this is it, this all

I was joking around with ada on twitter last night about divorce in the age of social networking.

You see, a few weeks ago my ex-husband removed me as a friend on FaceBook. I was crushed. It seemed a silly thing to be upset about, but it was like that final door closing. I was unfriended. We were no longer friends. I pictured photo albums being poured through and my face cut out of family photographs. Trash bags full of photos of my head.

The other night my daughter asked me to look at something she had written on her dad's profile. "I can't we're not friends." She looked puzzled. "Well, add him as a friend." It's important to me to not bring the kids into the drama that ebbs and flows between their father and i, yet i didn't want to lie to her and i didn't want to hurt her. "I could do that, but maybe it's for the best, this way we both get our privacy."

Then there is this blog, there is twitter. I have locked and unlocked my twitter account several times over the past few months. How do i navigate this? How do i say what i want to say, sometimes need to say, without causing pain and protecting my privacy. The answer? You can't. If i want privacy i would have to get off the internet and i just can't do that. The support and therapeutic value of writing, of putting it out there, is too strong for me.

Instead, i will slowly unentangle two lives and six years of marriage that happened online.