And of course they have. Intellectually I know I am not alone in this. Statistics show that some 50% of all marriages end in divorce. And still, no one ever imagines themselves on the precipice of such a colossal failure. If we could even conjure a picture of our future selves living in separate homes, contacting attorneys and real estate brokers, divvying up the furniture and the pets… well of course no one would agree to marriage in the first place. There’s no temporary happiness that can justify this type of pain. We all really, really mean it when we say “I Do.” Until we don’t.

Admittedly it’s been hard to focus on the dreadfulness of this situation as I am currently exhausted due to the frenetic pace that this life change has ushered in. I have temporarily taken work as a painter/renovator for a friend who buys multi-family homes out of foreclosure, slaps on a fresh coat of paint and changes some switch plates and proceeds to rent the places out for outrageous prices. It is depressing and mindless work but she pays a generous hourly rate and I can come and go as I please. I keep reminding myself that it is only temporary. I am rushing home from my painting job to meet the kids when they get off the bus. I am managing homework and bathing and dinner and house keeping. I am meeting real estate brokers and tracking down the right therapist for the kids. I am keeping the walkways to the back door ice free which means I am shoveling and scraping and salting as necessary. I am typing up resumes into the wee hours of the night. I am looking for a full-time gig, one that tickles the mind, pays adequately, offers benefits and a growth opportunity. I am trying to schedule a service appointment for the car. I am trying to squeeze in quick trips to the gym even if then kids need to come and do homework while I plod along on the treadmill. I am ordering a new Canine Fence Company collar for the dog since she’s broken the old one and keeps skipping the yard for greener pastures (who can blame her?). I am not sleeping well because there is laundry to do and I should really get one more resume off and there’s school snacks and lunches to pack and dishwashers to unload before it all starts again tomorrow.

The kids have been sort of swept along in this eddy of activity and coping and seem to be doing much, much better. This improvement in their mental state comes just in time for their father’s return home for the weekend which should set them back to square one by Sunday evening. But this is the best we can do right now. And that has to be enough.

O took the news stoically at first and tried to inspire his sister’s smile by making goofy faces and performing antics with the pizza crust in his hand. His efforts were in vain. She retired to her room to weep and process. The sounds of her sobbing called into question the whole damn thing for me, the selfishness of two parents parting. But O remained tear-free for hours. He has seen and heard this coming for miles. He has witnessed our fighting. We have addressed the fact of our conflict and the possibility of our separation as a solution with him. He has had time to cry about this already.

In hindsight, I wish we had handled the parting differently. While there was no way to make it easy, we could have been more thoughtful. In the effort to explain his leaving, their father mentioned the word “months” which instantly sounded like an eternity hanging there in the space between us. “Months” in the life of a child is something akin to forever. I so wish we had said, Dad is leaving for the week and will be back Saturday, no more – no less. This is the truth. They probably don’t need to know much more beyond the week to week since we don’t know much more ourselves.

In hindsight, we should have made certain his departure was during school hours. We should not have made them witness to our grief. But My Better Half was anxious to get the show on the road. Living here with the knowledge he’d be leaving eventually was wrecking its own havoc. And it must have been torture – this imminent departure from the people he loves all in the effort to find a way back to them – permanently. I think he wanted to begin the process of settling into a new purgatory while waiting for things to magically heal, while hoping for some sort of divine intervention on our family’s behalf. No one ever imagines slipping so far down their own life that happiness is suddenly out of reach. How could it have gotten so beyond us? So beyond me?

And what’s the old saying? When it rains it pours -pours down waste pipe overflow from the second floor bathroom through the light sockets in the first floor office, soaking the rug, flooding the basement on the night two parents decide to part ways. It was almost biblical, the timing of this plumbing failure. O and G and I, stood watching the deluge. And O, as if inspired by the waterworks, finally gave in to tears. He let the crying take him where no nine year old should think to go, My life is terrible, I want to die, everything is awful…my house, my parents, my lack of friends. G piggybacked on this profound depression and began to agree that her social life at school was sub-par, that her life at home was unacceptably sad without her parents being together and happy and living in the same house with working plumbing and shared bedrooms. She rejected the possibility of two homes in close proximity, equal visitation, Daddy-days and Mommy-days, she rejected this quaintly presented notion outright. She could see immediately that nothing this complicated could turn out so easy and sunny and sweet.

