fiction

Saving Face

Chapter 21: Why Erica feels like Angelina Jolie. At least for a few minutes.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009, at 4:46 PM ET

Subject: Chapter 2
Posted Friday, Sept. 11, 2009, at 4:20 PM ET

"Hey Erica," calls Danny as I help Ellie into the mudroom, shopping bags sliding down my arm. Sam ties on his Batman cape. He's been cheered immensely by repeat playings of his current favorite song, "Dumpy Wumpy Baby" ("I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, that much is true"), on the way back from school. We hang up jackets and put backpacks and today's art offerings into bins. Ellie lunges crazily for Chairman Meow, the cat. "Gaaaaaaaaaaa," she shrieks.

Ellie isn't talking yet. For a while, we thought it was funny that she was like Maggie on The Simpsons, and it was so fun and ironic to have a baby who would alternately fall down and then be silent. But now we're starting to worry a little. I have an appointment with the pediatrician to discuss this on Tuesday.

"Snacks in here guys," calls Danny, and they race into the kitchen.

"How was your day?" he asks me. Danny is young enough to listen to the answers to such questions and possibly even young enough to remember them a day later.

"The usual," I say, tossing my purse onto a kitchen chair. "Periods of prolonged waiting punctuated by brief flurries of lateness."

Danny smiles as the children launch themselves at his thighs. Having a "manny" makes me the envy of all my friends; he's a college senior who's been helping out since Ellie was born. He was Sammy's camp counselor that summer and it was love at first sight for both of them. Danny's off to med school next year, and I have not-infrequent visions of packing up the entire family to follow him there, cramming the four of us into his tiny New York bachelor apartment with our baskets of dirty laundry and demands that he replace our dead batteries. It's an immediate blast of relief to walk in and have him here: He's already cut the grapes in half, put away the breakfast things, and emptied out the dishwasher. Danny is what my husband would be if I paid him $14 an hour.

"Danny, still work for you to stick around until 10 tonight to help me with the clothing swap?" I ask. "Cole is going to be working late, preparing for this hellish divorce that goes to trial Monday."

"Sure. I can put the kids to bed and then help with the food and cleanup if you like."

"You'll want to stay out of the living room while they're trying on clothes," I laugh. "It will be a whole football field of Spanx out there."

Danny sets out plates of grapes and cheese and animal crackers for the children, and Sam starts cheerfully biting the heads off his cheese sticks. Sam is going through a funny eating phase. Maybe it's not quite a phase, since this has been happening for over a year. Sam refuses to eat the "tails" off anything. In his view, the tail is the last little bit of any food—the last quarter-inch of carrot, the last bite of a french fry, the tip of his cheese stick. At the end of each meal, Sam's plate is littered with tiny nubs of uneaten food that must be thrown out immediately before he can leave the table.

While the kids are fed and then wiped down and diverted with Play-Doh, I load the washing machine with armloads of my new clothes. As I stuff in a size 4 blouse, my iPhone beeps to tell me someone I know has just updated their Facebook status.

I glance to see who it is, cursing the instinct that led every mom I know to join Facebook one week in November last year. We have all been members now just long enough to cyber-stalk three old high-school boyfriends apiece; fill out nine cyber-quizzes (I am Mary Anne, Marina is Ginger); and upload 2,000 baby pictures that, as it turns out, look remarkably similar to all of our friends' 2,000 baby pictures. I can keep up with my old lawyer friends in Manhattan if I want to, but of course they all stopped updating their own pages a year before I joined. Joining Facebook has turned out to be like getting a new pet or a plant: one more thing that needs to be tended just as you were wishing for one or two less.

I am only half-surprised to see it's Marina posting an update already. She has turned rapid-fire status updates into a form of performance art and her relationship with Twitter is, if I were to be honest about it, vastly more robust than her relationship with Bob. A stay-at-home graphic-designer-slash-mommy, Marina is a monument to living life artily—hammered-silver cuff bracelets and garments I am not permitted to call "kaftans" to her face.

"Marina Samuels is Free at last!" she has written. "Marriage finally over and I am ready to rage. Party in the backseat of my Prius? I have a sitter who HAS NO CURFEW. (And he's my ex-husband!) Guys aged 18-25 especially urged to apply! Arooooooooah."

Now, on one hand this is classic Marina. Especially the poorly spelled wolf call at the end. We've known her since she met Bob, Cole's best friend at law school, and she's always had trouble letting even a single thought gestate for a while on the inside. But I have also been an attorney married to a divorce attorney long enough to know that advertising one's newfound sexual availability on Facebook only hours after the breakup of one's marriage isn't a smart opening salvo in a divorce proceeding. Especially in a small college town where one's husband teaches in the law school and half his students are your Facebook friends.

I fire off an e-mail to her Facebook account: "Yo, lunatic," I write. "Maybe hold off on the whole offering sex to strangers on the internet thing? If I were newly single after 8 years I'd be booking myself in for a week at the spa, not propositioning minors online. Seriously. Not a great time to play Melrose Place. I have no idea if this divorce is for real, or why you think you need a lawyer but really you need to be smart, Marina."

Then, thinking fast about the things I have learned over the years from Cole, I type out some quick instructions.

Welcome to Your First Night of Divorce
1.Don't promise sex to anonymous online strangers!
2.Don't have sex with anonymous strangers online!
3.Retain possession of the house. No matter what you do, if you let him have the house tonight you will spend years in court fighting to get back in.
4.Hang onto the kids. If you let him have the kids while you are out having sex with strangers tonight, you will spend years in court fighting to see your kids.
5. Hide the jewelry.
6. Figure out to a decimal point what's in your bank accounts and IRAs.
7. Male escorts = cheaper + more discreet. But as you are now likely aware after eight years of marriage, sex in general is largely overrated.

I hit send and toss up a silent ecumenical prayer that Marina doesn't find a way to make this divorce as dramatic as her wedding, the birth of her children, or her flirtation with a gluten-free diet last August. Then I run upstairs to track down dry cleaning bags for my enviable new collection of size 4 sportswear.

On my way downstairs from giving the kids good-night kisses before Danny finishes up their bedtime stories, my phone beeps again. Marina has just tweeted Bob came by to pick up more clean boxers. Um. Why?? I shake my head as I turn into the kitchen to set out the last of the appetizers for the clothing-swap. (Alice Waters gougeres. Dates stuffed with almonds and goat cheese. Goat cheese mousse in cucumber boats. And tiny shot glasses of ahi tuna gazpacho.) All of my food-related memories from when my sister and I were growing up in the 1970s are tangled up in acres of frozen plastic wrap and defrosting lasagnas sweating on the counter. I try to conjure a memory of my mother fussing, as I am, with matched sprigs of cilantro garnish, but I can't even seem to pull up a memory of my mother in the kitchen. The part of my brain that receives a 24-hour live newsfeed of what my mom would be thinking at any given moment cannot be silenced. If she were watching me now, she'd be thinking: I can't believe my grown daughter, the corporate attorney, is doing artisanal food crafting for a bunch of small-town TumbleBus moms.

I should explain that, five years later, my mother is still not yet fully recovered from the delivery of my first child. I had thought the painkillers would help get her through the tough first weeks and the 12-week paid maternity leave my law firm granted would help her adjust. In hindsight, it was probably my decision to extend that maternity leave to six months, then nine, and then to five years and counting, that has done things to her health that have rendered her almost totally uninsurable.

You see, my mother, Frances Miller-Kline, graduated from Harvard Law School back in the days when there were only seven women in the entire class and, to hear her tell it, not a single women's bathroom to be found in the entire 02138 zip code. As such and in light of the fact that—again, to hear her tell it—she took a seven-hour break in the middle of trying a felony-murder case to give birth to me, then put on the same suit and argued her closing to a rapt jury the next morning, she sees every minute I have not spent at my own firm as an affront to the whole women's movement.

She named her new dog Hillary. It's a boy.

Because of Frances' ability to monetize virtually every human feeling and experience, she is an exceptionally good federal trial-court judge today. But as a consequence of that worldview, I have become like a taxi to her, its meter forever running backward to represent my ever-declining net worth. As I sprinkle chopped chives over small cucumber boats, I find myself wondering if there is a single thing about my daily life that my mother would recognize.

******

Readers, I need to know the worst thing that could happen at a clothing swap and the worst way to find out your husband is cheating with one of his law students. Send mail to me at savingface.slate@gmail.com or post to the Facebook page. I am having way too much fun on the Facebook page. Way too much fun period. Thanks for the amazing suggestions and feedback.

Become a fan of Saving Face on Facebook and help Dahlia write the rest.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 3
Posted Monday, Sept. 14, 2009, at 4:52 PM ET

I stand in the hallway between the kitchen and my living room and feel a quick flush of party pride. The room is buzzing with talk and laughter, wineglasses are backlit by dozens of silver votive candles and blue bowls spill over with glass beads and stems of freesia. Thank you Martha Stewart Living, May 2008. Without you, I'd be all roses all the time. Props, as ever, go to Marina for the effortlessly hip playlist she's loaded onto my iPod. I have dutifully set it on repeat and forgotten about it, still unclear, even after her ninth explanation, what precisely is wrong with Dave Matthews.

If it weren't for the control tops and underwire and the growing mountain of discarded garments in the center of the room, the word elegant would describe this event perfectly. Guests offer up awestruck compliments as I drift around with fresh hors d'oeuvres and wine.

Jessica Kantor, whose son Noah is Sam's best friend—Robin to his Batman—takes a gougere. "You've outdone yourself yet again, Erica," she says, shaking her head. "If it were me, this would be hot dogs in blankets and wine coolers in the yard."

"My God, Erica, the dates stuffed with goat cheese are heaven. Can I get the recipe?"

"I can't believe children even live in this house Erica. It's immaculate. Mine always looks like we've just been burgled."

I smile and offer yet more food, basking in the praise; dreading the inevitable moment of near-nakedness that will follow when I am forced to set down my appetizers. I am also making efforts to ignore Marina's half-hourly tweets, which have quickly become focused around her suspicion that Bob has a very young girlfriend. Dusting his pants for fingerprints, reads her latest, OMG I am CSI: Charlottesville!

All the clothes have been hung on temporary racks around the perimeter of the room. Sizes 0-2 are arrayed on the wall beside the kitchen, the 4s and 6s hang in front of the fireplace, the 8s and 10s go mostly ignored next to the staircase. Everything else is massed next to the front door, including a bag comprised of equal parts sweaters and cat fur, supplied by Josie Bennett, whom nobody wanted to invite again in the first place. Accessories, jewelry, and bags have been arranged on the couch in Cole's study. Shoes in their boxes are stacked outside on the screened-in porch. (If there is to be any outbreak of violence at this event, it will be over the shoes, and it's easier to hose down the blood spatters out there.)

The three dozen women here have sorted themselves not by dress size, however, but by vocation. The working moms arrive late and steaming like horses. They have dashed over straight from work, starving, and are here only to support the school. They haven't seen their children since breakfast and they will grab a suit and a designer purse and run. They are efficient but brutal in their judgments, unafraid to tell a colleague "that jacket's too tight, try this one instead."

The stay-at-home mommies arrive early and will stay late. They are so overjoyed at being allowed out and at eating foods not served in oblong wicker baskets, they seem to achieve some kind of contact high just walking into the room. They laugh loudly, sip their drinks slowly, try every appetizer three times, and devote more time to dressing one another than themselves.

To overcome their reluctance to try on anything but sweatpants and hoodies, the stay-at-home moms screen little movies for one another about the social possibilities for every garment: "Try on that blue sundress, Michelle."

"It's totally cute. But where would I wear it?"

"Are you kidding? It would be perfect for afternoon drinks at some great little restaurant with a deck at the Outer Banks."

The working moms talk about disasters with baby-sitters ("then Patti just announced she was leaving for Peru for two weeks, starting Monday ... ") and whose boss is least sympathetic to the occasional sick day or begging out of a meeting to get the kids their flu shots. I can swear I overhear a couple of the stay-at-homes talk about the chicken coops they've built from recycled 18^th-century wine barrels in their backyards (Thank you Martha Stewart Living, May 2009!) and how much Atticus and Phineas have benefited chiropractically from sleeping in a Guatemalan hammock instead of a toddler bed.

My efforts to break into the professional parent circuit have been hampered by my innate aversion to boards, committee work, and organizational meetings. Since joining the PTO of Sam's school, I've been astonished by how many hundreds of e-mails it takes to pick a caterer or how many dozen coffee meetings it takes to set a menu. I have, additionally, learned that it is not wise to shout "hire an intern" in the midst of such discussions, and that invariably, after the thousandth phone call and the hundredth meeting, the committee chairwoman will ultimately announce a menu entirely of her own choosing that will be catered by her best friend.

In the six years since we left New York, I have consistently joined the wrong organic farm shares and signed my kids up for the wrong rhythmic dance classes. So I like to think of myself as part of the working moms group, a recovering Manhattan lawyer with plans to return to that hectic life, as soon as either Ellie or I reach some milestone I am not quite able to identify at this instant. I also feel that I ought to be grandfathered into this coterie of professionals, having contributed many, if not most, of the best suits to these events over the years. As I hover around the perimeter of their conversation with my Viognier and gazpacho shooters, the women offer up little conversational olive branches that hint at my past life as one of them.

"Any luck with the job search, Erica?" asks Kellyanne Miller, who teaches trusts and estates at the law school. Unlike the other women, who try on clothes rapidly and furtively, Kellyanne is striding around the room in a thong and push-up bra, with no qualms about asking questions while narrowly avoiding poking your eye out with an errant breast.

"Oh, you know, I am talking to a few firms in town, but I'm still not sure Ellie's ready for me to go full time."

"You're still working remotely for your old firm in New York, right?"

"No, not anymore—they've been laying people off left and right."

"What about the volunteer work with Legal Aid?" asks Stacy Cavanaugh-Taylor, a pediatrician whose son Jason is the class biter. "They just loved you over there. They think you and Cole are like the Brad and Angelina of the legal services world."

"You know, Ellie's only in preschool three days a week right now," I say, "and Cole has gotten so crazy busy with this big case going to trial. We'll get back to it next year for sure." I don't know how to explain that Cole has taken to small-town law firm life—consisting largely of old men in bow ties and also of young men in bow-ties—like a fish to water. Me, I feel like my blood slows to a crawl just walking into his sleepy law offices downtown. I keep waiting for the old rush of adrenaline, ambition, or competition to kick back in. But I can't even muster the energy to fight for a used Coach handbag anymore. You know that "look right, look left" speech they gave first-year law students? The speech Erwin Griswold made famous at Harvard, repeated verbatim in the movie, The Paperchase?: "Look to the right of you, look to the left of you. One of you isn't going to be here by the end of the year." The real speech should go "Look at the woman to the right of you and the woman to the left of you. One of them is going to drop out to have kids and then spend years having to claw her way back in."

Stacy nods sympathetically, flicking rapidly through blouses. "You shouldn't rush back to work until you're ready. Once you go back, you're really going to be stuck there, especially in this economy. You've got the perfect setup," she grins. "You're the stay-at-home mom who goes out!" Ladies laugh.

The truth is, I don't know what happens to the hours I am supposed to be spending seeking out contract work or volunteering or setting up informational interviews. I do feel like I'm out looking for work every week, but nobody seems to realize it's a full-time job.

I am trying to feign enthusiasm for a pair of gray harem pants when I notice a suit that looks frighteningly familiar. Approaching it casually from a diagonal, my heart stops when I realize that it is, in fact, my own black Armani: my Wonder Woman suit. This is the suit my mother purchased for me when I graduated from law school. I wore it for her investiture as a federal judge. I wore it for make-or-break meetings with critical clients, for all Come-to-Jesus meetings and to settlement conferences. In my mind this black suit comes with its own lance, snorting charger, and plumed metal helmet.

It is not, under any set of facts, something I would donate to a clothing swap.

Just as I am close enough to lay hands on it, Stacy Cavanaugh-Taylor grabs my suit and whoops. "Oh my God is this a real Armani?" Several heads turn and someone inspects the label and confirms that it is.

"Oh, that's the official law school Ball Buster suit," says Kellyanne, with whom the suit apparently arrived. "Everyone's done a lap in that suit. Try it on," she urges. "You'll feel like Iron Man."

Now would be the proper time for me to point out that the Iron Man suit, in fact, belongs to me, but I am still busy trying to understand how it made its way here today. I am absolutely certain I never loaned it to anybody. This suit is more important to me than my wedding dress. I try to recall where I last saw it. I was already pregnant with Sam when we moved back to Charlottesville. I would have probably hung it up in the basement with the rest of my old work clothes. Did I wear it before I got pregnant again? Had I moved it upstairs when I put away my maternity clothes the second time?

Was it hanging in my guest room? Did someone just take it? Could Cole have loaned it to someone at the law school without asking me? Stacy is buttoning the jacket, and it looks fantastic. She looks like she could cure childhood lymphoma in this suit or negotiate peace in Iraq. I just can't figure out how to tell her that the suit is mine, that I have no idea how many years ago I misplaced it, and that even though it is two sizes too small for me and I have no place to wear it, I want it back. Not when she'll probably cure childhood lymphoma in it.

"It's perfect on you," Kellyanne is grinning. "Black slingbacks, small silver earrings. It was made for you."

"I love it!" Jessica enthuses.

Kellyanne is painstakingly filling us in on the suit's recent biography. As it's been passed around among the women on the law faculty, its career achievements have been truly remarkable. The suit's been worn to oral argument at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, to a climate change summit in Milan, and to a (successful) interview for a Justice Department position with the Obama White House. I am now beyond certain that I cannot ask for my suit back without looking completely absurd. Anyone wondering what's happened to my spectacular legal career over the past five years need look no further: My suit's been having it.

******

OK, I now love the feedback from the Saving Face Facebook page more than I love eating. Keep the posts and the e-mails coming!! (Remember, your name will be used unless you specify otherwise.) For the next chapter I need to hear: 1) the cutest thing your 5-year-old ever said to you and 2) what happened when you split up with your ex and tried to move the kids out of state. Send mail to savingface.slate@gmail.com. Thanks!

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 4
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2009, at 6:14 PM ET

Nobody will ever tell you, when you first have babies, how intimately connected your acts of intimacy become to the running times of Pixar movies. Back in the days of Saturday morning cartoons, you could probably just lock the bedroom door and leave the kids in the company of Scooby-Doo for a few hours. But in the DVD era, such things cannot be left to chance. As I listen to Cole rushing the children down the stairs this morning, then to the rattle of plastic in the kitchen as he their prepares bottles and sippy cups, I can only imagine his silent cursing and shuffling as he waits through the FBI anti-piracy warnings. And coming attractions. When he huffs his way back upstairs and closes the bedroom door, I need only raise an eyebrow. His response, "Toy Story, running time 81 minutes" is what passes for foreplay these days.

We're just getting round to the next-to-last button on my pajamas when his phone rings. "Ignore it," I beg, but he's already rolling toward the nightstand. "What's up Kayne?" he's saying. "No, no, we had to get up early anyway to milk the children." He's sitting on the edge of the bed, fumbling for pajama bottoms. I reach for the remote.

Cole is up to his eyes right now in a massive relocation case. His client has basically shared physical custody of their children with his ex-wife without incident for two years, but now the mother wants to leave the state and take their three boys with her. Move cases are always heartbreaking because there's no room to compromise. This one is particularly awful because the mom wants to move back to Ohio to be with her recently rediscovered high-school sweetheart, and Cole's client is pretty sure he's about to go from having his kids 40 percent of the time to seeing them for a few weeks in the summers and at Christmas. The case is about to go to trial, which is rare, and now a judge is basically going to hear all sorts of nitpicky evidence about why mom wants to move and how the move will be so great for the kids, how much better the schools are in Ohio, and then, after taking all that into consideration, she will make the formal legal decision to obliterate either their mom's future dreams or their dad's. In family law, which is all about the Solomonic splitting of babies, out-of-state-move cases are cage-match-style winner-takes-all. Cole's client is freaking out as the trial approaches. I know this because right now I can hear his shouting over Real Housewives.

