Today is the seventeenth anniversary of my wedding to R and a week after the first anniversary of our separation. Seventeen years ago, my finger joyfully received that little band of gold with the tiny diamonds in it. If you’ve been reading this since the beginning, you’ll recall that one year ago today I removed said little band with much sturm und drang.

This is also my 20th blog post (!), so it seems like an all-around obvious time to take stock.

Let’s start with some of the things I don’t like about being an unmarried woman:

• It is hard being the mother of two tween girls when you have a husband–and thoroughly exhausting in a relentlessly female way when you don’t.
• I never wanted to think about things like refilling the car’s coolant fluid or whether I need to replace the de-humidifier in the basement, dammit, and I still don’t. But I have to.
• It sometimes feels icky to be the only single person at dinner parties besides the host’s 85-year old mother, who lines up her evening medications right on the dinner table; worse is when they seat you next to her as if she’s your date.
• I’m tired of people commenting on “how well I’m doing” and telling me how they could never handle what I’ve been through. I know everyone means well, but sometimes I hear these comments as “Boy, am I glad I’m not in your shoes!”
• It is, plain and simple, soul-achingly lonely at times.

OK, enough with the poor-me stuff. Let’s try to see the champagne glass as half full, shall we?

• I like to flirt and now I can, openly, anytime the opportunity presents itself. Plus, I got to have that BDF and you can’t (or shouldn’t) do that when you’re someone’s wife.
• Despite my bitching and moaning, it is empowering to discover that you can drive the 8 hours from New York to Maine all by yourself, in addition to: put up shelves, unclog the bathtub drain, and engage in mouse slaughter and its distressing aftermath.
• I have a new and boundless appreciation for my friends, to whom I give tons of credit for keeping me afloat.
• Three was a crowd, but now I love when one of my kids crawls into bed with me in the middle of the night.
• If R and I were still together, I wouldn’t have started blogging–and it turns out I really enjoy blogging.
• Now that I’ve survived this first year, it seems possible that I’ll get through the next one and even the one after that. That alone is a reason to celebrate.