And so the three of us fell asleep in my giant bed, trying to find some comfort in the proximity, alien and empty, listening to freezing rain lash at the windows, a sound quite like loneliness.

We have one car that’s a champion in the snow but mice have crawled up inside the dashboard and nested in the airbag system. My warning light has been illuminated as reminder that when I fishtail and throw a 360 on slick, icy roads, I’m SOL save for a rodent family that might shoot out the steering wheel to cushion the impact. Considering the size, weight and non-absorbent make-up of the average mouse, I’ve decided to mostly stay home even though the lack of cleaning apparatus and chill of strained relations makes me want to crawl out of my itchy, winter-dry skin and flee to Florida where I hear it’s 80 and humid and there’s no such thing as chapped lips.

I suppose in this confinement, I should continue the job search I began a few days before the X-mas break wherein I write and re-write cover letters and resumes in order to send on-line responses to job listings in which I am only vaguely interested, those that appear on Monster and Craig’s List, knowing all the while that my ten years as a Landscape Designer don’t translate into value as a paralegal or administrative assistant or pharmaceutical representative but there’s always hope that some firm will see that the individual who ran her own company, wrote for a newspaper and also did time in the accounts department in an advertising firm, can and will learn this office stuff quickly and, in the interim, can probably manage the phones and tend to the ailing tropical plants suffering for light beneath the fluorescents.

I make it sound sort of optional, this employment thing but really it’s dire. In the last days of ‘08 we learned that MBH’s company would no longer be covering health insurance for dependents. So we have the expense of three on our plate in the New Year which makes for leaner times in our already skinny lives. And then there’s the latest confession – that neither of us can take one more day in the house together as a couple; working, sleeping, eating, pretending. And so we’re trying to find a way to swing rent. Some way to give ourselves some breathing room. It may, in the end, save us. Or it just may allow us to sever things in a civil manner. Either way, we see the expense as non-optional.

In order to clear the way for this added financial hit, I cancel newspaper subscriptions, I dial back the minutes on the cell phone, I cancel cable and stare meaningfully at the high-speed internet access bill wondering if we can survive on a dial-up. Wondering if the dial-up option still exists? We are wearing long underwear and turning down the thermostats. The dog shivers in her dog bed. The kids play hours of Wii and we let them, because school’s out and the wind blows negative temperatures and it’s free and we ignore their computer game dependence because their bug eyed attention to Madden ‘09 somehow assuages our guilt.

We have yet to break the news to the kids, this separation, which will confuse and disturb them even more than it does us (if that’s possible). And then there is the news to share that we are taking a leave of absence from the Country Club which really doesn’t affect their Winter lives but will completely rock their summer-time existence. I keep reminding myself that there are worse things to suffer than no swim team or tennis or golf but I feel really, really badly about this one. Possibly because we gaveth and now we taketh away. It’s one thing not to know what your missing, it’s another to miss something you once really, really enjoyed. They have friends there. They have known the sweet laze of sultry afternoons spent licking watermelon drips from their sticky arms and jumping in the chill pool to rinse their skin clean. They have known the smell of fresh mown grass on the fairway. They have known the distinct sound of tennis balls bouncing on a clay court. They have learned how to drag the brush and groom the court after play without filling their tennis shoes with clay granules. They have dressed in a sun dress and sandals and little boy khakis with a starched button-down to attend the awards ceremony at summer’s end where they receive recognition for sportsmanship and effort and achievement. They have known what it feels like to belong to this safe place, a place of well-to-do families and blue skies and a snack bar. I feel sad about a lot of things, but mostly I feel sad that I can’t continue to give them the things they have come to know as normal.

So here’s hoping that somehow, some of the next 364 days will find a way to be truly better than this one. Less uncertain and bleak and fearful and nostalgic. And here’s hoping your ‘09 is a good one, better than the last, even if your last wasn’t all that bad, because who doesn’t deserve even better?