People are always sort of surprised to learn that there's just not a lot of "law" in family law. You can count the important Supreme Court family law cases on Ellie's fingers and toes; the systematic dismantling of families is left instead to a stewpot of state statutes, judicial intuitions, dueling "expert" reports, and vague, conflicting narratives about what's in the "best interest of the child." Cole began his legal career as a prosecutor, and he got very, very good at domestic violence cases. His mastery of restraining orders and complex custody arrangements made him a natural for matrimonial law after we moved back here to have kids. He's fallen hard for Kayne—as he does with all his clients—and he's been killing himself to build a case around the idea that Kayne's wife is a selfish, vindictive layabout who wants to move away mostly to have sex with some guy in Ohio but also to thwart his relationship with his kids.

As is often the case with a custody dispute, allegations of child abuse, adultery, and sex acts with the family bunny have become tangled up in counter-claims that mom skips T-ball practice to take the kids to piano lessons and that dad recklessly took one of the boys to a new barber before checking with mom.

Cole hangs up the phone and comes over to my side of the bed to kiss me on the nose. That's also foreplay—for the apology, which arrives immediately after the kiss. "I'm sorry sweetheart, I have to go into the office and go over Kayne's trial testimony again. His head's about to blow, which will pretty much prove conclusively that he's the abusive-rage-a-holic Ana's making him out to be."

"I understand. Go ahead, honey. Call if you're going to miss dinner," I say, wondering how to fill a whole Saturday without Cole's crackling energy. He's the one who leaps out of bed on the weekends, full of plans for farmers markets and petting zoos and museums. If weekends were left to me, I'd probably sort the kids' toy bins. With 42 minutes left in Toy Story, I run a bath, wondering what we can do to fill the day that looms ahead.

As I rest my phone on the bathroom counter in case Cole calls, I catch Marina's latest mad tweet, Rilke! He's quoting Rilke in the margins of student papers now?? Since when has he read Rilke?

I need to call and invite her to come out with us today. She needs to be out of that house.

The minute I settle myself into our claw-foot tub, Sam and Ellie are peering at me over the side, hopping around, begging to be let in. For Ellie this represents one of those not-to-be-missed opportunities to pry her out of the sparkly pink tutu. So out go the scented candles, in go the Power Rangers Bubbles; off come the sweaty pajamas and the tutu, and we're booked in for 40 minutes of Death Match IV: Little Mermaid Meets Wolverine.

"Momma," says Sam, crafting a little beard of soap bubbles for me, while Ellie dances Little Mermaid around the rim of the tub, "Are clowns people?"

"Yes, Sammy."

Sam looks relieved and then adds some bubbles to the top of my head and sighs, "Momma, I love you so much."

"I love you, too, Sammy-bear." I kiss him and tickle Ellie.

"Mom," Sam looks worried again. "Do you think Dad knows how much you and I love each other?"

"I think he's OK with it."

The phone starts to ring and I climb halfway out to reach for it, dripping bubbles. It's not Cole.

"Erica, I have the smoking gun!" shouts Marina. "The bastard is totally screwing around on me."

"Marina," I sigh, wishing I had made the time to call her back last night after the party. "I already know that because you are totally ignoring all of my advice and tweeting your own nervous breakdown."

"No, I mean it this time. He is totally having an affair and his whole I'm-bored-stay-friends-amicable-separation line was just bullshit. Bob has actually left me for one of his students!"

"What did you find?" I climb out of the tub and grab a towel.

"Last night I started looking at all the Facebook pages of every one of his students this term and at around 4 o'clock this morning I found this 2-L, Mandy, who had posted a picture of herself at some party with her arms around a guy who is definitely Bob. His head is chopped off in the photo but I can tell from the watch that he has his arm around some little hair-sprayed tramp who's got one hand on his butt and the other around a goddamn green apple-tini."

"When did you last talk to him honey?" I ask, trying to towel-dry my hair and hold the phone at the same time.

"I'm not talking to him! Are you kidding? If he thinks he's coming anywhere near me or my house or my children, he's out of his freaking mind."

"Marina, you're going to have to let him see the kids! He hasn't done anything to them."

"Hasn't done any ... are you insane, Erica? He has destroyed our family and our home for some floozy, and you're saying I have to let him see my children? No, I don't think so."

"Has he called and asked to see them since he left yesterday?" I ask.

"No! Why would he do that when he probably had to get to a keg-suck, then hear a band and then have crazy monkey sex with someone who is no doubt working her way through law school as a pole-dancer?" Her call waiting starts to go so "monkey sex" comes out "unkey-ex," but I get the idea.

"Don't you need to get the other line, Marina?"

"No. It's probably Bob."

I tell her that she needs to calm down and to bring the kids over to play. She tells me she has too much to do but promises to call this afternoon and maybe come over for dinner. The idea of Marina having too much to do because she's at home rooting through Bob's old student papers and following an imaginary trail of crazy Facebook crumbs terrifies me. Ridiculous as it may sound, the best way to initiate a divorce is dispassionately, the way you'd clip your toenails. I dash into the bedroom to get my laptop so I can watch Sam and Ellie splash while I quickly type out a second installment of "Welcome to Your Divorce"

Welcome to Your Second Night of Divorce

Night two is when the temptation to do something inexpressibly stupid kicks in. Avoid it. Instead of looking into the purchase of firearms or setting a match to your spouse's high school trophies, busy yourself instead with more useful endeavors, such as protecting yourself from being screwed. To that end, devote your evening to some or all of the following constructive activities:
1. Go through every scrap of your financial information and make copies of all of the following: tax returns, profit and loss statements, loan applications, bank statements, statements of personal net worth, credit card statements, retirement account statements, etc. These documents can be impossible to get when things get ugly, so grab 'em now while the grabbing is good! Same goes for cell phone records. You'd be surprised how much good stuff you'll find in a cell phone record.
2. Rummage through any old love letters between you and your spouse, with an eye toward anything that looks or smells like a promise about marital assets. We're looking for birthday or Valentine's Day cards filled with the usual sentiments like "I'll always love you and take care of you," and "everything that is mine is yours, especially the wide screen TV," etc. Who knows whether such evidence will be enough for a court to make any decisions about property rights, but they can't hurt, and they are excellent leverage in settlement negotiations.
3. TAKE THE HARD DRIVE!!!! Take it. Even if you plan to remain in the house, I assure you that your spouse is right now on the way over to get the computer if there's any incriminating information on it. And there is always incriminating information in it, even if it has nothing to do with your divorce. Don't just hide it. Take the time to remove the entire hard drive and have it analyzed by a professional. Financial info, dirty e-mails, sordid Web browsing history—all of this is on your hard drive, waiting to be discovered. By you.

I check Marina's Facebook page, where she has been posting her moment-by-moment forensic investigation into Bob's extracurricular activities with his students. She has already pasted my advice from last night in its entirety, so I just post today's installment above it. For one thing, Marina's more likely to take legal advice from me on Facebook than she is in person. But she also has 600 Facebook friends. If the statistics are accurate, that means that at least 300 of them could use a little divorce advice, too.

***

I still need to hear from folks who were involved in relocation cases from one state to another. Also I need stories about the strangest person you have met on Facebook. Thank you! Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 5
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009, at 6:17 PM ET

It's Tuesday afternoon and Dr. Simon, our regular pediatrician, is out with the flu. Dr. Evelyn Grassi, new to the practice, is checking out Ellie's ears. We've never seen her before, and she is very, very young. Dr. Grassi has plugged Ellie into some headphones that are chirping, woofing, and mooing by turn; Ellie sits kicking the examining table with her heels, cocking her head from side to side to listen.

Dr. Grassi has already briskly examined Ellie's sight and her hand-eye coordination. She has wordlessly tested her reflexes and her reaction times. The doctor has tried unsuccessfully to elicit even a "mama" or "dada" from my daughter (I assure her that Ellie has at least those words, although she doles them out only grudgingly), and she is starting to look annoyed, as though Ellie and I are here to test her. Ellie, having had enough of the headphones and the little hammers and the age-appropriate stacking blocks starts to kick the table even harder with the backs of her feet.

"Well there is nothing developmentally wrong with her," concludes Dr. Grassi, almost shouting to be heard over the thumping. "She's met all her milestones and is well within the normal range for every physical marker as well." The nagging little voice inside my head that's been certain my daughter has something terribly wrong with her finally falls mute. Of course there's nothing wrong! Ellie is, if anything, more curious, more animated, and more cheerful than Sam was at this age. She just doesn't talk.

"So, why do you think she isn't talking?" I ask Dr. Grassi, smiling as Ellie continues to bang, bang, bang on the table with her green frog boots. The doctor is making a few final notes in a chart and rubbing her left temple. I glance down at her hands. No wedding rings.

She looks up at me accusingly and blurts, "You know, you have to talk to them constantly or they won't learn." In case she was less than clear, she adds: "Do you talk to her at all?"

My eyes fly open. Surely this doctor isn't suggesting it's my fault Ellie doesn't speak. "Of course I talk to her. I talk to her all the time." I falter. Do I look like the kind of parent who doesn't speak to her children?

I am always doubly careful about how I dress when I take the children in for check-ups. I want it to be clear that we are careful, responsible parents. To my usual uniform of Modified Office Casual blue button-down and khakis, I've added a jaunty gold scarf and navy blazer. My dark hair is in a low ponytail. True, my lip gloss has rubbed off, but I think I look coolly professional; a prettyish, thirtysomething woman with sensible places to be. I realize suddenly that Dr. Grassi must somehow believe that I am the kind of mother who might have placed her daughter in a child-care situation where nobody speaks to her. What? Because I'm not wearing velvet yoga pants and matching hoodie, I'm a neglectful workaholic?

When I was pregnant with Sam, I never thought I'd take more than the 12 weeks of maternity leave I'd been offered. After he was born, Sam was fussy and sleepless and while I loved him from the first second they draped him across me, I would frequently find myself staring at him, wondering what it was he wanted from me and why I'd yoked myself to this complete stranger, no questions asked. I wondered every day what he saw in me and whether it would last.

It wasn't until he was about three weeks old and Cole and I started looking at day care centers that I started to panic. I remember taking him to a little university day care, recommended by everyone in town and reluctantly handing him to one of the workers there, a sort of human shelving unit comprised of jutting chin, breasts, and hips into which she promptly tucked my sleeping son. Suddenly he looked like any old baby.

I remember looking at the tiny plastic bottles of expressed milk in his diaper bag, with the blank spaces so you could Sharpie in the name "Sam," and I remember thinking that growing up, my sister and I had labels on every coat, sock, and T-shirt we owned. Sometimes I felt like Frances compulsively labeled our things just so she'd recall our names. And I remember seeing, in that instant, all the ways in which my son, who would arrive here every morning at 7:30 and be picked up at 6, would soon belong to this place and to these people, and even get used to it and that I would become the other woman.

And because it was cheaper to live here than in New York, and because we could basically make it on Cole's salary, I begged a few more weeks off, unpaid, and waited to get over it. Do I talk to my children? I think so. Do I sing educational songs and finger paint and sit on the floor with flashcards? I don't know. Not enough, I suppose. I have always seen my job as principally being to clean up as quickly as they can dump things out. I have, through sheer neglect, evidently made my daughter stupid.

I need Marina. Mumbling something to the receptionist as I flee the doctor's office with Ellie in one hand and her tutu in the other, I head straight to her house. Marina is one of those intuitively wonderful moms who would just as soon play blackjack with educational flashcards as wave them before the blank eyes of a toddler. Her girls, 6 and 4, are always giving their stuffed animals makeovers or blowing bubbles or face painting or selling brownies to the neighbors. They plant sunflowers. They wear two different colored sneakers.

When she opens the door, Marina looks even worse than her compulsive tweeting would suggest. "What took you so long?" she grouses, as she stomps into the kitchen. She's wearing a man's navy blue T-shirt (Bob's?), loose jeans, and her hair looks like it hasn't seen the right side of a conditioning spray for days. I suddenly realize that I am a bitch. Marina had made the hourly tweeting of her husband's infidelity sound so breezy and fun, I forgot to notice she was coming unglued. She drops a quick kiss on Ellie's head then steps in for a proper hug. I hold her for a very long time and she stands there, motionless. "I'm sorry," I say into her hair, which smells really terrible.

"Let's have tea," she says, pulling away with a smile. I make her sit down, then I fill up the kettle, pull down two mugs, and retrieve a tin of white cucumber tea. There's a half-eaten box of crackers on the kitchen table, which may represent Marina's breakfast, lunch, or both. I realize that now is not the time to unburden about Dr. Grassi's terrorist-style bedside manner. Marina sets Ellie up with an old Elmo jack-in-the-box from a basket by the back door. Then she rests her head on the table and looks up at me.

"Bob came by today. He took the girls to school. He'll bring them home later."

"Did you talk to him?"

"No, I sent the girls downstairs then hid in the bedroom until I saw his car pull away."

"Did you even talk to him to arrange the visit today?"

"No, his mom called and arranged it. He's staying at his brother's. Or I guess that's his cover story since he can't exactly move in with a second-year law student. Oh and now his mom wants the girls for a visit after school tomorrow. Somehow, the minute you announce you're getting a divorce, everyone's clamoring to get your kids away from you." It doesn't read bitter when she tweets this stuff.

I stir my tea and offer Ellie a cracker. She shakes her head. "Did you call the lawyer Cole recommended?"

"Not yet," she sighs. "It seems like the road of no return. Like the shortest distance between being here and being all alone for the rest of my life. While Bob, after a suitable interval, will marry his student and surround himself with all of our friends and small collectibles."

I put down my spoon. I never thought of Marina as lonely. She always has some new friend or other, a new sculptor in town or a Pilates instructor or the owner of a fabulous new boutique in Belmont. If anything, it always seemed to me that Bob was the lonely one in their marriage. But I guess he has his students, and his colleagues, and his family right now. Whereas Marina just has a lot of women with toned arms she could call, but won't. Her parents are in Seattle and her employer is a graphic design company in San Francisco. For the first time in all the years I have known her, Marina looks completely shipwrecked. I lay my hand over hers.

"Anyhow," she smiles, trying to slough off the mood. "I don't need a lawyer. I have you. Your 'Welcome to Your Divorce' posts are great, Erica. Everyone is sending them around you know. I even have a friend who tweeted "Take the Hard Drive" late last night. It nearly caused a Twitter riot. I had four new people friend me last night just for you."

"Yikes Marina," I yelp. "I'm not allowed to be doling out legal advice on the Internet! It was just me goofing around."

"Well, Charlotte Stern from your law school class doesn't think it's all that goofy. She friended me last night when she heard you were giving funny divorce tips. I guess that surgeon she married got caught with his scrubs down again and she told me your advice was the smartest thing she's heard anywhere. And that includes her high-priced divorce lawyer."

Charlotte Stern. She graduated No. 3 in our class and went on to clerk at the 4^th Circuit and then at the Supreme Court. She taught law at Harvard for a while before she married the handsome surgeon. She kind of vanished after that. Charlotte's the smartest woman I've ever met. And she's reading my goofy divorce advice? I wonder whether Charlotte friended me after she read my posts and so I sneak a look at my iPhone to see whether I have any new friend requests. I do!

"If I'm going to keep writing those silly divorce things for you, I need to put up a big old disclaimer that it does not constitute legal advice," I say, thinking out loud. Ellie is starting to fuss now, and I try to tempt her with another cracker.

"Well it constitutes legal advice to me," Marina says firmly. "I did everything you told me to do, including the hard drive, and I am eagerly awaiting your next directive."

"Honey, you need to get a real lawyer. If you're serious about doing this the hard way, the sooner you do this, the better. And I need to go get my son."

I kiss Marina and make her promise to take a shower. Then I collect my bag, my daughter, a cheese stick for my son, and go.

Welcome to Your Fifth Night of Divorce

HUMORLESS DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A LICENSED MATRIMONIAL LAWYER AND HAVE NEVER WORKED ON A DIVORCE CASE. I HAVE SOME EXPERIENCE IN THIS ARENA AND SOME OPINIONS, TOO! TO BE CLEAR: I AM NOT OFFERING LEGAL ADVICE REGARDING YOUR SPECIFIC CASE. MATRIMONIAL LAW DIFFERS FROM STATE TO STATE. TO FIND OUT THE EXACT LAW IN YOUR JURISDICTION, PLEASE CONTACT A MATRIMONIAL ATTORNEY. THIS ADVICE IS STRICTLY FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES.

And now, back to the good stuff!

So you want to protect yourself and your kids. And your husband has been the primary breadwinner (as in, he gets paid to work all day and you don't). Your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make like a bank robber and grab all the money and run. That's because his mission in the coming days will be to hide, divert, and spend anything he possibly can to keep it away from you. If you have been the stay-at-home mommy, now's as good a time as any to raid the family piggy banks and open new accounts to make sure you have enough money to see you through the early divorce proceedings. Soon enough you'll get your temporary support order. But for now, take what's yours. You've totally earned it. Online transfers will work, a little password changing may be in order to keep joint accounts out of play. Oh, and if you need to take a little teensy cash advance on all of your credit cards, just do it.

Tonight's activities also include locking down your valuables. This might include fancy jewelry, his grandma's jewelry that he gave you, your artwork, the coin collections, photo albums, Pink Floyd albums, safe-deposit-box keys, etc. These things needn't be worth millions to be of value to you. Just be aware that they might be useful in gaining some leverage in negotiations (particularly if something is of sentimental value to him: hel-lo autographed hockey stick!) and might also be liquidated in an emergency if cash is ever low.

Now let's talk about you. Yes you. Have you looked in the mirror lately? Do you look like someone's backed a garbage truck over you? Look at your hair! Is it sticking up? Look at your boobs! Are they hanging down? Get in the shower. Blow-dry your hair (use product). Now call a girlfriend. Go out for coffee. (Just make sure you've changed all the locks at home first.)

***

Who wants to name Erica's upcoming divorce for women blog? Punning encouraged!! Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 6
Posted Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009, at 9:49 PM ET

How Marina has persuaded me to join her on this stakeout is almost not worth discussing. Once I realized Tuesday that she needed a lot more moral support than I was giving, I tried everything in my repertoire from manicures to long lunches. But she is completely obsessed with Mandy, Bob's new girlfriend, and having tried unsuccessfully to redirect her attention, I am going with the only other child-rearing technique I know: indulging her.

We are camped out at the University of Virginia law school on a sunny Friday, moments before the noontime crush, hoping to catch a glimpse of Amanda Matthews, aka "Quid Pro Ho." Marina, having conducted rather exhaustive (and possibly illegal) research, found out that the girl has an antitrust class that gets out at 12:30, and so we are standing in the hallway directly across from the classroom, waiting for class to let out.

"What are we going to do when we see her?" I hiss, stating the question that's been plaguing this plan from the start.

Marina, who has dressed for the occasion in a tailored black suit (think Sue Ellen Ewing at a funeral) and high-heeled black pumps, looks at me over the tops of her enormous sunglasses. "Maybe slap her. Maybe hug her. Maybe dump a bag of Bob's dirty socks on the floor at her feet and tell her she'd better get used to picking them up because Bob wouldn't know a laundry hamper if he got hit in the back of the head with one."

"We're just going to get a look at her and go, right?" I fret. The navy skirt I found at the back of my closet doesn't quite button, and the safety pin I've fastened it with is starting to dig into my back. Marina thought it would be a good idea to dress up like police detectives for the investigation. Of course, Marina thinks it's a good idea to wear a costume to her mammogram. "You're not going to confront her or start anything?"

"I just want to see what kind of woman takes a man away from his home and his children."

