing, sucking, and licking of a part of the body – are dogs who are isolated or bored, punished continually, or who have nervous and stressed owners. Sean Wensley, a senior vet at the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, says, “As a result of such licking, the area can become raw and itchy, which in turn leads to further licking or chewing."

Pets mirror our emotions. If your parrot plucks his feathers feverishly, your poodle pouts with downcast eyes, your calico cat meows mournfully, vets translate these things as a form of depression because, folks, they are "furry" upset by the disruption in the house.

And why shouldn’t they be?

As Wensley says, “Cats and dogs, like young children, are sensitive to adult human emotions and, when these become tense or unpredictable, this can cause stress-related heath problems.”

What are more symptoms?

"Dogs that are stressed can show signs of compulsive disorder,” he says, including chasing their own tails. Cats, he says, “can be prone to 'wool sucking' which, as the term suggests, involves sucking or chewing on woolen items such as blankets.”

Parrots sometimes pull out their own feathers after losing a mate — which, in a way, includes a human live-in companion — or experiencing some other type of trauma.

And that’s not all. The hospital’s studies show that when their owners split, pets can develop serious long-term nervous symptoms, including chewing on and biting themselves.

You are parents forever, even after divorce. That conventional wisdom resonated this week with the new dust-up between Peter Cook and Christie Brinkley. As we reported this week, Cook apparently violated a confidentiality agreement by deciding to appear on 20/20 with Barbara Walters tonight.

Brinkley swiftly tried to then bar the philandering father from seeing her two children, Jack and Sailor, this weekend.

But a Long Island judge played Solomon and found a solution. Cook can take the children but as Brinkley's lawyer explained, he "has to be away from his home and he can't expose them to the 20/20 broadcast."

Cook claimed he wouldn’t have exposed the children in any case, but the children are seen in the 20/20 broadcast.

A person close to Cook said, "I find it silly that someone who not only allows her children to be in the media but encourages it would have a complaint like this."

The people who should have a complaint are the children.

I’m glad that Sailor and Jack have each other as confidantes since they are caught in the middle like fish in a net while their parents continue their hostilities. Children want to love both parents, and when thrown into an ocean of he said/she said charges, they are left confused, conflicted and hurt. At least they have each other as they swim through these murky waters.

That is no small thing. Often siblings in divorce form enduring bonds.

Forgiveness is difficult when you are co-parenting after a hostile divorce. Christie Brinkley clearly didn't want to have those wounds reopened by a Barbara Walters interview with her ex.

Peter Cook’s goose may be cooked. By dishing to ABC’s Barbara Walters, the porn-loving ex of Christie Brinkley broke a confidentiality agreement not to discuss his divorce. But his temper, he says, was boiling because he felt that he got unfairly grilled. The interview will be aired on 20/20 on Friday.

So why did Peter Cook carelessly cavort with an 18-year-old and also resort to on-line porn? Seems he felt that the Mrs., one of the most gorgeous gals on the planet, wasn’t making him feel desired.

"I was seeking a connection I could not find in my own marriage," Cook said to Walters. "I think the emotional aspect of our lives had changed. I think we were both feeling more like we were living with a brother and sister than a life partner."

So, he said, he suddenly realized something was missing.

"I wanted a little acknowledgment, a little attention, a little thank you every now and then for my efforts, for the amount of time I took to care for her and my family, for the wealth I was building," he said.

At times, the architect and builder said, “I pulled up [to] the driveway to the home that I found, that I built, that I lived in, and I felt like I was a guest in someone else's life."

Well guess what? He is now a guest who’s not welcome anywhere.

Cook has found his life systematically dismantled now that he doesn’t have Brinkley by his side.

As we reported in July, Brinkley divorced Cook after finding out that he was fooling around with Diana Bianchi while also spending up to $3,000 a month on Internet porn.

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?"