We’ve been there, hunched over our spelling lists, sputtering and wiping away tears as we try, try, try to remember that “grage” is actually spelled g-a-r-a-g-e. Or that “cercos” is, for some inexplicable reason, spelled c-i-r-c-u-s. The English language is cruel. Mrs. McLaughlin of the second grade is cruel. Spelling tests on Friday are cruel and but not unusual punishment and still, even though I graduated from second grade, and I am the mother of an older child that has already been through the rigors of the curriculum, I managed to forget that G needed to prepare for a Friday morning spelling test until well after 8 p.m. Thursday night.

I did a mock test in preparation and discovered that G was not able to spell more than half the list correctly. And so, being type-A and academically driven, I settled in to the task of helping her master the information. I put pencil and paper in front of her seven year old nose and I said, “”Write it again, three times, say it aloud while you spell it, hear the letters as you put them on the page.” She diligently penciled in the words, writing them the correct way over and over. And then I’d remove the spelling list and test her again and she’d make the same errors. I pushed and I pushed and I pushed her to the point of breaking. I was relentless and it was nine o’clock and I clutched her little body in a grip of frustration and I squeezed, just a little too hard and whispered through clenched teeth, “Why can’t you just get this?” I was tired. I’d been managing homework, G’s or her brother’s, since 3:30 p.m. with only an hour’s break for dinner. I was exhausted and depleted and sick of spelling ‘kingdom’ and ‘elevator’ and ‘bridge’.

I wanted to go bed. I wanted children who were self motivated and remembered their own spelling tests long before their mother insisted they study. I wanted something, anything to be easy. And because of my fatigue and frustration, I crumbled. My lack of control made my G feel terrible about her spelling difficulties and she cried and cried her way through another twenty minutes of drilling for Friday’s test before excusing herself and retreating to her bed where, I’m sure, she suffered anxiety dreams about mis-spelled words and her nasty mother and a stern teacher and a conflagration of shame and frustration. And I went to bed shamefaced and chagrined where I deservedly tossed and turned, wrestling with insomnia and the truth about my parenting limitations and I fervently hoped that in the morning she would wake and forgive me my insensitivity.

She was quiet the next morning – reserved and sulking. I sent her off to school that way, not knowing how to make it up to her. She’s can be tough and brooding. She knows how to hold a grudge. She’s now dedicated to making me work for her forgiveness, not knowing just how intensely I feel my own failures, just how badly I wish I could take it back. I can only hope we can mend before Monday when she will return to school and receive a new list of spelling words – a chance to handle things differently or another debacle. Here’s hoping for the former.

If I’m being honest, periodically, in the past five months, I have wanted nothing more than a long and peaceful slumber, some break from the tortured meanderings of my mind. Some way out of all this effort we must expend trying to repair and remain. The idea of real ‘forward’ exhausts me, requires sooo much hard work, soooo much conviction and I can’t seem to find the certainty that real ‘forward’ requires. And so, sometimes, I confuse permanent avoidance with the concept of progress. At least it’s a solution of sorts rather than the absence of one.

Of course, each time it flits through my mind, I am profoundly startled and ashamed by this desperate though fleeting thought. I’m a mother of two, an intelligent attractive woman who should just exude self-esteem and yet I must admit to having considered, momentarily, checking out. How profoundly selfish and sad and altogether beside the point. There are women the world over suffering the loss of their children, their spouse, struggling with illness, poverty, addiction, natural disasters, and here I am feeling like everything I have is too much and not enough. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

And while our couples’ therapy continues, My Better Half and I persist in occupying the therapeutic frame in just the same way we started – each of us sunk into our own end of the long leather couch, facing a man who is supposed to save us, a stranger to whom we direct our most naked and dangerous thoughts about the other. My Better Half and I occupy that space without making eye contact; side by side, separated by throw pillows and years of resentment.

We are two people repeating ourselves week after week, framing the same problems, circling the same cracks in the foundation, defending the space that is not ‘forward’ or ‘better’ but stubbornly remains the same. We have contentious car rides full of shouting and accusation on the way to this bi-monthly meeting. This is a time when we feel safe unsheathing our claws. We know we will soon be sitting on the long leather couch of our collective unhappiness, spending 50 minutes licking the wounds we just inflicted.