The classroom door narrowly misses the side of my head as it swings open and students pour into the hallway, weighted down by books and computer bags. Marina peers at the women as they walk by in noisy groups. Suddenly she wrenches off her sunglasses and starts waggling her eyebrows at me like Groucho Marx. Two girls are walking out of the classroom together, both petite brunettes with bouncing Southern hair and who both look remarkably like the woman in the photo Marina has pulled off Facebook.

"Which one?" I mouth to Marina, as they approach.

"What?" Marina mouths back.

"Which one is Quid Pro Ho?" I mouth, louder.

"What?" snaps Marina.

The two women have now passed us and crossed the hallway into a classroom directly opposite. As the door closes behind them, Marina hisses, "Well, that was useless, why did you have to distract me like that, Erica?"

"I couldn't figure out which one was her!"

"The trampy one," she huffs and stalks across the hall to peer into the classroom.

Whatever class is about to start in there attracts an awful lot of females because the hallway is suddenly full of young women jostling to get inside. Several have to pass Marina, who is preventing anyone from entering because she is still peering through the window.

A flustered girl with a pile of curly black hair comes to a screeching stop in front of the door to the classroom. "Are you here for the brown bag lunch on work-family balance?" she asks. "Lisa, the 2-L who set it up, got swine flu. I told her I would be the moderator, but I have no idea who the panelists are supposed to be."

I am just about to tell her that we are not there for the lunch and were indeed just leaving, but Marina cuts me off with a "Yes, yes we are. I am Helen Van Patterson-Patton, and I was invited to be on today's panel because of my superlative work in the work-family-balance field."

"Oh, thank God," sighs the girl, shepherding Marina quickly into the classroom. "I'm Lally Singh. I'm a 3-L." She stops and looks questioningly at me. "Are you a panelist too?" she asks.

Just as I am about to say no, Marina says that of course I'm on the panel and that I am a very accomplished attorney and an alumna to boot, and with that Marina sweeps into the room (think Sue Ellen Ewing at a coronation ball) and starts picking her way down the stairs to the front of the classroom where a table has been set up in front of the blackboard. There are four chairs set up behind the table, three of which are already occupied by women with some ostensible expertise in both work and families. Marina sweeps into the fourth chair, leaving both Lally and me standing on either side of the table.

"Somehow I thought there were only three panelists today," says Lally, brightly, "but I guess five panelists would be even better than three, right? So let's just pull up some extra chairs and get started." Someone pulls two more chairs to the front of the classroom and I sit gingerly on the edge of mine, wondering whether I should save Marina a lot of money in divorce-lawyer fees by strangling her on the way home.

Lally manages to get the roomful of chattering women (and three earnest young men with wedding rings) to quiet down by standing and clearing her throat. A woman with an infant in a Baby Bjorn stands at the back of the room, trying uselessly to quiet the baby. Her colleagues smile uneasily at her, probably wishing she would just leave so they could get some useful advice on blending work and children.

"Hey, everyone. Welcome to this panel put on by Virginia Law Women on balancing careers and families. Please sign in on the sheets in the back if you haven't already done so. I'm so happy to see that so many of you are interested in this issue, although I can't help but wish a few more guys were worrying about this stuff so we don't have to." Polite laughter. "Anyhow, as many of you know, Lisa Hunter, who set up this event, has swine flu, and so I am going to be a sort of laissez-faire moderator in her place and let the panelists mainly just speak for themselves. Then I will ask them a few questions and then leave lots of time for your questions at the end. I am going to start by asking each panelist to tell us who she is, what kind of law she practices, and what her family is like. Why don't we begin with you, er, Helen?"

My heart is still hammering as I try to decide how to play this. Unlike Marina, who is right now telling these rapt women that her name is Helen Van Patterson-Patton, I can't possibly vamp my way through this thing. I hear Marina spinning a Danielle Steele novel into narrative gold as she invents Helen's astonishing legal résumé. She's already put Helen through a difficult childhood in a cruel Boston orphanage, then educational triumph at Harvard and Yale and Oxford (where she evidently became great pals with both Prince Harry and Victoria Beckham), and she's now explaining that she and her family just recently relocated to Charlottesville when her husband bought a local winery which they have turned into a fabulous success. She is just starting to describe a party she hosted last month for John Grisham's latest best-seller when Lally stops her to ask what kind of law she specializes in.

Marina falters for only a second as her eyes, which have been scanning the crowd, finally settle on Mandy, who is jammed into a desk in the fourth row from the top. "Property," blurts Marina, glaring at Mandy, and I quickly chime in that Helen is an intellectual property lawyer who has taken some time off to raise her kids. And zinfandel grapes.

The woman to Helen's left quickly explains that her name is Olivia something and she teaches contracts here at the law school and that she is in her 60s now and her kids are grown, but that academia is a really great route for women trying to balance work and children. Next to Olivia sits Joanne, who now teaches legal research and writing part time at the law school and has a 7-month-old at home. Then, the woman sitting next to me says her name is Kate and she's a public defender who has just adopted a little girl with her partner and is trying to figure out the juggle in a big hurry. When my turn comes, I explain in as few syllables as possible that I went to law school here and used to work at a big firm in Manhattan but am taking time off to raise my two children, Sam and Ellie, who are 5 and 2.

Lally asks if each of us could talk a little bit about the challenges of trying to work full-time as an attorney and raise children, and since Kate is the only one who evidently does both, she answers for everyone. "It's tricky," she says. "Being a public defender, your client is almost always in jail up until trial or settlement, you're going to the worst parts of town to interview family, witnesses, etc., so your partner is freaking out for your safety. And motion practice happens at the drop of a hat. That said, you're a government employee, which means you aren't expected to stay after hours, and most of us leave for the day after our court cases are done. It's family-friendly as law jobs go, but it's a wonder any of us have families when you realize what kind of world you're bringing them into." The students laugh.

"That said," continues Kate, "it's really hard, because your clients expect and deserve your full attention, 100 percent of the time, but yet, someone has to be there when the baby is sick, or the sitter is late, or the washing machine has flooded the basement again. And that's always the woman." She smiles. "Even if you're both women."

"Most of us went through law school desperate to get A's in everything," she concludes. "I'm here to tell you that if you meet someone who's getting an A at her law firm and an A at home with the kids, she's either an android or taking really good drugs."

Everyone laughs, and I find myself tentatively interrupting her to add that large firms have certain expectations of the women who work there, and that this is measured exclusively in time served. "Look," I say, thinking of my mother. "If you only want to see your children for an hour at bedtime and brief parts of the weekend, you might want to consider just renting." More laughter. This is a nice crowd.

Olivia says that academia is really a gift to women with young families, and a student asks her whether it's better to try to get tenure before or after you have children. Someone else asks Kate whether her work is depressing and whether she takes it home with her. Joanne says the real problem is that women get so far behind when they drop out of the work force that they can never quite catch up. She cites the same dispiriting statistics about the numbers of women who graduate law school compared with the tiny fraction of women who rise to leadership positions at their law firms, on the bench, or in government.

Then someone in the audience asks Marina/Helen whether intellectual property is a good field for women with new families, and Marina, who still hasn't torn her eyes off Mandy, picks up her water bottle and sips delicately before she speaks: "The good thing about intellectual property," she says, "is that it's all about intellectuals. People who are smart and well-read and such. And they are, generally, I find, very respectful of other people's property. Which is to say that when something, or someone ..." and here she is light-sabering Mandy with her eyes, "takes something, or someone, that is, in a manner of speaking, an intellectual, from someone else ..." Only in a roomful of young women desperate to have both careers and children could this sort of soliloquy be listened to so earnestly. Marina is now talking about the ways in which some property cannot be understood in purely intellectual terms because that property has shared a life with someone for eight years. She is rising to her feet now, and it occurs to me that it would be extremely bad for both her and Bob if she brutally assaulted a student at Bob's place of work.

Thinking as quickly as I can, and wishing that I had one-tenth of Marina's gift for improvisational bullshit, I leap to my own feet, grab my phone from my bag and pretend to be receiving an urgent call. "What's that?" I holler. "Sam's school, you say?" I am talking so loud they can easily hear me in the back row. "He's what? His hair is caught in the paper towel dispenser?" "Yes, yes, I will be right there. Oh yes, definitely call the ambulance. Yes. ... OK. ... Yes." Seventy-five pairs of eyes stare blankly at me as I realize that I can probably wrap this up already. I place my phone in my purse, look up at the students, and then announce that this is the ultimate lesson in work-life balance.

"When the school calls," I intone gravely, "They. Always. Call. The. Mom." Then, relishing this newfound respect and attention, I turn to Marina and say, "Helen, my car's in the shop. Can you give me a ride?" And then she and I glide graciously up the stairs and exit stage left.

******

A few more questions for my readers: What is something your 6-year-old did or said to tell you they were struggling with a stressful situation? And also, what is the best or worst or most outrageous advice you received from a divorce attorney? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 1
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009, at 5:05 PM ET

You know that small secret shiver of delight you get whenever you hear about somebody you know splitting up?

I'm not getting it.

"But why?" I ask Marina, again, juggling phone, water bottle, and steering wheel. "Is he cheating?"

"No," she says.

"Are you cheating?" Like I wouldn't know. Marina hasn't participated in an unreported sexual act since 1989.

"No!"

"Is he stealing office supplies? Seducing his students? Plagiarizing arcane law review articles?" I strain to imagine poor Bob committing these or any other such wrongs. Aside from his invisible floor-length cape of boringness and a tendency to begin every sentence with the law professor's "So," Marina's husband is pedestrian in every way. He was, as far as I can tell, born 43 years old and has spent the rest of his life making middle age his primary place of residence. He's 36.

"He hasn't done anything," sighs Marina. "I haven't done anything. We just aren't happy. We haven't been happy in years. There he was, walking out the door just now, and I couldn't think of even a single reason he shouldn't."

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh," says Ellie from the backseat, where she is eating Cheerios from a small plastic bowl. As each one sticks to the wet pad of her finger, she brings it up close to her face and then politely greets it by name. "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh."

"How can you be unhappy?" I flick the left turn signal and work the car over into the passing lane, "You're happy, Marina! You're the happiest person I know!"

"We're bored. We're stuck. We never laugh. Other than the kids, we have nothing in common. We fight about stupid little things. We never have sex. I hate his hair." She stops, as if surprised at this last complaint.

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," says Ellie.

I can't believe this is happening. And yet even while I can't believe this is happening, I can't believe that most of my brain is still stuck on what right up until this minute I was calling a crisis of my own and what my brain apparently still considers one: Tonight I will be hosting a clothing swap to benefit my son's super-select kindergarten. All the mommies will bring their old clothes, put $100 in a kitty, then down buckets of white wine and "shop" from their friends' discards. For a few weeks after such an event, you walk around dressed exactly like your friend Gina or her best friend Amanda. Your husband wonders where the four weird backless sweaters came from. At which point it's time for a new clothing swap.

But this morning when I started culling from my old, out-of-style garments, everything was either a size 8 or 10. I hold Ellie, currently in the car seat behind me serenading her cereal, largely responsible, although it's been two years and I think that cover story is wearing a little thin. Being the bearer of the largest clothes at a clothing swap is like being the kid who brings sardines to the cafeteria. In a growing panic this morning, I rooted through my old boxes of pre-pregnancy clothes, but in the dark intimacy of the cedar closet, they had somehow grown together into a mass of indistinguishable navy suits.

So I spent this morning at the mall, hastily picking a creditable selection of mid- to high-range styles in a size 6. The plan was to pick Ellie up from preschool, get home, snip some price tags, launder them, and then hang them in old dry cleaning bags. I feel thin already.

"Erica. Do you think Cole would take me on as a client, or is that too weird?" Marina is asking, having just related that the most dramatic moment in her adult life involved Bob packing up a gym bag and sorting through mail before leaving the house.

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," coos Ellie.

"He'd never represent either of you," I say. "You're our best friends. I can ask him to recommend someone good. But are you really sure you're ready to talk to a divorce lawyer? Don't you want to think this over a bit? And you know you can do this without lawyering up right?"

The part of me that isn't thinking about perhaps spilling just a teensy drop of bleach to "gently age" the teeny little size 6 pencil skirt I've just purchased cannot believe what I am almost hearing here. How can Marina and Bob be calling it quits? They were in our wedding. We were in their wedding. Bob still has my Margaret Atwood books. Marina is my best friend. What will we do for New Year's? Who laughs eight years into a marriage? And who the hell has sex six months into a marriage? Oh God. Maybe I should have bought those cuffed white pants in a size 4?

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." Ellie smiles at me. And "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," I moan back.

"What?" asks Marina.

I need to get back to the mall and trade these clothes for 4s. And I need to do it right now. I still have time before Sam's school lets out. If I take Main Street and cut down to the bypass, I can make it.

"Hey, Marina, let me call you from home," I say. "I can hardly hear a word you're saying. Let me call you soon OK?" I hang up abruptly and wonder, yet again, when I became the sort of person who can't listen to my best friend's worst news in real time. I need time to process this. What I can do, as I process, is get all the way across town, swap 6s for 4s, and fetch my son from his school in 45 minutes, with a toddler in tow.

I glance at the clock on the dashboard and tell myself that I used to understand what 45 minutes really meant; I've even been known to cavalierly round it up to a full-on billable hour without a backward glance. Back in the days of depositions and client meetings, I could achieve brilliant outcomes in three-quarters of an hour. But 45 minutes in the car with a baby and no action plan is an eternity. It's become the time unit from hell.

My phone rings again as I cut sharply to the right and fiddle with the rearview mirror so I can shape my mouth into an O for Ellie. I check the number. It's Cole.

"Hey," I say, in my something-big-happened voice that has never once signaled to him that he should ask whether something big has happened.

"Hi, honey. Do you have Ellie yet?"

"Roger. Say hi to Daddy" I tell the baby.

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," says Ellie.

"Are you on your way to get Sam?" asks Cole.

"Um, yes. Right now. Guess what."

"What?" he asks, as I hear the other line start to beep. He's about to pull the rip cord. I talk quickly.

"Marina and Bob are getting a divorce!" I yelp.

"You're kidding! I have to go." And he hangs up.

I have 42 minutes before my 5-year-old son is shot out the door of his kindergarten like a cannonball. Ohhhhhhh, I smile. Actually, 44 minutes if I go by my watch instead of the clock on the dash. I am confident I will not be late again.

I am late again. Late with shopping bags, which ranks even higher, perhaps, than late with new highlights in the Mommies Criminal Code. I opt to hide the shopping bags under an old towel in the trunk, which makes me even later than I was when I pulled in. It occurs to me when I find Sam curled up in the plaid armchair in the principal's office—with eyes puffed nearly shut from crying and an organic juicebox—that I could have called the sitter to pick him up when it was clear I was going to be 30 minutes late. Why does that never occur to me? We've had Danny, our babysitter, in to care for the kids every afternoon for two years now, but I still find it unthinkable to ask him to do the preschool or kindergarten runs. It's one thing to hand your kids off to a sitter for a few hours in the late afternoons, but I can't imagine trusting anyone else to do the school run. What kind of message does that send their teachers? That you're too busy to hear about your own child's day?

Of course Sam's teacher has already left for the day, so I don't get to debrief her. Still, I think it's so important that they know, and that the children know, that these are not the sorts of tasks you'd leave to a paid caregiver.

Sam flings his arms around my middle and hangs there like a limpet as I apologize to Principal Weston for being late. She gives me the Eyeball of Disappointment, along with the Eyebrow of Long Suffering, as she tells me, for perhaps the 10^th time since September, that Sam was very worried and upset when I failed to be punctual, and that it's best if our mommies arrive on time or at least call if they are running late in order to send consistent messages and promote feelings of self-confidence in impressionable small persons. I apologize to her again while Ellie knocks a parenting book off her bookshelf and Sam turns into a human girdle as he continues to squeeze my middle with enough force to cause organs to shift up into my chest cavity.

"Thank you, Dr. Weston," I say again, walk-dragging Sam from her office as Ellie toddles loopily behind us. "We'll see you Monday. Everything's on track for the fundraiser tonight. Yay! So fun! Sorry again. Sorry. Sorry ..."

Trailing apologies of this sort have shadowed my every exit and entrance since becoming a mother. "Sorry." I don't leave home without it.

For Sam's Lunchbox on Monday. Written today:

Dear Sammy-Bear:

Mommy is so sorry she was late to pick you up today. She will be on time next week. She loves you so much and can't wait to see you.

Love,

Mommy

(never sent)

******

OK, that was totally fun. Thanks to everyone who is e-mailing, and even more thanks to the Facebookers, who are already doing way too much research and fact-checking than is fair. Also, thanks to everyone who has sent in photos of your pets. To everyone who told me to have a really detailed outline before I start: I am so going to do that this weekend.

I need to know three things for the next chapter: fussy kid eating stories (so far I am working on a 5-year-old boy who only eats dry food but I know you can do better). Also, for those of you whose mothers worked full-time, were they supportive when you took time off to be with the babies? And, lastly, how many tweets a day would be a Twitter addiction and how might a Twitter addiction look? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. It's Day 1 and I am somehow already behind. (New here? Read the introduction to learn how you can help.)

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 7
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009, at 5:05 PM ET

Cole is late for dinner again. The kids have been fed and bathed, and they are in the kitchen in their pajamas, waiting to "kiss him goodnight." And by "kiss him good night," I mean that they will be chased around every room downstairs, tossed to within mere inches of the kitchen light fixture, tickled to a point of near-derangement, and then—only when every nerve and muscle in their small bodies is screaming with the joy of a life well-lived—be taken up to bed.

Every marriage has a Sleep Czar and a Fun Czar. Because I, with my compulsive management of bedtimes and waking times, and the ongoing side drama of the unplanned car nap, have managed to appoint myself the Sleep Czar, Cole gets to be Fun Czar. Which would be fine if only his entire fun-related program didn't have the effect of curtailing our children's sleep. He's been so overwhelmed and overworked by this relocation trial it's hard to begrudge him these extra hours at night. But he isn't the one who'll be cleaning up the milk tomorrow morning when a sleepy Sam spills it all over his good pants. He isn't the one who's going to have to put Ellie down for a nap at 11 a.m. because exhaustion has driven her to tears over a broken bunny cracker.

Sam is coloring at the kitchen table, angry at the whole world because his light-up Batman pajamas are in the wash. "Go to the store and get more Batmans, Mamma," he orders. "Do it right now."

"Sammy, we don't buy new pajamas just because one pair is in the laundry."

"But why not?"

"Because it's a waste of money."

"Money isn't that important, Mom. Somebody gives it to you. You give it to somebody. Nobody really keeps it." Ellie, who is reorganizing my pots and pans in ways that make me quietly anxious, hums softly to herself. When Cole blasts in through the back door, laptop swinging, jacket flying, he's like a quad-shotespresso in a necktie. He kisses the top of my head and dumps a huge stack of files on the counter.

"Hey, little monkeys, what's shakin'?" he shouts, turning to the kids, and within seconds my sleepy children are swinging off the furniture like flying lemurs.

"Hi, honey, how did it go today?" I ask.

"No settlement. Trial starts Monday. Kayne's developing a weird new facial tic from the stress." He takes a computer printout out of his inside jacket pocket. It's an article from the law school's online student paper with a color photo of all the panelists in this afternoon's brown bag lunch. It's a pretty good picture of me, actually; I'm saying something earnestly, with my left hand gesticulating, and I look strangely authoritative. Cole is laughing.

"I didn't know you were being invited to speak to students about the complexity of working motherhood," he grins. "Did you talk about your recent lateral expansion into Lego or last year's brave acquisition of Polly Pocket?"

Asshole.

He's beside himself with laughter. "And what the hell is Marina doing dressed up like a mob widow? And who the hell is," he peers at the caption, "Helen Van Patterson-Patton? Wasn't that a character from Designing Women?" "Have you guys lost your minds?"