We have mopey, quiet car rides home, forty minute journeys back to the reality of our lives – lived together under the same roof and, somehow, worlds apart, where we skirt conversations of import, dodging emotional landmines, saying little, sharing nothing, waiting until we are back in the therapeutic frame some ten, sometimes twenty days later, where we can, again, be candid and direct.

I find it hard to gather a spark from anything these days. Even the positive election returns, the optimism I feel now that we’ll have new leadership in Washington, seems clouded and thin, not quite the exuberant dance of future forward that I was expecting.

I suppose I’ve been to busy saying goodbye to the good things that are October: afternoon soccer practices and Sunday football games, the dazzle of colored leaves, the singular blue of autumn skies, striking the tennis ball while dodging acorns and drifts of pine needles at the base line, jogging without gloves and a hat, standing at the bus stop in nothing but shorts and a sweat shirt and sunset after 6 p.m.

Darkness arrives at 4:30. Mornings are chill and bleak and require two cups of coffee. It is time to make Winter preparations, a fact underscored by the arrival of the plow-guy today. He spent a few minutes staking the borders of our driveway and talked with anticipation of the first snow fall. His mentioning early November storms of years’ past sounded slightly ludicrous on a day of fog and drizzle and 57 degree temperatures. But I don’t doubt his facts and feel, now, just a hair more anxious and intolerant of all the leaf drop in the yard.

And while its seasonally time to eat heavily, sleep deeply and breath slowly, I find myself unable to find a state of relaxation. I spend whole nights sweating the small stuff and the big stuff and all the stuff in between and when I finish making mental grocery lists and planning my future as a trial attorney, I turn to contemplating the purpose of human emotions.

Last night, while fluffing my pillow and popping muscle relaxers in hopes of finding temporary hibernation, I pondered the concept of jealousy and decided that while most of us learned from an early age that the inherent human emotional response of possessiveness and wanting, the peculiar rile and prickle of insecurity we know as jealousy should be stifled, I think, in fact that jealousy can serve as a necessary and effective means by which to communicate our core feelings of vulnerability and deep love.

I’m not suggesting that the type of jealousy aroused by the neighbor pulling into his three car garage in a brand new Lexus is healthy or productive, but rather, I’m talking about the kind of jealousy that makes a person feel demonstratively protective and vulnerable when it comes to their mate, a spouse or significant other.

While jealousy may be a feeling most associated with machismo – men throwing perceived competitors down the pub stairs for looking at their date wrong while shouting, Wadda you looking at, I believe there’s a certain quiet admission of jealousy that can actually bolster a relationship, leading to open discussions of commitment and need.

It takes a lot to admit one’s insecurity to an intimate partner. It’s an admission of fear, fear that “I’m not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, funny enough to hold your attention and I fear abandonment.” Such an admission may make a person feel like a weenie. But an admission like this is also a signal that one of a pair fears the loss of the other, holds the spouse in such high esteem, and at such great value, that this loss is unfathomable and to be avoided at all costs, it can be interpreted as sweet and, at it’s simplest, can serve as much needed validation. I think that when a spouse fails to admit to jealousy they miss an opportunity to say, in no uncertain terms, I really, really don’t want to lose you to anyone at anytime. It’s so simple a possessiveness, so certain an admission of love.

I can’t help but wonder how many relationships have been ruined by outspoken and admitted jealousy versus those that could have been saved if a person had just copped to a little unseemly possessiveness and said, out loud, I value you enough to fear your going, I realize others must see the same qualities in you that I hold dear and might want them for themselves?

I soothe myself with Ron’s suggestion that, really, only the bare minimum is required at this stage in the game. After all, he has reminded me, my readership is non-existent now that I’ve been off the grid for so long. It doesn’t matter what the hell I write today or, ya know, EVER, because my following, while once an impressive 12 readers deep, is now down to 1 or 2 rubber-neckers who check in every now and again looking for an obituary notice. I think what he’s trying to say is that I’ve forced the bar on this blog thing very, very low. So here I am, back from the grave, at least today, can’t promise I’ll be here everyday, or the day after that, but today is a start.

So first a bit of business…Many of you have been kind enough to stop by and inquire about my return to life as a landscape designer. As my last post indicated I returned to design in May and, since then, have knocked out three design projects. It’s a bit like riding a bike, this design thing. Once you’re up and speeding down the hill, that hill could be in Zone 6 or Zone 11. It turns out that there’s not much difference once a person gets a handle on the twelve most important plants in the local landscape while cruising, break neck speed toward career-oriented disappointment.

After a few short weeks of careening down the hill of my new enterprise, feeling the surge of hope, the satisfaction of accomplishment, like wind in my hair, practically singing into the breeze of my own projected success, Weeeee, I can do this because I am good at this and people like me, I hit a rather imposing wall that I’ll refer to as the faltering economy but may, in fact, be more the stuff of bad luck intermingled with a few bad characters.

One project went smoothly, the design was well received, the contractor paid me for my time but the earth remains barren, not a plant has been installed. I’m thinking the homeowner is hoping that Spring will usher in the resurrection of his mutual fund but I’m just guessing. Another project, the one I did for free while hoping my generosity would lead the back door neighbor to cover up the chain link fence that went up around the enormous hole in the ground that they call a pool, well, that design and attendant plant list was completed in mid-June and I’m still looking at bare dirt and a long stretch of metal fencing along the western property line. I’m thinking it’s another garden laid victim to the volatility of the NYSE, but I’m just guessing.

And the third project has officially lurched off the tracks into train-wreck territory. The plans have long been finalized and delivered but I still haven’t been able to track down a check for the remaining design fee, a check which represents 50% of the design costs, my entire month of September, not to mention a few tense weeks in October. So small claims court here I come.

There’s no bit of comfort I can take away from this triptych of disappointment, no successful project or happy homeowner waiting to be my first success story as a landscape designer in the Northeast. There is only a long, ominous stretch of nothingness, a total void of landscape design jobs now that it’s almost November and the snow will soon begin to fall and most people are intensely focused on continuing to pay the mortgage and the heating bill while watching their stock portfolio bottom out a few weeks before Christmas.

Enough with the bleak landscapes and the obscured horizons, I’ll sign off wishing a Happy Day to all who have ventured over to Madmarriage after such a pregnant pause. And if any of y’all happen across a landscape contractor who calls himself Jim and speaks with a lisp and fancies himself a black belt in karate and apparently signs contracts without reading them, do me a favor and swerve in his direction. Just once, this once, I think the Gods might forgive a hit-and-run. I know, I know, this Jim character will get his, someday, somewhere, but I’d just like to be close-by in order to to bear witness.

This is my first landscape design project since leaving Florida. I have enjoyed an almost three year sabbatical and now it is time to put on the big girl panties and get back to work despite the fact that there are chinks in the armor, holes in the lingerie. Because I have studied and practiced in a subtropical climate, I am, decidedly, no expert on Zone 6. I am faking my way through this first endeavor and so far it proves to be no different than the barely managed chaos of the projects I’ve been used to.

Today the excavation crew hit the water main and took out service to my house and the neighbor’s to the South of us. After service was restored we had chunks of copper and mud clogging our hot water tank and our toilets and the water ran brown from the taps and into the washer. We spent the entire day clearing lines and blowing out faucets after which we have clean running water again and I have that “Oh yeah, that’s why I quit landscape design and installation back in 2005″ feeling. Same shit. Different state. ‘Tis the nature of the beast and all those other platitudes I could throw at the thing. I have, in hand, large format reproductions of the property next door and I am tired already.

The hushed quiet of the private therapy room, free of the canned sounds of reception, is breathless and cool. Though it is dark, it is not dreary and there is some comfort in the fact that there is a Kleenex box and asian art work and a bowl of hard candies, butterscotch or peppermint, sickly sweet confections in a bowl, an oral diversion meant to ease the complexity of discussions about “relationship hygene” and the purpose of sexual encounters “to engage feelings of vulnerability and aggression which we have come to think of as taboo emotions and regularly suppress such frailties in most non-sexual human interactions.”

One can tell that much thought has been given to the arrangement of furniture in these therapy spaces. My personal therapist likes to sit in a straight backed chair pulled up to her desk while inviting me to take the seat that is directly adjacent to that desk. She can swivel to face me and put her feet up on the file cabinet. There is a window behind her and the filtered light illuminates the wisps of her short hair, glowing gold in the darkness of the room. Her visage is cast in shadow, completing the effect of deliberate anonymity. She is faceless, haloed even, playing the angel of benevolence whose expression I cannot read for the corona that surrounds her.