Ellie is both screaming and laughing as he blows raspberries on her stomach. Sam is on Cole's back, pulling his tie and grabbing his hair, and I give up any hope of having my children asleep by 9. I duck into Cole's study and flip on the computer. I have 12 new friend requests on Facebook, seven of them from strangers claiming they love my divorce advice. One woman suggests I turn it into a blog and offers to set up the page for me.

Cole, who has now worked my children into screaming, sweaty demons, sticks his head in the door and says, "Don't you think they should be getting to bed pretty soon?" I wave him off while I quickly check on Marina's latest tweet. It's from an hour earlier: Bob bailed on ice cream. Surprise! Girls crying. How to explain daddy loves Quid Pro Ho more than Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough?

Cole pops back into the study a few minutes later, looking annoyed. "Honey, it's getting really late. Let's put them to bed now, OK? You can do that later. Or are you drafting interrogatories for your big Pat the Bunny case?"

I shoot him a look and slide the chair in closer to the desk. "Why don't you start putting them down? Marina's having a crisis."

He looks at his watch. "Marina's in crisis. Well, I guess it must be 8:49 on a Friday night, then."

"I'll be up in 10 minutes. Just start telling them a story. And could you maybe stay away from The World's Greatest High Speed Auto Crashes?" Cole rolls his eyes and herds the still-shrieking children toward the stairs. He is still very, very handsome, my husband, and I love him very much. But despite being in the top 10 percent of our law school class and one of the most able litigators in town, he seems incapable of comprehending that the full basket of folded laundry at the bottom of the staircase isn't there because it complements the ottoman and the window treatments. Is there some Darwinian reason the laundry basket full of clean clothes waiting to be carried upstairs fails to register upon the male retina? Cole leaps over it, like a pirate, and chases the kids up to their rooms.

My father moved out when I was 8 years old. My sister Nina was 6. Sometimes you have to conduct years of stealthy investigation to learn what caused your parents' marriage to fail, but in our case there was no mystery: They never should have been together in the first place. My dad fell in love with my mom for her hard-driving, single-minded dedication to her ideals and her career. And yet although he was himself a dedicated feminist and civil rights activist, after a few years of solo dinners with a good book and an apartment still decorated in milk crates, he'd had enough. Or maybe she'd had enough of him having enough. Most divorces, even in the late '70s, were met with confusion. But people hearing of my parents' divorce mainly just murmured "what took them so long?"

When I was 11, my father remarried, this time to a woman who was 12 years younger than him. Claudia was a rising young star at his publishing house, but this time he made sure to find a rising star willing to orbit around him. As we grew up, he and Claudia gave Nina and me the occasional weekend glimpses of their stately Mamaroneck home, meals consisting of all four food groups bubbling aromatically together on a stove and, eventually, an adorable little stepbrother called Jason. If Frances lost a single billable hour to regrets over my father's new life, we never heard about it.

I creep upstairs to finish putting the children to bed. But Ellie is already fast asleep in her crib, her bottom up in the air and face mashed into the sheet as though she's hit it from above from a very high speed. I drape the blanket, tentlike, over her rump and close the door. Crossing the hall to Sam's room, I spy his dark head snuggled up on the Buzz Lightyear pillow, just next to his dad's blonde one. If Cole isn't already asleep, he will be in 10 seconds. Sliding his hand into Cole's fisted one, Sam whispers, "Hold my hand Daddy?"

"Why?"

"So that we will be in the same dreams …"

There's a message from Marina on the home phone when I get downstairs. She says Bob didn't pick up the kids for ice cream. Gemma stomped up to her room and slammed the door, and Norah was still crying. "This situation is ridiculous. He can't just blow them off like this, Erica. They're children. I think I need to prepare myself for a messy divorce."

I sit down at Cole's computer again and begin tapping. After the now-standard disclosures I write out the following:

Welcome to Week Two of Your Divorce

OK, so it's really happening. I think at this point it's fair to conclude that this is NOT a nightmare. Which means, my dear, it's time to get out of bed and change the sheets. If you and he are not working your way toward a resolution at this point, it's probably safe to say that you are working your way toward a divorce. Take a breath and say it with me now: If this situation isn't fixable, it's time to get your ducks in a row. In some jurisdictions, that means you can run out and file for divorce. In others you can't do it yet but you can still plan for it. (Here in Virginia, if there are children in the marriage, you must be separated for at least a year before you can file for divorce. Of course, until very recently here in Virginia, women also had to wear skirt suits to take the bar exam.)

1. You need a lawyer. If this is going down the road you think it's going, you need a really great lawyer. If you're worried about money because he makes most or all of it, know that it's his responsibility to support you and the children. So you want to strike first, like a serpent. It's your responsibility now to fight for your kids because—say it with me now—kids are not for bargaining, and if you don't protect them now, you will lose them, or parts of them, later.
2. So here's where I tell you to make interim arrangements for spousal support, for child support, and for custody. Since I assume you have the kids and the house right now, I want you to be sure you have sole possession of the house and to make sure he keeps making those mortgage payments. You need to do everything in your power to keep your kids' lives as normal as possible. You're their advocate! Same home, same bedrooms, same routines, same everything. Fight for that!
3. How to talk to your kids about divorce? Gently. Softly. Honestly. Lovingly. Don't say cruel things about their dad. They need your permission to love him. Don't say cruel things about Dad's new friend. They will come to hate her someday without your guidance. Don't pretend to have all the answers. And don't answer questions they haven't asked. Tell them a thousand times it isn't their fault. Tempting though it may be, it's unwise to tell them that dad is dead. Best to say he's just resting. Then say it again. Then everyone gets an ice cream. Chocolate for them. And vodka for you!

I pick up the phone to call Marina. It's past 11, but she picks up on the first ring. "I thought you were Bob," she says.

"Still no word from him?"

"Nothing."

"It's just not like him to flake like that. Not if it would hurt the girls," I say.

"No," she sounds worn-out.

"Does the fact that you're answering your phone on the first ring mean you're finally ready to speak to him?"

"I guess I'll have to sometime."

"I think it may be time to call a lawyer, honey."

"I think so, too."

"I'll talk to Cole and get you some more names in the morning."

"Thanks," she says dully.

"I put it all of my other advice on the blog," I tell her.

"The blog?"

"I'm migrating my divorce-advice column from your Facebook page to a blog. Starting tomorrow. Will you post a link?"

"Of course," I hear her smiling.

"And tweet it?"

"Yeah, baby."

"I still don't have a name for it, Marina." She thinks for a minute then laughs.

"Splitigation?"

"Perfect!" I laugh. "I love it!"

There's a very long silence. Maybe the longest one of our whole friendship. Then Marina sighs and says, "Goodnight, Erica. I love you."

"Goodnight Helen Van Patterson-Patton. I love you, too." I say and hang up the phone.

******

Next questions: How did you discover your favorite blogs? And what's the biggest fight you ever had with your spouse? Here's my account of surviving Week 1. Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 8
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009, at 5:05 PM ET

It's Friday at lunch. Cole is in trial, the kids are in school, and I am in the playroom organizing bins. It's my therapy.

It doesn't take a village to raise a child. It just takes a village to clean up after one. When Sam was born, we started off with an "only stuffed animals" rule. Then it was the "only cunning, educational wooden toys and stuffed animals" rule. Then it was the "only educational wooden toys, stuffed animals, and plastic toys so long as they weren't TV characters" rule. Then it was only Sesame Street. And Thomas. Finally we agreed on a rule that we could all live with: The "nothing that would explode in his hands and sear his little eyebrows off" rule.

And as our playroom became the place parenting principles went to die, I thought that if Sam learned nothing about being frugal from his mountains of toys, he might at least learn some self-discipline. Enter the bins. We now have blue bins for cars and red bins for crafts and orange bins for Playmobil figures and green bins for superheroes. A friend suggested drawing cars, crafts, and little figures on the sides of the bins to help Sam sort his own toys, so I did it. But mostly, our toys all get jumbled into two or three baskets and the rest of the empty bins are stacked in a corner. Once in a while something will motivate me to dump everything and try to reorganize. Often, it's the sound of some battery-operated creature beeping at the bottom of a heap or the scent of spoiled milk from a sippy cup that has begun to smell like a crypt. A visit from Cole's mother will do it, too.

Marina has always had a very different strategy for the storage of her girls' toys. She labels her containers with cleverly ironic names. Her bin for dolls, pretty dresses, tulle, tiaras, and pink stuff is labeled "Pernicious Female Stereotypes" and the tub full of educational puzzles is called "Stuff You Never Play With." Her Play-Doh bin says "Greige Goo." In the week since our law-school matinee performance, she's also become a proponent of the zenlike meditative state that can be reached by drinking half a bottle of merlot and sorting the girls' toy bins.

As I separate the zoo animals from the farm animals, it occurs to me that even though Marina has made a lot of material progress in the last seven days, she seems somehow worse off than ever. Her attempts to formalize a visitation and support schedule have been met with no resistance at all. Bob is perfectly content to see the kids on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings, to pay whatever bill needs paying, and to leave them alone beyond that. He hasn't agitated for anything he left behind at the house, he hasn't questioned Marina's parenting choices. This leaves Marina many empty hours in which to imagine a Bob too consumed with his new life to care about his old one; she is plagued by visions of him settling into his new high-rise apartment with his new low-rise girlfriend and a new wardrobe that is, in her mind, comprised mainly of surf shorts, concert T-shirts, and baseball caps. Marina has been known to tweet such scenarios at 3 a.m. Since Bob hasn't returned even one of Cole's phone calls, I am starting to believe she's not wrong about this.

All of this has become terrific fodder for Splitigation, which really does seem to have found sort of a niche after only one week. After Marina posted a link from her Facebook page and then tweeted about it, I had 100 readers. They told two friends, and they told two friends, and suddenly I have several hundred readers. It wasn't my plan to pitch my advice primarily to women, or to stay-at-home women who have been dumped by the primary breadwinners meant to be providing for them, but now that I have started reading all this e-mail from readers, I can't help but notice the difference between the way women and men experience a divorce.

A woman from Washington state wrote in to say that her husband not only cheated with the au pair (the au pair? Yuck!) but then when she had some kind of breakdown over it, they managed to get sole custody of her kids. A woman wrote in to say her husband told her that he was going to McDonald's and never came back. He even asked her what she wanted him to pick up for her. And she was pregnant. There's the woman whose husband kidnapped their daughter and took her to Costa Rica and she spent years tracking them down. The woman whose husband put their house on the market without telling her. I know most marriages don't end this way, but after a week reading the comments section on my Splitigation posts, I can't believe how many actually do.

Mostly, I just keep hearing from women who are on the brink of a divorce and totally terrified of losing their kids. I wonder whether most divorce lawyers understand that for a woman—for whom the experience of putting a kid on a school bus for the first time is akin to amputation—the idea of giving up your children from Thursday to Sunday is like sending your own pancreas to the dry cleaner. It's not that dads out there aren't suffering. I get mail from them, too. But these women gave up their jobs and their independence and their skinny jeans to their marriages, they've lost their husbands, and now they are threatened with losing their kids. They are getting all sorts of legal advice, but that isn't really what they need. They need counseling. They need to feel they aren't alone. They need me. I am really starting to believe that I am giving them something they don't get anyplace else.

I hear a key turn in the front door. Cole? It's just after noon.

"Hey?" I call.

I hear his footsteps in the hall, hear him drop his things in the study and make his way across the house to the playroom.

"You're sweeping back the sea," he mutters when he sees me sprawled all over the floor with my piles of carefully cataloged kid booty. I am hard at work on a gummy bear that's lodged in a Transformer, so I just glance up at him and smile.

"It has to be done."

"I give it 20 minutes," he says, loosening his tie. "Ten if Sam manages to dump it all with both hands instead of one."

"How did it go today?"

"We're done. Now we just sit and wait for an order from the judge." He folds his jacket over his arm.

"How's Kayne?" I ask.

"Insane. Ana put on a hell of a case. The schools in Ohio are now somehow unparalleled in the free world. Her boyfriend will move them all into his gorgeous McMansion with a bedroom for each. The kids will have nannies instead of being in aftercare at school. Their grandma can watch them on sick days. There will be ponies and sunsets and rainbows in Ohio. And between Christmas and summer vacations and the wonders of Skype visitation, he'll somehow have more time with the boys than he does now. So how are we supposed to stop her?"

"Oh, Cole," I peel myself off the floor and put my arms around him. "What judge believes Skype is the answer to anything? Good grief."

He rests his chin on my head. "It's just so unfair. Erica. These women have it so easy. All they need to do is find a rich guy out of state and they get to airlift the whole family out. Sure, it's changed circumstances, but it's like she's won the custody lottery. Poor Kayne has worked like a dog to provide for these kids for 10 years and now, through no fault of his own, he loses custody and virtually all contact with his sons because his ex-wife has a sugar daddy."

"I dunno sweetheart," I say. I think of the reader whose husband made off to Costa Rica. She sure didn't get a trial beforehand. "I've been hearing from dozens of women whose financial circumstances just collapse after a split. Most women don't get sugar daddies, you know. Most have to watch their ex-husband's income go to supporting two households instead of one, and most have to get jobs. I'm not saying it's OK that Ana is about to marry her way into sole custody but trust me, that's not the story I'm getting."

"Well, honey, you certainly have become quite the little expert on divorce in the span of a week. I checked out your blog out this morning. Everyone at the office is devouring it."

"I'm hardly holding myself out as an expert, Cole," I snap my head back to look into his eyes. This is more than just the stress of a long custody trial. "I am just trying to give some advice to women who feel like they have nobody to turn to and the whole world to lose."

"Well, you're dispensing legal advice on the Internet, which is just asking for trouble down the road. You're evangelizing all these bitter women into thinking that the only way to get divorced is through acts of extreme financial violence. You're encouraging them to take as aggressive a posture as possible where being reasonable is almost always smarter. It's very cute and very funny, I grant you, and it's really great entertainment. But, Erica, I promise you that you are making things worse for a lot of people who need cool, rational, professional advice instead of punch lines in a crisis."

"Well tell me how you really feel, Cole," I snort, annoyed that I am being cast as the flapping hysteric to his rational actor. Again.

"And to be perfectly honest about it," he continues, "you're also making it awfully hard for me to represent a man when everyone at work believes I am now married to the Ann Coulter of the contested divorce world."

"Wow," I say, angrily sweeping the last of the Legos into a box. "I had no idea this blogging thing was going to be so threatening to you. I thought you wanted me to do something with my law degree. To be—and I quote—'more than just the children's inexhaustible personal shopper.' "

Cole sighs. I slam out of the playroom, grab my laptop from the coffee table in the living room, and experience a moment of resentment that my husband has his own study while I will have to post today's blog entry from the floor of the laundry room, surrounded by pink Dora the Explorer socks. I'm pretty sure Cole won't find me in here. He hasn't done laundry since the mid-1990s. I slide down next to the washing machine, flip the computer open, and load up the Splitigation home page. My phone rings and I grab it. I don't recognize the number but push the talk button.

"Erica, is that you?"

"Yes."

"Listen, it's Kevin. Marina's brother. I'm calling from Seattle."

"Hey there, Kevin, how are you?" I smile, leaning my head back against the drier. I've met Kevin a couple of times, and I really like him. He's one of those class clown types, but I can't imagine why he'd be calling me.

"Not good, actually. I just got a phone call from the hospital. Marina's been in an accident."

******

And now, the next questions for my readers: Can you tell us about your car accident? What happened? How long were you in the hospital? And also, shat should the judge order in Cole's relocation case? Here's my account of surviving Week 1. Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 9
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009, at 5:05 PM ET

I have been sitting in the UVA medical center emergency room for five hours now, waiting for Marina to be admitted so I can be allowed upstairs to see her. I have put in calls to Bob every half hour, but his cell is turned off, his secretary at the law school has no idea where he is, and he appears to have no phone at his new apartment. I have arranged for Bob's mother—who hasn't seen him in a week—to pick up the girls at school. I am calling Marina's family with medical updates as I receive them, mostly to reassure them not to book cross-country flights yet because her injuries are extensive but not serious. Mainly, I have read the same dog-eared copy of Self magazine 17 times. Which means I have now mentally transposed all 10 of the "Things Your Man Secretly Wants in Bed" with the 14 easy moves to "Whittle Your Waist Instantly." Never again will I go to bed with my husband without hand weights and a yoga ball. And starting tomorrow I will shed those post-pregnancy pounds using only a feather and some vanilla frosting.

I have called Cole twice to apologize for this afternoon's argument. I left messages asking him to pick up the kids and tell Danny to start dinner. Cole's under crazy pressure right now, and I never wanted to add to it. That said, I wish I had thought to bring my laptop along so I could be blogging right now. I want to write up some of that good stuff I yelled at him about women and move cases.

When they finally allow me up to see Marina, it's almost 6 p.m. and the halls are full of stacked dinner trays that smell like grilled cat food. I had no idea what she might need, so I am clutching an Old Navy bag stuffed with my white bathrobe, an iPod, a new toothbrush, Cole's woolly camping socks, and a Lancôme makeup kit I got from duty-free. When I first tap at her half-open door, Marina is lying so still I think she must be drugged or asleep. It takes a minute before I realize she can't move her head to greet me.

"Hey," I whisper, opening the door a bit wider.

"Hmmmmmmmm," she grunts.

I circle the bed with its thin, white coverlet and raised guard rails and position myself in front of a face that bears no resemblance to my friend. The whites of her eyes are completely red and the bruising and scrapes around her face are raw. A purple welt across the top of her left shoulder must have come from her seatbelt. Her arms and fingers are covered with bandages.

I try to find some undamaged terrain on her face where I might drop a kiss and find a spot near her left ear. Her lips are so swollen I can barely make out what she's saying. She hisses, "Girls. School?"

"Bob's mother has them," I assure her. "She's at your house waiting to hear whether to bring them in to see you."

"Not ... like ..." she gestures with bandaged hands at her face.

I reach for some piece of undamaged Marina and end up clutching her left leg. "No. Not like this. I'll tell her to wait until your face is healed up a bit."

"Bob?" she says, closing swollen eyes.

"I haven't been able to reach him. His cell keeps going straight to voice mail. Cole went by his apartment and pounded at the door, but no answer." I hesitate. "I even thought about putting a call in to Quid Pro but I couldn't bring myself to do it."

"Don't," she mutters, wincing as she tries to turn her head. I reach behind her and attempt to reposition a crunchy hospital pillow but stop when I realize I'm only making things worse.

"Kevin wants to fly in. So do your parents."

"No." Her eyes fill with tears.

"Are you sure?"

"No." She swallows hard. "Other driver?"

"Nobody hurt but you, they told me. Oh, Marina, what happened?"

"Smell of airbag ... Worst smell ... "

"Worse than," I peer at the foil-wrapped dinner tray and read out loud, "Scrod Diablo?" No smile.

"Bee flew up my sunglasses," she tells me. "I couldn't see. Hit someone in a Hummer from behind."

"Were you sober?" I ask. And then, as realization dawns, "Oh my God. Were you tweeting?"

"No." For a natural-born diva, Marina is actually a fairly bad liar.

I pull out my phone to check the time of her last Twitter entry. 11:55 a.m. The hospital told me the ambulance cut her out around 12:30.

"Marina!" I howl. "You were going to orphan your girls just so you could advise the world in real time that ..." I slowly read her most recent partial tweet, "OMG Quid Pro Ho drives like my great Aunt Sylvia. Who taught xdfklsldkfj"

Marina crashed her car and almost died while tailing her husband's mistress. How very Tolstoy for the 21^st century. "What is it with you and Twitter?" I ask, gripping the bedrail. I can't bring myself to ask about the fact she was trailing a young woman in her car. What started as a little post-breakup Facebook stalking has morphed into the monorail to crazy-town.