And our marriage therapist has his own contrived arrangement. He prefers a deep arm chair that faces a wide leather couch. There are two other arm chairs beside this couch. To sit one of these chairs would be to face the wall rather than the professionally dressed man who has greeted us gently, quiet but stern, paternally ushering us through the door. So we both sink into opposite corners of the long couch. We prefer to meet his gaze than that of one another, having shared a chilly car ride, a week of reserved hostility and patient withholding.

I get the feeling that he is making note of our seat selection. That our choice to sit together on the couch, however far apart, my habit of holding the throw pillow in my lap, hugging it to my chest as if for protection, tells him something about us as a couple, about the state of the connubial union. I only wish I could see the note he’s made next to “seat selection” – hopeless, helpless, hopeful, fucked. He must play a little game with himself. Upon first meeting a troubled couple, he must try to predict the outcome ahead of time, tagging the duo with some sort of premature prediction. He is, perhaps, keeping score of his ability to predetermine a couple’s destiny based solely on the place they choose to sit when first entering the inner sanctum.

But I have to believe we are learning things beyond where to place our fannies. Conversely, I fear that the learning, the progress, is supposed to be more efficient in its development, neatly packaged within the 50 minute therapy window, reaching its weekly conclusion by the end of each billable hour, when, in fact, we’ve both just managed to open a vein and are in the midst of a full soulful bleed on the oriental carpet when our fifty minutes have elapsed.

Almost as if there is an audible chime, a programmed alarm bell, we are ejected into the harsh glare of day, into the parking lot of our lives without the benefit of soft sounds and cushioned chairs and hard candies. We bleed and ooze a collective flow of unhappiness upon the pavement. And all the way home we wish for the mediator, the third party to help us frame and present our individual view points in a more palatable and digestible manner. I have thought to ask him how much it would cost to take him home with us for the week where he might spend some real time dissecting our likenesses, our differences, where he might really get a feel for the state of the union and can say, after seven short days, hopeless, helpless, hopeful, fucked with some measure of authority. That would be easier somehow than this slow burn that is perhaps progress and perhaps not and only time and countless seating arrangements will tell.

So there is the state of things…one big hassled frenzy, a breath taking whirlwind before the pause and linger of summer which should be spent poolside, sipping lemonade and reading mindless fiction but somehow, these next few months don’t seem to hold the promise of that quiet languor.

First there is the fact that, with nowhere left to go but up, My Better Half and I are attempting to make some changes. I wish I could call this team work but it feels more like each of us embarking on an individual and private effort to find some stable ground. It’s been shifting and tilting away from us for awhile and this is the moment, the crucial point at which we find ourselves searching for a way back to center.

While I’d like to think that people change, people who really, really want to change can find it in themselves to fight complacency, can recognize the tiny but significant ways they have failed each other and make the minute adjustments necessary for recovery and the sustained health of the marriage, I can’t quite shake the emphatic claim that MBH has made throughout the eleven years of our marriage. Until very, very recently he has been determined and resolute in his opinion that people don’t change, can’t change, won’t change. It was take it or leave it for so long and now, somehow, when leave it became a distinct possibility, he is no longer quite so certain that change is an impossibility.

And while no one sets out to find themselves here, staring at one another over a cup of coffee at a the Heartbreak Cafe, deciding whether or not to split the bill, share the tip and take separate ways at the fork in the road, I think it’s sadly common, almost banal. We aren’t the first people sipping at this bitter brew and we won’t be the last.

There is one jaded but clever waitress here, with her netted hair and her faded work uniform, who tells tales of the few who have decided to endure, who held hands awkwardly while on the way out to the parking lot, who climbed back into the very same beat-up, work horse of a marriage they arrived in and rode off together in some inexplicable state of stubborn devotion.

She says she never hears from these folks again. She tells it like it’s a good thing, this silence. She claims that only the lonely and the sorry send her postcards. The others, the few, that made it out together have each other. And that makes her glad.