"Reminds me that I'm still here," Marina grinds out, then shifts her eyes to stare out the window.

Splitigation

Welcome to Week 3 of Your Divorce

First, I need to reiterate that I am not, repeat NOT dispensing free legal advice over the Internet, and that I am just sharing thoughts I have about divorce and matrimonial law as they occur to me. This blog is intended for entertainment purposes only, and also maybe as a place for women to realize they aren't totally alone. If you need advice specific to your matrimonial situation, please contact a lawyer in your jurisdiction.

So here we are at Week 3. And let me tell you: Week 3 = Rock Bottom.

Right now, you probably feel like you are all alone on the planet, except for your children who are somehow needier and more demanding than they have been since infancy. You probably feel like the whole world has moved on and left you behind. You want to give up. Well, I am here to warn you about what happens to women who give up; women who are too conciliatory, too financially challenged; too plain old depressed to fight for themselves or their families from the start.

There is no doubt that women suffer more than men after a divorce. I looked it up. Virtually all the empirical literature shows a precipitous drop in the mother's standard of living post-divorce. Period. Divorced women find it harder to find jobs, harder to retain counsel, and harder to pay the kind of experts they need in order to win in a contested custody dispute. Study after study shows that women in mediation bargain away their economic rights in order to retain custody of the children. Judges today are less inclined to award spousal maintenance and more inclined to push mothers back into the work force. Courts consistently hold mothers to higher moral standards than fathers. Oh. And every single decision made "in the best interest of the child" gets filtered through some family judge's crazy quilt of biases, prejudices, and life experiences.

So your impulse right now is to focus on the other woman? What does she have that you don't? Besides all the laundry and dirty coffee mugs you no longer have to worry about? And she's probably lost control of the remote. Ack! Forget her. She'll be tailing the other-other woman down the highway in her bathrobe and hot rollers in a few years. Promise.

Forget the makeover and the new wardrobe and the plastic surgery, too. That's little girl stuff. Don't let yourself get lost in dreams of the past or in a future that only happens in movies. If you have a job, you can lose your kids. If you don't have a job, you can also lose your kids. If you cheated on your hubby, you can lose your kids. If he cheated on you, you can also lose your kids. So you need to get up off the floor and fight for what you want. And that means figuring out what you need and demanding it. Where do you want to live? What do you want to do? Who do you want to become? How do you want to care for your kids?

Maybe there can't be a happily ever after in a divorce, but there can be a happier than you'd hoped for. So aim your ship that way. I'm behind you all the way.

******

To my readers: Who does better in divorces, men or women? Is it wrong to generalize? Is it wrong to assume that men and women should be treated equally? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 10
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009, at 5:05 PM ET

It's been five days since the accident, and Marina's body is mending slowly. The hospital says they will let her go in a day or two if she promises to rest at home. Bob's mother and I will tag-team with the kids and the house. The police say she is on the hook both for the accident and for texting while driving. Her heartbreak, I can't seem to help with. She talks when her girls come by to visit, but beyond that she's almost always quiet—either sleeping or pretending to be. She won't even dictate any new tweets for me to post. Bob has made some efforts to pick up the child care slack, but he hasn't visited her. When we finally tracked him down the night of the accident, he was alone at a coffee shop near the law school, reading law review articles. He'd forgotten his cell. He looked almost as bad as she did, and he hadn't tangled with a Hummer. When we told him about her accident, he barely reacted. I've seen him more worked up over a baseketball game.

There's a message waiting for me on the home phone when I get back from the hospital this evening. Cole doesn't even mention it to me, although he's clearly listened to it and saved it. When I retrieve it, a strange voice bleats:

Hey this is Zoe Fine from the Web site BarCzar.com. I'm sure you've heard of us. Anyhooo ... love Splitigation. Seriously. Love. it. Wanna talk to you about it. Give me a call, soonest. 202-555-2666.

Of course, I first have to wrangle the kids' chicken fingers (no tails) and carrot sticks (no tails) and leftover roast chicken for Cole, who is and will remain a basket case until the judge makes her decision in his relocation case. He barely grunts at me through dinner, asking only whether I have any immediate plans to cite statistics that disagree with my own emotional conclusions about divorce. I tell him we should discuss this calmly when his trial is over.

Cole oversees the kids' baths while I clean the kitchen. And then, like clockwork, it's time for Total Drama Pajamas (Ellie shaking her head furiously at every pair proffered and settling at last for the hand-me-down Little Mermaid gown that's three sizes too big). After that, mercifully, it's bedtime. Cole takes over at story time long enough for me to leave a hasty message for Zoe Fine saying I can meet up in Washington, D.C., anytime that works for her, and to scan my reader mail from Splitigation.

Some of these women do scare me a little, like the ones who call men "sperm shuttles." But most of them tell me I've given them hope and a bit of resolve, and thank me for being a voice amid the silence.

"E-ri-ca?" Cole is bellowing for me from upstairs. "Is there any chance at all that you could come up before the advent of the Bristol Palin administration?" I turn off my computer and head up to kiss my children. Because I'm pretty sure I'm not getting kisses from anyone else up there tonight.

The offices of BarCzar are in Washington, D.C., two blocks from the Farragut North Metro stop. By offices I mean office, singular, where an emaciated-looked intern with tomato-colored hair mans phones at the reception desk. She looks up at me pleadingly as I step off the elevator and open the glass door. Maybe she's hoping I have come to take her away from all this. Or maybe she imagines I come bearing cans of Ensure.

"I have a noon meeting with Zoe," I say before I am fully inside the reception area, "I'm early. Where's the ladies' room?" I can't believe how nervous I am. I used to convene meetings with 20 captains of industry in conference rooms bigger than this whole office. Now I am cowed by a room full of dingy orange bucket chairs and a receptionist in immediate need of intravenous fluids.

In the ladies' room, I look myself squarely in the eye and take what would have passed for deep cleansing breaths in the early '80s yoga craze. I am in a short black suit. Not Armani. My blouse is white and my makeup is more than I have worn since my wedding. "You wanted a career," I tell myself. "You are making this happen. Do. Not. Blow. It."

Zoe Fine is in her late 50s, with shoulder-length hair that is blue-black from the ears down and light gray up top, like an inverted Civil War map. Zoe is also, evidently, a recovering smoker. Every square inch of her right arm is covered in patches and each time she exhales, she watches her own breath longingly—as if looking for ghosts of nicotine past. Her office consists of a messy metal desk, a photo gallery of her dog, and a computer that appears to be switched off. When I enter her office, she leaps to her feet and extends a hand across the rippling papers.

"Hey, you're Erica Hirshblatt." She says delightedly. "You're too cute. So great to meet you. I'm a big fan of Splitigation. A huge fan. It's so voicey! Fun! Edgy. I just love it. So whaddaya say?"

I am not completely sure what she's offered me, or even that she's read my blog. "Sorry?" I say.

"We wanna acquire Splitigation. Make it an integral part of the BarCzar family. Migrate it over to our site. You'll have almost total editorial control. Huge bump in your traffic. Big, big advertising. You heard of Massengill? Page views right through the roof. Click-throughs. Links to all the major players—I'm talking HuffPo. The Beast. I'm talking young. Ironic! Voicey. Do you write about sex much? Have you done anything on the teen sexting epidemic yet? Teen sexting is so huge right now." She rifles wildly around on the papers on her desk and pulls out a newspaper clipping about sexting, handing it to me with a grin.

"Zoe," I say. "Can I interrupt you for just a second? I'm not sure Splitigation is exactly what you're looking for. It's not really ironic or fun. It's not really about sex. It's kind of about not-sex, in fact. It's about marriages ending, new beginnings. ... "

"I know it!" She cuts in, breathing out hard. "Fantastic stuff. Hey, do you know anything about elder law? We really need a blog on elder law. Unbelievable growth in all death-based demographics. We'd make a killing. But we'd want it young, you know, very voicey."

I explain to Zoe that I really don't know anything about elder law but that if she still wants to acquire Splitigation, I'd be willing to consider an offer.

"That was my offer!" she puffs out. "Migrate it over to our site. You have almost total editorial control. Huge bump in your traffic. Big advertising. Links to the big boys. Millions—and I mean millions—of new eyeballs. I can see you twittering, live-chatting. Maybe you could live-blog some celebrity divorce case. Is the Christy Brinkley trial sill going on?" She's looking at more newspaper clippings spread out across her desk.

"But what would you pay me?"

Even Zoe's laughter is on the exhale. "Pay you?" she starts to cough. "Who the hell pays their bloggers? Erica, we haven't paid a writer since 2002. You come to us because it's better than writing for your mama. By the way, is your mama really Frances Miller-Kline? You think she wants a column? We could totally get her a column. She know anything about elder law?" For some inexplicable reason, there is a photo of my mother on her desk that she's waving at me.

"But I didn't come to you," I grumble. "You called me."

"Look," says Zoe, swiveling her chair to look at her reflection in the dark screen of her desktop. "That's the business in the online media. You write for you, you write for me, either way you write for free. You'll get a cut of the ad revenues. That's what we can offer. Can be big money down the line. But here's what I can promise you, Erica: eyeballs. I can promise you buzz. I can promise you cable news shows and a seat at the table. Getting paid is sooo last century. We're all about voice now."

"Would I be able to continue blogging from home?" I ask. "I live two hours away from D.C. I have two little kids."

"You can blog from Amman, Jordan, if you want. I don't care where you're blogging from. Just post six, seven times a day. There's no more news cycle. News cycle is a spin cycle. You have to feed the beast. We're looking to be acquired by one of the big ones so you need keep it young and hip. You do makeovers? Advertisers love makeovers." I open my mouth to say there wouldn't be a lot of makeovers. Then I shut it. Zoe is either a new media visionary or a lunatic. I'm not in a position to judge.

I tell Zoe I'll call her with my answer tomorrow. "Tonight is better," she says, fast-walking me out to the reception area. "We're talking to another blogger about acquiring his election fraud Web site, MocktheVote.com. Huge eyeballs for election fraud. Unbelievable growth in the whole election fraud demographic. Very young. Very ironic. ..."

I've arranged to get lunch with my old law school roommate before driving home to start dinner. Paige is an environmental lobbyist who has never quite lost that Last Child in the Woods bafflement over how she ended up in this city of blocky concrete buildings instead of in a kayak off the Oregon coast. Paige and I have kept up over the years, mostly in monthly phone calls. She comes to visit when she can't stand D.C. another day. She leaps to her feet when she sees me, knocking over a basket of breadsticks and wrapping me in a power-yoga hug. "You look fantastic," she enthuses. "Seriously, you never change."

"You look great, too, Paige," I unfold my napkin. "What's going on in the world of Big Environment?'

"Same old," she says, scanning the specials. "Hey, what's up with Marina and Bob? I heard she was in an accident?"

"Ugh, it's a mess. He's moved out. She's barely functioning. This year we all just smacked our heads on the seven-year itch, I'll tell you."

"What happens to them?" she asks, shaking her head.

"I think something snaps in the male brain as soon as the trench warfare phase ends. As soon as the kids start sleeping through the night, the dads all start to realize what chumps they've been. Then they go mental to compensate. They join other packs of hollow-eyed fathers at violent movies and join bands."

Paige nods wisely. "I read someplace that it takes seven years for all of the cells in your body to turn over, so that none of the cells you have in seven years will be the same ones you have now. That means you may well be completely repulsed by the person who used to drive you wild."

"Can't fight science," I say.

"I know it."

A waiter comes by to fill our water glasses. We both order salads. "What's up with you?" I ask when he moves away. "Anything promising?"

"Job's great. Love life blows," sighs Paige. "Hey. How did your meeting go this morning?"

"Kind of nutty. I think I just met my first-ever Internet entrepreneur who has never been on the Internet. They would pay me the equivalent of a couple lattes a day in exchange for blogging until my hands fall off. Still. It's kind of tempting. Take Splitigation to the next level and all that."

"Splitigation is so great. I have everyone at work reading it. What do they promise you if it takes off?" she asks.

"Nothing past the equivalent of a couple lattes a day. I just don't think this is the time to try to monetize online advice, Paige. I guess the only question is whether I want 'the eyeballs.' When I think about all the people who are being laid off, I guess maybe working for eyeballs is better than not working. ... '"

"And what does Cole say?" she asks.

"I can't tell whether he's more annoyed that I am writing a badass blog about matrimonial law, or that—for the first time in five years—I haven't asked his opinion on it. He pretty much hates it. It's embarrassing and it's unserious. But you know what? He was pretty embarrassed when I was a stay-at-home mommy, too. He used to introduce me at firm events as a 'recovering lawyer.' In fact, I can't honestly remember the last thing I've done that hasn't made him roll his eyes at me like I'm Ellie's incorrigible little sidekick." I pause as the waiter returns with our salads. "In fact, I bet I help more women in a day than he does in a whole month!" I pause, a little shocked at how good it felt to say that.

"Like, wow," Paige says, chewing slowly.

"What?"

"I just never thought you two would be doing battle over anything, much less clashing professional egos."

"Do you really think this is about my ego?" I ask, stung.

"Well, of course it is. Look, you've been trapped in the Mom Cave for six years now. You're ready to bust out. Good. It's OK for you to want to talk to adults again, to solve people's problems again. But I wouldn't pretend like it's all altruism, any more than I would pretend that the years you took off were all altruism. You have something to say, and you want people to take you seriously when you say it. Good for you. It's about time."

"You sound like my mother," I smile, taking a sip of my water.

"No, she'd be telling you to register the kids in military school, find Cole a girlfriend, and run for attorney general. Me, I'm just telling you to sell your blog."

My mother calls halfway between Washington and home. I could ignore it, but there are tons of dead zones here, so if she says anything too annoying, I can just hang up and call her tonight.

"How's Cole's case?" she asks.

"Hell. Judge has it now so we're just waiting."

"You'd have to shoot me before I did family law," she snorts. "It isn't even law. It's paintball for lawyers."

"Mom, I'm in the car so if we get cut off ..."

She cuts me off. "Did you get the check I sent for Sam's birthday?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Put it into T-bills. Goddamn economy. What the hell was Obama thinking? Secretary of state my ass. ... Hillary would have had us out of this banking crisis in 15 minutes and still had time to make peace in the Middle East."

"Hey Mom, I think I am going to sell my blog to an online magazine."

"What blog?"

"My blog, Mom? Splitigation? I started it a few weeks ago. I sent you the link?"

"Yeah, I don't really get links. Which online magazine?"

"BarCzar.com. It's a pretty huge legal magazine. Everyone at the law firms reads it."

"Yeah, I've never heard of it. How much they paying you for it?"

"Mom? Mom? I'm driving into a dead zone. I'll call you later, OK ?"

******

OK, so what really does cause the seven-year itch? All scientific and nonscientific theories welcome. Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 11
Posted Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009, at 4:08 PM ET

Marina and I are having a celebratory coffee at the Starbucks on the Corner. Ostensibly, we are celebrating her discharge today from the hospital and my "sale" of Splitigation to BarCzar—an event that actually involved no extravagant boozy lunches, no complicated advice from counsel, and no elaborate contracts, but simply a press release, a new URL, and a logo I am not delighted with. Also, a rather enormous purple pop-up ad from Massengill.

Marina, her face a patchwork of yellowing bruises and angry brown welts, manages to scare a pair of buzz-cut soccer types away from the window seat with just a look. Both hands covered in gauze, she slowly pops the plastic top off her double latte and stirs in two packets of sugar. She keeps her eyes on her coffee operation as if she's dismantling some kind of explosive device and one false move would blow us all out of the cafe.

"I need to go home," she says, eventually.

"That's our next stop," I assure her. "As soon as we're done here, I'll run you back to the house and you can clean up before the girls get home. Let's maybe order in a mess of Indian food tonight for all the kids and you just take it easy? I have a coupon somewhere. ..." I start to rummage in my bag.

"No, I mean I need to go home home. To Seattle." She looks at me dully.

"But honey, you can barely walk right now. And you and Bob have only been separated for what ... three weeks? I don't think you want to take off to the West Coast and leave the girls here with Bob and his mother. God, how would that look in a custody fight?"

"I want to take them with me. You think Bob's going to fight me for them? He's barely even picked them up for visits. And when he is with them do you know what they do? They sit around his apartment and watch the Cartoon Network while he sleeps. Or he drops them off with his mom or his brother. You think Bob is going to fight for the girls? I think he wants to forget all about the bunch of us."

This may well be the longest speech Marina has uttered in a week.

She stirs her coffee and glares at me. "You think I shouldn't uproot them, don't you? You think I'm being selfish, right? But let me tell you something. I am sick to freaking death of being selfless. You know why we live in Virginia? For Bob's family. For Bob's job. Because of Bob's career ambitions. You know what I gave up to live here? Everything I was before I came here."

I am starting to realize she isn't talking about a visit. She wants to put everything, even me, behind her.

"Look," I begin, putting a hand gently over her bandaged one. "That was the bargain you made when you had kids. And you can't just pick up and leave now just because Bob has left you. He has rights. Trust me, Cole spent a year on his monster move case and the only lesson I learned from it is don't have a kid with someone if you don't plan on living in the same state with them pretty much forever!"

"So I am supposed to sit here in Bob's town, surrounded by Bob's colleagues, while he soars from one success to the next, and do what exactly? Collect child support? Telecommute from my kitchen counter? Stalk his teenage girlfriends? That part is over, Erica. He left me. I need a new start. I don't want to spend the next 10 years waiting to bump into him and his pretty girlfriend at the dry cleaners. I don't deserve that."

"Listen, of course you deserve to be happy and supported and away from here if you want to be. But the courts won't see it that way. They will want you two to share custody as best as you can and to put the best interests of the girls ahead of your own."

"And you think it's in the best interests of the children to have a mother like this?" She lifts up her hands and dramatically waves them around next to her tattered face. "Do the courts have any idea what the best interests of the children even means when the mother is on Twitter all day, just hoping her husband might maybe tune in and listen to her?"

What can I say? My best friend wants to go home, and if it were me I'd do the same thing. I can't imagine my life without her, but I can't imagine her life in this town, either. Marina needs everyone to be looking at her. But whispering about her? Pitying her? I'd give her six months before she crashed her car again.

I drive her home in silence after extracting a promise that she won't do anything rash without talking to her lawyer. "You're in huge trouble already, Marina, with the accident and the tweeting and the insurance. Don't give the courts one more reason to take your kids away. Moving back to Seattle seems totally rational to you, but it will look selfish and erratic to a judge, I promise."

I walk her slowly upstairs to bed, bring her tea and some pain pills, and stroke her weird new sticky-uppy hairstyle until she falls asleep. Then I get to work cleaning her house before the girls get home from school. Bob's mother has tried to hold it together around here, but judging from the dirty laundry massed at the top of the stairs and the congregation of evangelical fruit flies in the kitchen, caring for two small girls and a large house has obviously been too much for her. I wonder if it's going to prove too much for Marina.

I also wonder what it is about other women's houses. Even if we're too exhausted to lift the Dustbuster in our own kitchens, give us a Swiffer and a good friend's hopeless mess, and we're unstoppable. Is it still the thrill of playing house—in someone else's home? Or the chance to snoop shamelessly through someone else's stuff? Whatever it is, I track down the bucket and start mopping in ways that my own kitchen floor has never experienced. I'm suddenly the Mother Theresa of Dishpan Hands.

Splitigation

Welcome to my new home, at BarCzar.com! Here's the part where I tell you unequivocally and in a seriously legally binding way, that this is not the site you want to go to for legal advice about your divorce. Nobody at BarCzar or in my house is responsible if you use whatever I say here as anything other than entertainment. Capisce?

So? What do you think of my new logo?

Enough about my relocation. Now onto yours. I know I am getting a little bit ahead of myself here, but I want to talk a little bit about how completely screwed you will be if you have primary custody of your children and try to leave the state. This is something you need to think about even before you get your divorce. Truth be told, it's something to think about even before you get married: "If things go south, do I want to live in the same state as this man until my children (who are probably just sperm at this point) go off to college?"

I mention all this because relocation is the big hot sweaty underbelly of divorce law. You won't give it a thought until it smacks you in the face.

The law of relocation is premised on a 20^th-century view of what families look like. But we live in a mobile society. And now we're in a recession. We—especially women with kids to feed and inadequate child support—need to be able to go where the jobs are. We need to be around siblings and grandparents. But the law wants to keep us trapped in some parody of a Very Brady Family; it wants us frozen in amber, entombed in our own histories.

Courts today largely insist that primary custodians will be held hostage in the same state as their ex-spouses, because absent incredibly compelling circumstances you will not be allowed to move. And, my dears, if you do move, be it for your wonderful new husband in Maine, your fantastic new job in Manhattan, or to attend the only medical school that will admit you? Well, be prepared for a second custody fight that will make your divorce look like a beach picnic.

No matter what state you're in, the courts deal with relocation requests by asking what would be in the best interests of the child. Some courts do that on a case-by-case basis. Some are guided by state statutes and some follow state case law. The courts don't want to hear about what's in your best interests as a parent. The courts want to know that the kids will flourish in the new situation. Not you, them.

Why am I just a little bit worked up about this whole relocation issue? Because the Supreme Court recognizes a protected constitutional right for citizens to travel freely between the states. The court has gone so far as to say "it is, of course, well settled that the right of a United States citizen to travel from one State to another and to take up residence in the State of his choice is protected by the Federal Constitution."

Let me repeat that: The Constitution itself protects your right to travel. You have the right to find new love, a better career, the support of the people you love. But when you attempt to exercise that right, a court will often come in and tell you that it's in the best interests of your child for you to remain in the broken shell of your old home, your old town—in all the trappings of your old life, minus the loving spouse. You are not allowed to reclaim a life for yourself because the courts requires you to be sitting around on Thursdays and alternating weekends so your ex can take the kids to T-ball.

The more I think on that the madder I get. Courts seem to be completely clueless about the simple fact that it's in the best interests of the child to have a happy parent. And what parent can possibly be happy trapped in the hollow shell of a life they have outgrown? A life they may never have wanted in the first place?

******

Today's questions for readers: Do you believe in midlife crises? Do they happen only to men and only in fiction? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 12
Posted Friday, Sept. 25, 2009, at 7:03 PM ET

Sam and I are folding laundry in the living room while Danny changes Ellie's diaper upstairs. Sam loves to fold laundry so long as every garment—from socks to t-shirts—is folded the way you'd usually fold a sheet. That means we must each grab two corners then walk slowly toward each other with grave expressions. We must perform this ritual act of folding again and again until the sock or T-shirt in question is folded into eighths, or better yet, sixteenths. We will know something is well and truly "folded" when it is small enough to be tucked into a little red Sunmaid raisin box.

As he folds, Sammy sings a little song of his own devising: "There's a hungle, and there's a jungle. And the birds are chasing somebody. A Heena hinna heena hinna who." As singing Sam goes to pluck another shirt from the laundry basket, I find myself gazing again toward my laptop, open on the coffee table. My most recent Splitigation post, on relocation, has kicked up a serious dust storm of controversy, and I'm seeing traffic—and my reader mail— soar. Surprisingly, I find I like the hate mail almost more than the "go girls." The hate mail confirms that I was right all along: Women send mail about their babies. Men keep talking about their property.

Cole, having read last night's relocation post, has stopped talking to me altogether. He did send an e-mail that read: This has to stop. I can't even tell where your jokes end and the personal attacks on me begin anymore.

Here's the funny part: I honestly never thought of any of this as an attack on Cole. So maybe I've been a little overinvolved with Marina's legal issues, but Cole has argued both sides of move cases before. I'm not writing anything on Splitigation he hasn't argued in a courtroom. And telling women facing a divorce to stop negotiating away their own dignity hardly makes me a bra-burning radical. I'm starting to think all this has a lot more to do with Cole's own insecurities than my blog. I nevertheless send him a note promising to talk later.

Cole and I are meant to be going to a firm dinner tonight—a fancy dress-up thing at one of our favorite restaurants, C&O. It's going to be pretty awkward if we still aren't speaking when we pull into the parking lot. You can always tell those couples because they head to different sides of the room to start drinking. That's not what Cole and I do. Once upon a time I would get stuck at the far end of the corner table with the old ladies, wives of partners who would quiz me on where I get my hair cut and how proud I am, on a one-to-10 scale, of Cole's meteoric rise at the firm. (10!)

But tonight I'll walk in as the crazy lady who blogs in her nightie—one poised to spill client secrets and bring down the whole firm. I'd walk across searing asphalt for a little black dress with a functioning zipper to wear. Barring that, I'll go with a pencil skirt and skyscraping heels and my head held high. I am not, I tell myself, doing anything wrong.

These days, the first phone call from Marina always goes straight to voice-mail. Her self- confidence is so wobbly that she checks in with me before she opens a can of tuna. But when it immediately rings a second time, I pick up.

"Bob's a no-show again," she says without preamble. "Gemma can't take much more of these fake-outs. I don't know what to tell them." I can hear Norah screaming "stupid, stupid, stupid" in the background.

"Have you called the office?"

"No answer."

"The apartment?"

"Still no phone, and he promised last week he'd have one put in!"

"Cell?" I ask, pointlessly.

"Yeah right," she retorts.

"Have you driven by his apartment?" I ask, ever so slightly impatient that I have somehow, inch by unwilling inch, inherited the pants in her family.

"Are you completely nuts? I've never been near that place, and I have no plans to start now," she says. Without missing a beat, "Could you?"

I sigh a huge sigh. "I have to be at a firm dinner in two hours. I can swing by there for just a minute but I think you guys are going to need to work out a better system."

"I already called my lawyer," she says. "He just told me to keep good notes on all of Bob's erratic behaviors."

I tell Danny I have to run a quick errand and ask him to start quesadillas for the kids. I zip up a hooded sweatshirt and grab car keys, purse, and the scrap of paper on which I have scrawled Bob's new address. Ten minutes later I find myself on a dingy block of student housing where even the chained-up bicycles look desperate to bolt. I park quickly, sprint into his building, and ask myself yet again what I will do when I see Bob that will not involve my fist and his bloody teeth all over the ground. I wish I'd thought to send Cole by instead, but Bob has been dodging my husband—one of his own best friends—as diligently as he has been avoiding me.

I search for his apartment on the third floor, smelling curries and grease and mold under each successive door along the corridor. When I find his apartment, the sound of Oprah Winfrey loudly interviewing the bra doctor pours out into the hall. I knock. When nobody answers, I knock again. Finally losing patience, I begin to pound.

"Bob, I know you're in there, I can hear the TV!" Open the damn door!" After what feels like minutes, I hear some shuffling and a slow creak. The door cracks an inch. The left side of Bob's face, unshaven and bloated, appears in the gap. If this is what an extravagant midlife sexual spree looks like, I'm sticking with my once-a-weekish.

"What the hell is going on?" I ask. "Let me in."

"Why?"

"You missed visitation again. The girls are melting down." He closes a bloodshot eye for a moment.

"Shit," he whispers, more to himself than me.

His door swings open.

Papers cover every surface, Styrofoam takeout containers are stacked in a precarious pile beside the TV, with half-smoked cigarettes buried in mountains of half-eaten rice and graying mac and cheese. There is more than one half-empty vodka bottle standing open on the kitchen counter. Bob is wearing checked boxers and a UVA Law sweatshirt that may have at one time been Cole's. Everything smells like a pizza box.

"Bob, what the hell?" I ask, too stunned to step beyond the doorway. When he refuses to answer, I stride over to turn down the volume on his TV. "What is up with you?" He stares at the wall behind me and shakes his head. "Bob," I repeat. "What's going on?"

When it becomes clear that he either can't or won't answer me, I start picking up the worst-smelling garbage within reach. Bob stops staring at the wall long enough to say, "Don't," then collapses on the couch to stare at Oprah. I'm flummoxed. I was perfectly willing to buy into the notion that every man within shouting distance of 40 flirts with the purchase of either a BMW Roadster or a Harley-Davidson and repurposes the entire basement for some hare-brained winemaking venture. But I didn't think a midlife crisis involved collapsing back into infancy.

There is no way Bob is having an affair with anything other than Cole's sweatshirt, which looks not to have been washed in weeks.

"Bob," I try again. "I know you won't talk to Marina, but have you been near a computer in the last three weeks? Do you have any idea what's been happening with her? She's been pouring her heart out about you on Facebook and Twitter. She's been so mad at you, she hasn't been able to see straight." He continues to stare at the TV. I don't know whether he's incapable of talking at all or if he's just not talking to me.

I find myself wondering if Cole is going through some sort of midlife freakout himself. I wonder if part of his hostility toward me and my blog has to do with the growing realization that he just isn't going to be the next David Boies or Clarence Darrow. Maybe a man has a midlife crisis when he realizes he is too old to be a professional athlete or an astronaut. For women, the midlife crises happen when we don't recognize the person we used to be for all the carpooling and the picking seeds out of watermelons. Is it possible that 36-year-old men want to be teenagers again while 36-year-old women just want to be grown-ups?

"Gemma had a dance recital last night, Bob. You should have seen her: She's amazing."

Silence. I give up. I'm doing no good here. I try to put my arms around him, but he's still staring. On the front steps of his building, I put in a call to my friend Kellyanne at the law school to ask, as subtly as I can, whether Bob's been coming in there at all.

"Weird that you ask," she says. "He's been here but kind of absent, showing up for class but always in the same suit and mismatched shoes. And his students say he's always hyper-prepared but often with the wrong lecture. In fact, someone told me he gave the same lecture twice last week without even noticing. Something is up but when the dean asked if he was OK he just mumbled something about getting back on his feet."

I thank Kellyanne and quickly head home so I can call Marina. Sitting in my driveway, knowing I'll be late for the party, I describe Bob's strange behavior, the state of his apartment, and Kellyanne's story about work. Marina is quiet for a long, long time. I expect her to call him a selfish asshole. "Oh my God," she finally says. "He's off his meds."

Marina never told me Bob was bipolar. By the time Cole and I met him in law school, he'd been medicated for years. She tells me today, for the first time, that when she first knew him, he was wilder than she was, a sleepless thrill-seeker and joy-rider who would crash for days when it all got to be too much. For their friends, Bob has played Ricky to Marina's Lucy for so long they almost believed it. But Bob has always hated his meds, hated the way they made him feel, Marina tells me. Bob's invisible cape of boringness was, it turns out, a blanket of damp chemicals.

"Has he gone off them before?" I ask.

"Never without discussing it with me and his doctors first, and never for very long," she says, slowly. "But in the last year or so he had started complaining that they made him feel so passive, almost dead. He said his sex drive was all but gone. He said he couldn't write." She pauses. "He told me a few months ago that he felt like I was the mother of three children now, not two. But I've been so certain for so long that he'd get bored and take up with some girl in a sundress, I never even heard it."

I cannot believe this is happening. Marina and I are now immortalized in the law school newspaper for pretending to be work-life experts, because we were stalking an innocent young woman named Amanda Matthews. Marina almost died because she was tailing this girl. And now, based on what my friend has just told me—and the month's worth of garbage piled up in Bob's apartment—I'm thinking it might all have been for nothing, for Lifetime Television. We've been chasing a big fat cliché all over town, all over the Internet, because Lucy forgot to tell me that Ricky is bipolar. I don't want to ask. But I have to. "Do you think he even had an affair?"

Long pause.

"Maybe. Or maybe he just started hanging out with students and that made him feel young and great and like he didn't need the meds anymore. Maybe she was flirting with him in a seminar and he felt fantastic. Every time Bob has ever started to feel really fantastic, he's declared himself cured."

"Does any of this make you less inclined to leave town?" I ask, holding my breath.

"Leave town? Are you insane? He needs me. I'm on my way over there this minute. I'll drop the girls at his mother's."

"But," I say. And then close my mouth. Something I should probably have done a month ago.

******

Readers: What's the most embarassing thing that could happen at a fancy law firm party? And does Erica really need her Armani suit of armor, or is she better off without it? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 13
Updated Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009, at 11:17 AM ET

My fantasies of a long bubble bath and quality time with the deep conditioner have been replaced by the reality of a fast shower and swipe of red lipstick. Cole and I quietly kiss the children goodnight, thank Danny for staying, and then grimly buckle ourselves into the car before I turn to him and say, "OK then, lemme have it."

"It's not a joke, Erica."

"No part of me is joking. None. It's been a hideous day."

"Yeah, for me, too," he says. "Kayne lost."

"What?" My heart flips over. "When did you find out? Why didn't you call me?'

"I'd have thought you'd be delighted. Ana's already got the boys packing the moving truck. They leave town next weekend. The judge felt that Kayne's job demands would require the kids to be in almost full-time child care and that they'd ultimately be better off with their mother, grandma, and soon-to-be stepdad in Ohio. You got what you wanted. Ana gets a whole new life."

"I never wanted you to lose your case. And I think Ana's a horrible person for standing between those boys and their dad. I just think family courts need to recognize that they are holding women to a model of motherhood that's stuck in the last century."

"Well, there's nothing like trading in your hardworking trophy husband for a richer one to advance the cause of women's rights."

"Cole. You of all people should understand that you can't ask women to give up everything to raise their kids, then stand in the way of them pursuing their dreams when the kids are no longer babies!"

We pull up to a red light and Cole looks at me for the first time in a week. "This isn't really about Marina or even Ana at all, is it? The truth is, this is all about you. This crusade has been all about you from the start. You feel like a martyr for having taken time off from your big career, and now you're lashing back at everyone—including me—for holding you down." The light changes and he presses too hard on the gas pedal. We jolt forward so hard that I lose a sparkly hairpin.

"Nobody made you take time off from your job. Nobody made you move back here so we could have a porch and a tire swing and a sandbox out back. You wanted to take time off and you're making the whole world pay for it. You want some kind of purple heart for doing something you chose to do." He shakes his head, finally lowers his voice. "Do you really think it's a coincidence that you've chosen to become a national media expert in my field of professional expertise? Couldn't you have left just a tiny corner of the world for me?"

I breathe deeply, trying to choose among the swarm of angry words buzzing in my head. "I cannot believe," I say, "how threatened you are by my success. I cannot even believe you just said that I am deliberately trying to occupy the sacred private corners of your professional world. I have been listening to you complain about arbitrary family court judges and the meaningless 'best interests of the child' standards for five years now. And I frankly think you're just pissed off that I'm brave enough to put out there in public the things you're barely willing to whisper at the dinner table."

Cole's lips are set in a hard line as he jerks the car into the parking lot in front of the restaurant. He waves jovially to one of the partners before turning to me with his parting shot: "And I can't believe you're willing to cherry-pick sound bites from my litigation career, your best friend's wrecked marriage, and your own unresolved crap with Frances for a goddamn blog."

He gets out, slams the car door, and starts striding for the restaurant. "Tom! Harriet!" he calls to the elderly couple near the front door. "So good to see you." I scramble out the passenger side, slam my wrap inside the car door and have to tug to get it out, and then I trip over the gravel in the parking lot to catch up to him as he greets two other colleagues. I get just close enough to his ear to hiss: "You never liked that I made better grades than you at law school, and you never liked that I got a better clerkship, or made more money at the firm. You've loved having me sidelined so much, you gave away my Armani suit!" He looks startled. I blow past him into the restaurant and find the room.

"Gladys," I say, warmly, kissing the cheek of an elderly woman nearby. "How wonderful to see you. Fantastic necklace!"

There is nothing more painful than walking into a party with a spouse you're not speaking to. Except maybe doing so after he has accused you of cannibalizing your best friend's misery to forward your own career. The fact that I am certain everyone here is whispering about me makes everything that much worse. And as always happens when I feel like everyone's whispering about my professional shortcomings, the thought pops into my mind that—if Cole and I can ever make up—we really should have a third baby. The room is dotted with small candles, a makeshift stage, and bars in every corner. It's sweltering. On one side of the room stand a pair of ice sculptures in the shape of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and the University of Virginia's rotunda.

As I turn from checking my wrap, the first person I see is Kate, the public defender from the brown-bag lunch. She's striding toward me in an amazing short gold sheath dress. It immediately crosses my mind that I need to invite her to the next clothing swap. I consider ducking behind a catering station, but it's too late: She's headed straight for me, smiling broadly, hand extended. I stop a passing waiter and grab a glass of white wine. I drain it so fast my eyes buzz.

"Erica!" she says, then lowering her voice. "Your name really is Erica, isn't it? Because I'm kind of thinking that old Helen wasn't really a Helen." She's still smiling, which leads me to feel only fractionally less foolish. "Should I be worried that hers was the best advice at that entire event?"

"Which part?" I ask, grinning "The part where she explained that the only way to avoid gaining weight growing up in a Boston orphanage is by signing up for the cheerleading squad and avoiding carbs?"

"That was useful advice," she grins. "Although I liked the bit where she said that the best place to find a nanny was on Craigslist."

"OK, OK," I laugh. "She wasn't really supposed to be on that panel. Neither was I. I'm just a stay-at-home mom."

"That's not what I hear. Word around the ice sculptures is that you are an up-and-coming blogging star."

"Oh, that," I say. "I screwed up. I read like three law review articles and thought I was an expert in family law."

"Listen," says Kate, putting a hand on my shoulder, "you shouldn't be that hard on yourself. From what I've read of your blog, you're making some good arguments. The family law system needs a bit of a kick in the rear. I'd maybe tone down some of the gender stereotypes, but I think it's time someone called the family law system out for some of its faults." She lowers her voice. "But if you tell anyone here tonight that I said so, I will deny, deny, deny. By the way, I want you to meet my partner, Karen, when you have a second. She just started at your husband's firm, and she's a big fan of the blog. But don't tell anyone here tonight that she says so." Then Kate plucks a glass of wine off a passing tray, clinks it against my empty one and says, "Good luck! Chin up," and floats away. I scan the room for Cole but don't see him. Because we were extremely late for the speed-drinking round, people are already taking their seats for dinner. I slip my phone out of my purse and duck into the ladies room to check in briefly on Marina. She says she's over at Bob's, that she's spoken to his doctor, and that they have an appointment first thing in the morning. I try to ask how he's doing, but she cuts me off.

"Listen, Erica, I have a ton to do. Let's catch up later, OK?"

Wow, I think, staring at my phone after hanging up. You'd think it was all my fault. Between the chill with Marina and the deep freeze from Cole, I think my lips might start chattering. As I move toward the tables, I can hear the "humorous" speeches finishing up and the salad plates being cleared. The room gets hotter by the second, and the two ice sculptures are already melting down into an anatomically flawless pair of female breasts. I find my place card and slip quietly into my chair. Cole's seat, directly opposite mine, is vacant. I can see him deep in conversation with one of the senior partners at the bar set up on the back corner of the room. I try to catch his eye, but his back is turned toward me. I settle into my seat, swallow my second glass of wine on an empty stomach, and try to make small talk with the young woman to my right. She gets up to call her baby-sitter. The waiter brings dinner and I pick at it, glad to have an excuse to avoid my tablemates.

Cole is still not in his seat when they remove the salmon and start passing out coffee and dessert. The "humorous" skits have now begun: Some paralegals have rewritten all the words to "American Pie" to encapsulate an entire year's worth of firm litigation.

I gamely try to focus on the singing. The paralegals are only just getting warmed up.

Elliot Manning went to court,
His client, she was very short,
But she looked very tall in four-inch heels.
Manning tried to plead her case
But she tripped and landed on her face
The jurors saw her thong and heard her squeals ...

So bye, bye Manning, Feldman, and Frye,
Litigation in the nation is running dry,
We'll all be working at some Starbucks on High
The day, the law firms die ...

Oh Lord. Kill me now. By the time they get through every litigator in the firm, my kids will be in college. I can't believe how many billable hours must have been lost to the crafting of this song; no wonder the economy is in the toilet. The lawyer to my left has begun openly checking his e-mail on his BlackBerry, so I sneak a peak at my own mail, holding my phone in my lap. Traffic numbers continue to rise, but at least the hate mail has tapered off since last night, so maybe the very worst of the relocation squall is really behind me. The drunken paralegals onstage have nowhere to go but onward. Suddenly I hear a familiar name. My heart sinks to the sub basement.

Cole Hirshblatt had a lovely bride,
She mostly chose to stay inside,
She diapered, lunched, and changed their sheets
But suddenly she's a work-life queen,
The star of an online magazine
And losing hubby's cases with her tweets

So bye, bye Manning, Feldman, and Frye,
Why bother with law when Nancy Grace is so fly,
We'll all be working at some Starbucks on High
The day, the law firms die ...

The gasps around the tables are audible. Heads whip around to look at me and then at Cole, still in a heated debate at the back of the room. In the silence left by the audacious paralegals, nobody can miss Cole's voice, raised in anger, as he shouts at the very senior partner opposite him: "Believe it or not, Erica's twice the lawyer I am and has the balls to challenge a family law system that doesn't really work for anybody. I frankly think you're just pissed off that my wife is brave enough to put out there in public the things we're all barely willing to whisper around the conference table."

Monticello and the rotunda continue to melt into uncannily breastlike formations. The paralegals resume verse 2,000 of their song. And my husband stalks back to the table, unfolds his napkin, and sits down opposite me with the tiniest glimmer of a wink. We may get through this after all.

******

Dear readers, here are my next questions for you: Why would Danny the manny have given away Erica's Armani suit? Also, how will Erica react to Cole's apology? Does she pull back from the blog and the advocacy, or take advantage of his softened position? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 14
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009, at 1:34 PM ET

The only thing better than the makeup sex? Makeup housework.

The smell of fresh blueberry pancakes is a happy surprise when I finally I amble downstairs Saturday morning, but that's nothing compared with seeing Cole at the kitchen sink washing dishes. Lest this stunning visual escape my notice, he calls out. "Hey! I'm washing dishes!" I melt.

The next thing I notice—after the pancakes and the dish-cleaning—is my children. The two people I have devotedly bathed, fed, and dressed every single day this month. Yet somehow, between Marina and the blog, they have spent most of their time either bouncing around town in the back of my car or double-parked in front of PBS Kids while I pound on my keyboard. I've been lugging them around like oversized carry-on bags for days now. Sam is reading a Batman book at the kitchen table, and I realize how badly he needs a haircut—he looks like David Cassidy. Ellie needs a new booster seat. She has been the Harry Houdini of all known child restraint systems, but this morning she is listing forward over the kitchen table like Kate Winslett in Titanic. She looks like she could hit the floor at any instant. Come to think of it, she's looking a bit shaggy, too. Haircuts for everyone today!

I shuffle over to the coffeepot and fill a mug. (Has Cole actually emptied the dishwasher? Does this mean we don't even need to discuss our angry words of yesterday?) I can feel the invisible tug of my laptop, the blog, my inbox, reader traffic. I have grown used to checking each of them before waking the children in the morning. But today, I decide that I can just ignore it all. What's Zoe going to do to me if I take off a few hours on a Saturday? Dock my virtual salary?

"Marina called," Cole says, wiping a lick of syrup off Ellie's ear.

"I'll call her after breakfast," I sigh, pulling up a chair next to Sam and reaching for the pancakes.

"I don't think you really need to," he says, ducking down to locate a sponge under the counter, so that I cannot read his face. "She just wanted to ask me some questions about Bob and his medication and some other involuntary treatment stuff. I think she's crazy busy today. Maybe just give her a bit of time to get things stabilized over there?"

"She's really going to blame me?" I can't keep the annoyance out of my voice.

"I think she feels like she spent a little too much time last month worrying about stealing the hard drive and not enough time really talking to Bob."

"But I kept telling her to talk to him. She was the one who decided she needed to go dark to punish him. She knew about his history. Not that she bothered to share it."

"Let it go, Erica. She'll be herself in a day or two. Marina always needs someone to crash into and fly off of. You know that. So right now it's you."

I swallow some pancake and reach for another. "Let's get out of the house today," I say, impulsively. "Outdoors. Away. Nature."

Cole looks like he's been tripped with a hockey stick. The last time we went camping together (in law school), I brought a Water-pik, a flat iron, and my rolling suitcase. We have more or less stayed indoors ever since.

As I start to make the sandwiches and collect juice boxes, Cole pulls out a laptop and gets online to figure out where in nature we should go. Sam, accustomed to weekends alternating between the kids' museum and the playground, helpfully suggests things like "the pyramids of Greece" and "Madagascar" and "Kalamazoo." It's kind of great to finally see the Fun Czar forced to work within a committee structure.

Later, when everyone is buckled into their corner of the car and Cole points us dubiously toward Nature, he turns to me and says, uneasily, "Er, so what was that you were saying last night about your suit?"

"Huh?" I am fiddling with the snack bag on the floor at my feet.

"You said I gave away your Armani suit because I was threatened by your career?"

"Yes," I say, feeling stupid. I suppose we are going to have to talk about the fight after all. I stare out my window. "Well, it showed up at my clothing swap a few weeks ago, and I was told everyone at the law school had worn it over the past several years. But I never would have given that suit away in a billion years. So I guess I went a little nuts and figured you were the only one who would have done it."

We stop at a red light. Cole shakes his head slowly and sets his mouth in the line I recognize from last night. "I would never give that suit away. I know what that suit represents to you, or what you think it represents."

"What does that mean?" I say, rewinding abruptly to the angry place before the makeup sex. We sit in silence.

Then suddenly Ellie, who's been looking at Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and rhythmically kicking at the back of my seat, blurts out her first complex sentence. "Go now."

We'd been so lost in reprising the dumb argument about dumb things, we'd both missed the traffic light turning green. When did I start missing things, anyhow? Cole doesn't drive. We're both turned to face the backseat. Ellie just spoke! I put my hand on his knee and squeeze a little. Ellie talked. And her first sentence may have been the most pragmatic words spoken by any member of our family in days.

"Ellie, did you just say 'go now?' " I beam and nod wildly. For weeks I've been spinning out in my guilty brain the dread day Ellie would say "Danny" instead of "Mamma." But in real life children tend to punish their mothers' return to work in far less dramatic fashion, like peeing on a throw pillow.

Sam, perhaps realizing that his years of monologuing are about to come to an abrupt and unwelcome end, interrupts to announce, "You are so beautiful, girl-mommy. Like a sweet ole car." I suspect it's a sort of first-child Hail Mary, a way to forever stake his rhetorical claim, but I elect to take it as a compliment. Especially when Cole grins and agrees that I am indeed as beautiful as a sweet old car. We turn on Dan Zanes and sing. We are stunningly bad singers.

Cole has chosen an easy trail near one of the mountain resorts in the Blue Ridge nearby. We park the car, hike for 10 minutes, and then demolish our cheese sandwiches and pears as if we have just scaled Kilimanjaro. We finish the last 10 minutes of the hike hauling an empty cooler. Ellie, in the jogging stroller, has been chattering much of the way, mostly in what sounds like fluent Portuguese. Still, she's making sounds we've never heard before and every once in a while we hear a distinct "ready now" or "go now." Then, evidently exhausted from all the firing up of neurons and flame-throwing of synapses, she collapses on my outstretched legs like a wet towel and sleeps hard, lips working fiercely like she is trying kiss her dreams.

Cole and Sam fly a kite and I close my eyes and try to suck out the last of the autumn sunlight like a peach. When Ellie wakes, we head down the hill and back to the car. There's a fall harvest festival happening at the mountain resort, and the children smell cotton candy and beg to hear the music. Cole and I smell the children and the cotton candy. We wordlessly agree. The day stretches into the evening. The kids parade down the mountain, with noise-makers and streamers, and then a tiny fireworks shows with about four real explosions to go with a lot of gray smoke and noise. There's kettle corn and caramel apples and local beer. Jolie Fille is playing Cajun music. And as Sam dances in circles with his sparkler and Ellie drutters her fine new words to herself from on top of his shoulders, Cole holds my hand and I shiver. This is the life we chose, and this is why we chose it.

When we get home, I carry a sleeping Ellie to her crib and Cole gets crazy spinning Sam into his pajamas while I check voice mail. There are 14 new messages. My first thought is that something terrible has happened to Bob. But the first message, and all 13 that follow, shows the same Washington, D.C., number on my caller ID. And every one of the 14 messages has the same message, left in an ever higher register: "Erica. Zoe Fine here from BarCzar. Where the hell are you? Listen, the cable bookers are burning my cell up. Senator Lyndon Laden just left his wife of 20 years for some chickie who works at the Library of Congress! And his wife is giving a press conference in the morning. Your timing couldn't be better. The bookers all discovered Splitigation at the same time and they're going nuts for your advice. We need you on TV tomorrow night to talk about divorce and rat-bastard men and Splitigation. Call me soonest. The instant you get this. It's Huge. Huge. You're going to crush."

******

All right, readers. Next: What happens to Erica under the bright lights of cable news?

If Marina and Erica were still speaking what tips would Marina give for rocking a television interview? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 15
Updated Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, at 2:46 PM ET

My inbox isn't quite as overheated as my voice mail. There's just one brief message, from someone named Whit Campbell at CNN. It, too, is a little less overheated than Zoe Fine would have suggested. It says merely:

Ms. Hirshblatt, would you be interested in coming on Spencer Buckley's show, The Buck Stops Here tomorrow evening to discuss the Lyndon Laden affair? In light of the breaking news, the network is doing a special Sunday night show. Please let me know at your earliest possible convenience so I can arrange for a pre-interview with myself or another one of the producers. Best, Whit Campbell.

My phone rings before I can hit reply. It's Zoe, taking a deep drag of nothing. "Jesus H., Erica, where the hell have you been all day? I'm stroking out here."

"Sorry, Zoe, I was hiking with my family and didn't have any phone reception."

"Hiking?" she asks, in the same exact voice one might use to say, "Drowning rabbits?"

"Yes, hiking," I say, ruggedly, in the same exact voice one might use to say, "and also shooting moose from helicopters."

But Zoe is so excited that she's begun to wheeze. "CNN has been trying to book you for tomorrow for a special show to talk about the Lyndon Laden divorce. It's just huge. Huge for BarCzar. Huge for you. You have to do it Erica. It's just spectacularly good timing for everyone."

"Except maybe Mrs. Senator Laden," I mumble.

"Whaaaa?" But Zoe is a snowball hurtling down a hill. "I called them back about an hour ago and said you can do it in-studio from Washington tomorrow night. You can do it, right? They're sending a car to Charlotte, North Carolina. That's where you live right? Look, make sure they spell BarCzar right on the banner, OK? With the period and everything? Ok? Now, listen, I have to go do a thing. But call me tomorrow when it's over, OK? Just remember, young, voicey, hip ... " She's still churning out synonyms as she shuts off her phone.

I take a deep breath and go upstairs to find Cole. I have to admit that "What will Cole say about all this?" was in fact the third thought to cross my mind when I heard Zoe's messages. The second was, "What will my mom think about all this?" The first was, "What will I wear?"

I wish I could call Marina about that last question, because she would know and she would be right. But I don't know how she will feel about my parlaying her family tragedy into a major TV appearance. Cole first, I tell myself. Marina later.

Cole is just shutting Sam's bedroom door and tiptoeing out as I climb upstairs. He is still basking in the afterglow of the bonfires and the kettle corn; smiling the wolfish smile of a man who's caroused in nature all day and now wants to carouse with his woman. The question for me: sex or disclosure? I opt for disclosure. CNN is waiting.

"So, honey, I just got an e-mail from somebody at CNN. I guess Senator Laden just kicked his wife to the curb, and they want me to talk about it on Spencer Buckley. Because of Splitigation." I wince and screw up my nose at him. "So, what do you think?"

Cole stops advancing toward me and sags against the door of Ellie's bedroom. "That was fast," he says. He zips up his fleece.

"Yeah."

"Do you want to do it?"

"I think so," I say, staring hard at my sneakers. "But I absolutely don't need to do it if it makes you uncomfortable. I mean, you're already in hot water at work over Splitigation. I can totally call them back and say I'm not interested.

"Not for me, Erica. I can handle it. If you really are interested, you should do it. But," he peers at me, "don't do it to beat up on me, or Bob, or your Mom, OK? Do it because you're smart and good at it. If this is what you want to do, do it well."

"I'm sorry," I say, hoping that covers it all, and also what's to come next.

"Me too," he says, starting toward our bedroom.

"Maybe you can help me out with Splitigation over the next few days?" I ask. "You know, sort of remind me to be a lawyer first and flame-throwing daughter of Frances second?"

"Yeah, sure," he says, without turning around. I duck into Sam's room and kiss the lump under the comforter where I imagine his head to be. Then I flick on the ballerina nightlight next to Ellie's crib. "Up in a few minutes," I call to my closed bedroom door before I run downstairs to accept CNN's offer.

Dear Mr. Campbell, I'd be delighted to do the Spencer Buckley show tomorrow night. Just let me know where to be, and at what time. Yours, Erica Hirshblatt.

If I'm still good at anything, it's research. Research is why my kids sleep through the night, and research is why they drink only organic milk. Sam and Ellie have been raised almost entirely by the Parenting shelves at Barnes & Noble. My nervous friends called their mothers to ask about night terrors, lice shampoos, or croupy coughs. But I called Marina and bought books. I decide that if I have to choose between puffy eyes and stupefied silence on national television, I'll take the puffy eyes. So from 10 p.m. to midnight, I research Sen. and Mrs. Lyndon Laden from Illinois. They fell in love at the University of Chicago (one of those fraternity-sorority deals), she supported him through law school on her teacher's salary and then quit to have babies when he became district attorney, tried huge cases, then ran for the Senate. Two beautiful platinum-blone daughters, 9 and 12. A rising star in the party, the senator has authored two best-selling books about education reform and his name had been floated for a cabinet post in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Another golden boy with lead feet: This was not, as it turns out, the his first affair. There are e-mails with icky pet names. There are photographs. It's all so familiar, you almost don't have to bother with the details. Except that he moved out of his home last night and moved in with the pregnant girlfriend.

Received 2:15 a.m.
Dear Erica,
We need you in the makeup chair at the studio in D.C. by 9:30 p.m. Hit time for the segment is 10:20 pm. We'll send a car for you if you send me your address. A producer, probably me, will call you midafternoon for a brief pre-interview. If you have any other questions, please let me know. Best, Whit Campbell.

When I can't stand reading about the Ladens any longer, I research Spencer Buckley, whose late-night cable news show I have never managed to watch for more than 15 minutes. Buckley made his name in the Ronald Reagan years, chiefly for following the president around, putting coasters under his glasses. He had a stint as a local TV weatherman in Hawaii. It seems he once argued a high-profile case in favor of criminalizing sex toys. He has said on-air that he doesn't think "girl lawyers" should get to clog up the courts with "fake crimes" like date rape and sexual harassment. He's been married three times. OK. This guy is probably not going to be a fan.

Between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. I devote my time to pacing the downstairs, brewing red tea and a surviving a lightning round of breathing hard into a paper bag under Cole's desk. By the time the kids begin to stir at 6:15, I look and feel like I've been through some weeklong hostage negotiation. And that's when I start rooting through the closets for something to wear. By 6:45, I'm done ransacking the downstairs closets. I pop in Finding Nemo and give the kids a Pop Tart each so I can go upstairs. I claw my way through our bedroom closets, yanking stained blouses from hangers and throwing them into a pile on the floor.

Cole awakens the same way each morning: By sitting straight upright and yelling "whaaaa?"—a tic he acquired during Sam's brief colicky period and cannot seem to shake. I am dumping plastic bins full of old work clothes onto the bedroom floor and, fighting back tears, I beg him to please, please, please help me find one decent garment to wear because the car service is coming to get me in five hours. Together, we grimly sort through one old, ill-fitting suit after another. The word "Armani" hangs in the air between us, unspoken. By 8:30, I am dressed in a blue blouse, khaki blazer (left unbuttoned), khaki skirt (cannot be buttoned) and red high-heeled shoes. I have hung an identical backup outfit in a plastic bag next to the front door.

I again consider calling Marina, but I still don't really know what to say. Then I consider calling my mother, but I don't really want to know what she'll say. The only person I do want to talk to right now is Cole, but we are speeding wordlessly past each other like emergency room nurses, trying to get the kids fed and dressed, all my notes printed out and organized in a green binder, before we sit down together to watch Mrs. Laden's press conference.

It lasts all of 90 seconds. She steps up to the microphone set up on the lawn in front of the family home and reads a prepared statement in which she says that she was shocked to learn of her husband's recent affair, that she has no idea what she will do next, and that she begs the media to afford herself and her daughters some privacy in this very trying time. She takes no questions.

There is, perhaps, something to be said for tweeting the collapse of your marriage after all.

At 11:15, 45 minutes early, a black town car pulls into our driveway. Cole opens the door to tell the driver I am coming while I take another run at the brown paper bag in the downstairs bathroom. I hug the children and then Cole puts his arms around me and kisses my nose. "You'll be great," he says. "You don't have to answer all their crazy TV questions. You just have to argue your case. Go get 'em baby."

The driver helps me into the car and then pulls slowly out of the driveway. He tells me his name is Hughie, to help myself to the free bottled water and that we should be in D.C. in two hours. I spread my papers all over the back seat and begin to make careful notes of the big points I want to address. Nuanced points. Lawyerly points. By the time we hit 29-North, Hughie is asking if I mind if he plays a little music. I smile and say it's fine.

What comes blasting out through the speakers cannot be readily classified by genre. It takes me a few minutes to realize that I might just be listening to my first Christian Zydeco.

"So, I guess you're wondering who's singing?" says Hughie, after a minute or two. "Do you think its Dylan? A lot of folks think this is Bob Dylan."

Before I can tell him that it does sound an awful lot like Bob Dylan, he continues. "Of course a lot of people also think it sounds more like Cat Stevens. Doesn't it sound a bit like a sort of Cajun Cat Stevens?"

"It does, a bit," I say, glancing up from my notes to see him gazing shyly at me in the rearview mirror. I don't know what I'm missing here.

"Or don't you think it sounds a bit like a young, Cajun Cat Stevens crossed with an old Bob Marley?" he urges.

He starts to sing along to the music. When I still fail to react he starts to sing along a good bit louder. When he clearly cannot stand it a minute longer, he yells into the rearview mirror: "It's me!"

"I'm sorry?" I startle, smiling up at him nervously.

"It's me! Singing! Isn't that amazing? Wait wait, lemme skip ahead to the next track so you can appreciate the range here," and then he skips to another song that sounds like the first. "I'm very versatile that way," he says, bobbing his head and humming along.

We drive for a few more miles as Hughie silently appreciates Hughie before he says he wants me to listen to another version of the same song from a live performance he did a few weeks back. He asks if I am hearing the banjo. I assure him I am. After about 10 more minutes of this, I ask him to please turn it down a little. Politely. Lawyerly. He says he just wants me to hear just one more song. I tell him I just really need to prepare. "I've never been on TV before. I feel like I'm cramming for a final back here," I smile.

"Wait, wait," says Hughie. "I'll play you some of 'God's Washboard' That will relax you."

I tell him one more song would be fine, but it isn't fine. People used to listen when I asked them to do things. What is it about me that screams "kitchen wallpaper?"

By the time we pull in to the CNN studios, I have been quizzed closely on the differences between two seemingly identical versions of the title song on his live concert album, Driving, and given nine copies of his CD to dispense to anyone "famous" I may encounter at the TV studio. Hughie tells me he will pick me up in the exact same spot at 10:45 tonight, wishes me luck, and promises a reprise of Hughie Comes Alive on the way home. I am nine hours early for my cable-television appearance, and I haven't pulled an all-nighter that wasn't baby-based in more than a decade. Nobody ever called for my pre-interview, the buttons are gaping on my blouse and I feel completely underprepared. Not even Hughie takes me seriously. I'm hoping nothing else can go wrong.

******

About half my e-mail is from people who think this story can't end happily unless Erica goes back to a law firm. The other half want her to take better care of her family. Is there any middle ground here? What does a happy ending even look like in the mommy wars? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 16
Posted Friday, Oct. 2, 2009, at 1:31 PM ET

It seems nobody at CNN has ever encountered a guest who shows up nine hours early for her show. When I explain politely to an intern in a black turtleneck with a white bra underneath that I am here for the special Sunday night edition of The Buck Stops Here, she looks at me blankly then parks me in the green room. The green room! Marina would be freaking out right now. I reach for my phone in my bag but then put it back.

The green room, as it turns out, is dark yellow. There is a boxy beige couch, a coffee table, a coffeepot, and coffee. A television tuned to CNN plays Mrs. Laden's press conference on a loop. There is an autographed hockey stick that says "The Puck Stops Here! Thanks a million, Buck!" A not-very-clean electric razor is charging on a side table next to an MSNBC pen. The other door leads to a small makeup room, currently vacant. And for the first time in years, I am staring straight down the barrel of nine hours of "me time." It's hellish.

I try to slow my breathing and focus on the interview like it's a law-school exam question: What do I really want to say here tonight, about divorce and women and their families? Why can't I talk to adults the way I talk to children? With children you can be direct, simple. But suddenly it seems I can no longer say anything to Cole unless I sidle up to it diagonally. And just about every word I said to Marina last month was rooted in a misunderstanding, which led to even more imbalance on the blog. Even Hughie, the driver, can say what he wants in clear, declarative sentences. I am a lawyer: I can be straightforward and honest, and people will listen. "Grow, up Erica," I tell myself.

I pull out my green binder and a stack of law review articles, and grab the MSNBC pen. I can ace this thing. I know I can.

It takes almost an hour to do my makeup. The makeup woman appears to be set on fashioning an entirely new face over my existing one, and what starts off as a fun flashback to childhood slumber parties ("Hey, that black eyeliner is awesome …") quickly starts to feel like onerous urban redevelopment ("I'm just going to put concealer and powder all over your cheeks and draw in some cheekbones with the contour ..." ). I haven't eaten anything since last night, and my stomach grouses quietly as she works. An intern comes in and ties Anderson Cooper's dog to the couch in the green room. Jeff Toobin stops by to pick up a notebook. He's very handsome. I introduced myself shyly and tell him he has a bit of cream cheese on his tie. He thanks me.

Just as the makeup woman is renovating my lips, Spencer Buckley himself strides into the small room and takes the chair opposite me. He's so short that his feet don't even reach the ground when he leans back. Weirdly, he has a normal-sized torso but also teensy little legs. Now I understand why they have to put him behind a desk every night. Buckley has congressional hair, meaning that each strand has been chemically plumped up to look three times larger than it actually is.

"Hello. There. Gorgeous!" he booms, as he swivels his makeup chair around to face me.

"Er, hi there, Mr. Buckley," I say, just as the makeup artist giggles, "Hey, Spence!"

Right. He was talking to her.

He swivels the chair back to look at himself in the mirror and says, "You must be the Splitigation lady, huh? You're a lot cuter than you write; that's for sure." He winks, and I long for Purell. The woman doing my makeup, ditching me with only the left half of my top lip done, swiftly goes to work on Buckley. I check my iPhone for messages. One line from Cole: Good luck. Another from Whit Campbell: Sorry no pre-interview. Crazy day. Just the standard divorce stuff. Good luck!

Just the standard divorce stuff? Who the hell has ever had just a standard divorce?

The work on my top lip finally having been completed, I watch the first part of the show from the green room. First, Spencer Buckley introduces a taped piece about the Laden's marriage, his meteoric Senate career, the tawdry affair. His other guest is a political consultant who, perhaps not surprisingly, expresses the decisive view that Sen. Laden's political career is probably over.

"But should it be over?" asks Buckley. "Should it? Shouldn't what happens in your pants stay in your pants?" He looks earnestly at the camera. "When we come back, someone who wants to give Mrs. Laden a little Lorena Bobbitt-style advice about what's in her husband's pants. Our next guest thinks women should stop taking their husbands' infidelity lying down and start taking it to the streets! When The Buck Stops Here—right after these messages."

Everything after that happens on fast forward. I'm hustled in to the studio and hastily stuffed behind the desk next to Spencer Buckley. I smile nervously as one technician reaches up my jacket with a microphone he clips to my lapel and another stuffs an earpiece in my ear. It pops right out.

"It's too big," breathes the technician. "Get me a smaller goddamn earpiece. Please!" People scurry. Buckley scans his notes, refusing to look at me. I breathe deeply. A small burp comes out, startling the technician fiddling with my lapel. Then another, smaller earpiece is jammed into my ear. Still too big. There's no time to locate another one. The makeup girl darts forward to pluck something small that's lodged in my hair. Cat fur. I try to think of something clever to say about that but wind up staring dumbly as she balls it up wordlessly and walks off. It's very, very hot under the lights. I wonder if my new contoured cheekbones will melt right off my face, midsegment. Has that ever happened?

"You'll have to hold the earpiece to your ear," barks someone. I stuff my finger in my ear like I'm out on a beach, covering a typhoon. Then a disembodied voice from inside the earpiece instructs me to look at Spence, not the camera or the monitor.

"OK," I whisper.

"And don't talk back when we start talking in your earpiece," comes the voice.

"Sorry," I mouth, silently.

"Stop it," says the voice. "And we're live in 4 … 3 … 2 …1."

Buckley leaps to life and smiles ferociously into the camera. "What comes next for Senator and Mrs. Laden? Time was, a woman would handle her husband's extracurricular activities like a lady. Imagine Jackie Kennedy holding a press conference on the White House lawn to bellyache about her husband's philandering. Please. But our next guest is a lawyer and writer on the incendiary new women's blog Splitigation. She says it's time women stopped acting like ladies and started fighting like men. Erica Hirshblatt, welcome to The Buck Stops Here."

I open my mouth to speak but the monitor shows me on a slight time delay. And so as I begin to thank him for having me on the show, the me on the studio monitor is just opening her mouth to start to say something. And then before she, or I, manage to say anything, Buckley is turning to look at me again with a small, feral smile.

"A few weeks ago, you posted on your blog, Splitigation, the following advice for a woman who's just discovered that her husband is cheating on her. ..."

On the monitor I can see the screen has been filled with a long quote from my first Facebook posting, which Zoe Fine had transferred to the blog and which Buckley is now reading aloud:

Welcome to the First Night of Your Divorce. ... Hang on to the kids. If you let him have the kids while you are out having sex with strangers tonight, you will spend years in court fighting to see your kids. ... Figure out to a decimal point what's in your bank accounts and IRAs. ... Hide the jewelry. … Male escorts = cheaper + more discreet.

Buckley looks back at me and punches a finger in my direction: "So, tell me, is that the sort of legal advice you'd be giving Betsy Laden tonight, on the first night of her divorce?"

I start to explain that these were chiefly attempts at humor, but the earpiece pops out of my ear. I have to jam it back in and hold it there and on the monitor I can see, in time delay, my mouth open and shut once again, like a cod. Then the me of two seconds ago is quickly replaced by another block quote from Splitigation, which Buckley is reading, with relish:

Rummage through any old love letters between you and your spouse, with an eye toward anything that looks or smells like a promise about marital assets. We're looking for birthday or Valentine's Day cards filled with the usual sentiments like "I'll always love you and take care of you," and "everything that is mine is yours, especially the widescreen TV.

Buckley points at me again: "Is that the way women should win in a divorce? By blackmailing their husbands with old love letters?"

"Look," I finally interject, "you're trying to impeach me with my own testimony here. ... You're just cherry- picking the most inflammatory. ..." A voice suddenly hisses in my ear "Erica. Stop swiveling in the chair!"

"OK," I tell the voice.

"Not to me; talk to Spence!" hisses the voice.

Buckley is still throwing up selected quotations from Splitigation, with lots of ellipses to cover any inadvertent reasonableness I may have shown: "And you also seem to have very strong views about the need for mothers to grab their children and leave town, Ms. Hirshblatt. That's what we used to call kidnapping. But your advice on Splitigation for Mrs. Laden?

Courts seem to be completely clueless about the simple fact that it's in the best interests of the child to have a happy parent. And what parent can possibly be happy trapped in the hollow shell of a life they have outgrown? A life they may never have wanted in the first place?

"That's a pretty sad picture of marriage; don't you think? Poor, defenseless women trapped in hollow shells of lives they have outgrown?" Buckley smiles into the camera. "I sure am glad you didn't handle my divorce; I'll tell you that much."

"I bet you are glad, Spence," I say, finally tearing my eyes off the time-delayed monitor and letting the umbilical cord connecting my ear to the nagging producer drop to my shoulder. "Because if I had represented your first, or second, or even third wives in their divorces, you wouldn't have the Porsche or the house on the Virgin Islands. Does your first wife have a Porsche? Did you even pay for your children's college educations? One recent British study showed that the minute a man leaves a childless marriage, his income instantly rises by 25 percent. Their wives have a poverty rate of 27 percent—almost three times' their former husbands. And another study shows that, on average, women's standards of living drop by 27 percent after divorce. Jackie Kennedy could afford to be a 'lady,' Spence. But, by that metric, most women today really can't."

"And so your sage legal advice is to steal the hard drive and ..." he rifles through his notes "make like a bank robber and grab all the money and run?"

"No. Spence. My advice is simply that women should be hard-headed and pragmatic about the collapse of their marriage. They should treat it as an economic event, not an emotional one. And that there's a name for men who tell women to shut up and stop complaining while they're getting screwed against their will."

"And we're out," interrupts the voice on my shoulder. "Talk us out, Spence." But Spencer Buckley just blinks a few times, and they cut to a commercial. Before I know it, I'm being hastily unplugged from my earpiece and microphone and hustled out of the studio so the next guest can be seated. Buckley never looks at me. As I collect my things in the green room, the makeup woman gives me a big thumbs-up and asks me if I want some baby wipes to remove all the makeup.

"No, I think I'll keep it on for a while," I say, and check my iPhone for messages. There are three. The first is from Whit Campbell: Way to go there Momzilla. I'm impressed! Everyone's buzzing. And don't take this the wrong way but you really are cuter than you write :)!

The second is from Cole: You looked great, honey. But fair and balanced? Not so much.

And the last comes, blessedly, from Marina: OMG, you are a goddess. You so rocked that! (And the new cheekbones! Beyond, beyond.) Baby mine. You're gonna be a star!

******

Dear readers: What does Erica's mother think of Erica's brand of feminism? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 17
Posted Monday, Oct. 12, 2009, at 1:44 PM ET

Chapter 17

The ride back to Charlottesville is a wild rumpus on four wheels. I make Hughie stop at the CVS on Dupont Circle for a bottle of cheap Oak Leaf chardonnay and some Solo cups. Then Hughie and I work up a scorching two-part harmony to "Howl for the Holy Ghost." But every few minutes I have to tell him to turn it down, because my cell phone is ringing itself silly. Zoe is over the moon. She's already gotten calls for me to do two radio shows first thing in the morning. My sister calls from Boston, baffled but proud. Then Marina calls, so frantic with excitement she can hardly speak. After the preliminaries ("hair looked great ... makeup was fantastic ... blouse totally made your eyes pop ..."), we each blurt out apologies at the same time.

"Marina, I'm sorry I got so caught up with the blog. I totally lost touch with reality ..." I say just as she offers, "It was ridiculous for me to blame you for what happened with Bob ..."

We laugh, promise to meet up tomorrow for coffee, and hang up. I feel like I can breathe again. Until we pull into my neighborhood, close to 1 in the morning, and I start wondering whether Cole has waited up for me. He's probably sleeping—hopefully sleeping—I tell myself, and I glug some more white wine just for insurance purposes. I didn't think the adrenaline high from television could survive so much travel and so very much Hughie, but between the e-mails and the phone calls, I'm still buzzing.

Hughie lets me out of the car only after I agree to take three more CDs, an autographed harmonica, and his business card. Laden with this all this bounty and the half-empty bottle of chardonnay, I teeter up the front steps to my house and open the door as gently as I can with full hands. Cole is in his pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved T-shirt in the darkened living room, hunched over with his forearms on his knees. Probably the very first time Eve came home a little tipsy from a bachelorette party, Adam was waiting for her in precisely this posture: still-life of the profoundly wronged male. I drop my purse, binder, wine, and collected Hughie paraphernalia on the coffee table, and drop into the overstuffed armchair opposite him.

"You looked great," he says, looking up and offering one of those lipless smiles that reflects either humorless mirth or the fact that he's just ruptured a kidney.

"Thank you," I say. We sit in silence for a minute. I was hoping he'd noticed the cheekbones, but evidently we're moving on.

"Are you planning on taking the kids and just leaving me?" he finally asks, looking up at me as if he's all but given up on us.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Erica, nobody who writes the way you write and talks the way you talk about marriage could possibly be in a happy one," he says. "Listening to you tonight, anyone would guess you're married to a serial cheater with a rage disorder."

I feel my eyes stretch to near-popping, so random is this accusation. "Cole, that's insane. What I write and say has absolutely nothing to do with you or with us. I love you. I have never thought for even a minute about taking the kids and leaving you."

He's on his feet now, pacing the length of the area rug. "Well, you sure have a lot of displaced anger you've directed toward all the remaining husbands of America."

"But it has nothing to do with my husband," I repeat, baffled that he can't see the difference between my work and my private life. "When I talk about unhappy marriages I'm talking about other people's marriages. About the average cheating husband and the average stay-at-home mom."

"And what about the average cheating wife? What about the average stay-at-home dad? Do they even get walk-on roles in your cramped little view of the modern American family?"

"I just don't know of a whole lot of female senators who ditch their clueless husbands for the perky summer intern. I promise that when we achieve that kind of perfect gender parity in this country, I'll rail against the women with equal fervor."

He blinks at me and sits down again heavily. "Whatever happened," he finally asks, "to the promises of balance and moderation in your future media appearances?"

"That jerk was baiting me! He was quoting me selectively and trying to make me look unhinged."

"Erica, you've given him a lot to work with. He could have picked any three sentences at random from Splitigation and put them up there on the screen and you'd have looked unhinged."

"Are you taking his side?" I sputter. "He was a Neanderthal!"

"I thought you were there to talk about the Laden divorce, not do Punch and Judy with the host."

"Well, he punched first."

"And then you basically called him, and men who think like him, rapists."

I reach for the Oak Leaf and swig straight from the bottle. Then I put it back on the coffee table much harder than I'd planned. There will be a mark.

"Look, I didn't expect you to be delighted with what I said out there, but I thought you'd at least understand. The man was a cretin. He deliberately set out to embarrass me."

Cole is rubbing at his face like he wants to push his skin right off the bones. It's not just the show that's bothering him. He's still only halfway through the fight he started and never finished last week in the car. I wait. I can see in the way he's looking at me that I've become someone he doesn't recognize, a person he'd hate if he met her at a conference of divorce lawyers.

"Look." He rubs his face again. "I get that you feel like you want to matter again, to be respected again. And I really do get that you feel like you need to help other people, and I even get that you thought you were helping Marina when you were pushing her to split up her family."

"She apologized to me tonight," I cut him off. "That wasn't all my fault."

"Look, I don't want to make this about fault. I just want you to really think about whether this is the way you want to be putting yourself out there in the world again. Do you really believe you're helping people? Serving people? Doling out provocative divorce tips on the Web? Saying indefensible, scandalous things on cable talk shows? You're a smart person, a great lawyer. I can't see where turning yourself into a cartoon of a feminist helps you or anyone else. You used to laugh at the women at law school who spewed crap like you spewed tonight! Do you really think you can be a serious lawyer when you're turning yourself into the constitutional Hooters girl?"

"Well, what about Marcy?" I grab my phone and check my e-mail. "What about Marcy Elliott? I'm helping her! She wrote in after the show tonight thanking me for standing up for all the used-up throwaway wives and said I'd inspired her to try to get sole custody of her kid." I scroll down. "What about this woman from Indiana who says her husband is months behind in child support? What about the 20 e-mails from women whose husbands fought them for joint custody and then just ditch the kids with a babysitter?"

"Erica."

"No, Cole, you need to listen to me. I understand that the blog is embarrassing to you. That it's unserious and unprofessional, and un-"—I'm really feeling the wine here—"un-gravitas-y. But I didn't set out to embarrass you, and I didn't set out to glom onto your career. This isn't about you. I am not plotting my divorce from you. I'm a lawyer, too. I like this, and I am really good at this. You've been pushing me for a year to get back to work."

"I meant a real job, Erica, not a cable news freak show. The reason Danny is still working for us is so you could look for a real job. A job that's worthy of you."

"Ah, so now it's unworthy."

I'm shouting now. Loud enough to wake the children. I haven't shouted in years, not counting tonight's TV performance. Cole starts to shush me, then thinks better of it. He stands up again and shrugs. "Unworthy. Yes. Beneath you. You are a fine person and a great lawyer and, at least until recently, a good mother. But none of those facts is in evidence in your current, absurd, vocation." He pauses and looks straight at me. "Be very careful, Erica. You're becoming ridiculous."

"And you're becoming as pompous and sexist as Spencer Buckley."

We stare at each other. Usually our fights wend their way toward a better place, even if it takes a few days to get there. But this one seems to have dropped us someplace bad and then bolted. There's nothing to say. I gather my binder, my Hughie CD, and my wine, and I head upstairs to bed.

I used to believe that the principle difference between stay-at-home moms and working moms was the Uncrustables. But today I learn that it's shopping. Marina and I are on a tear to get me some new TV suits. Marina? She says she is looking for some Lululemon athletica boogie crop pants. I have no idea what that means, but she's determined.

It turns out that I have forgotten how to shop seriously. Once you have children, there are basically only three types of shopping: online at 1 a.m. with a glass of merlot, crashing crazily through Target for items that will total precisely $200 no matter you buy, or Marshalls at 3 on a Friday afternoon. And that's the saddest kind of shopping of all.

(Something terrible happens at Marshall's on Friday afternoons. All the stay-at-home women who have waited all week to treat themselves swarm in and finger the scarves and the perfumes and the shoes. You can see in their eyes that they will never, ever find what they are looking for. They are the ones who buy the gourmet chocolate-covered coffee beans and the freesia-scented candles that are stacked next to the checkout counters. But what Marina and I are engaged in today isn't just aspirational. It's alchemy. We need to turn me into a TV star.)

This morning the video of me telling Spencer Buckley that there's a name for men who tell women to shut up and stop complaining while they're getting screwed has gone viral on YouTube under the heading "The Buck Stops Talking: Feminist Blogger Takes Out Blowhard Buckley." I did three radio interviews this morning (ostensibly about Splitigation but in actual fact about what it felt like to render the biggest mouth on cable news speechless). I'm booked to do a couple more shows this week. And I've blogged items about the Laden divorce, the clichéd treatment of women's issues on cable television shows, and the Jon and Kate split in just one morning. Traffic is through the roof. I'm having lunch with Zoe Fine on Friday.

But that all means that I need a work wardrobe, stat. We start at Sephora and Marina fills me in on a lifetime of female sorcery merely by introducing me to powder eyeliner. I don't even know how it's possible that I completely missed out on powder eyeliner, but I decide immediately that this is another failure of Frances that can never be remedied or rectified. Marina quickly cheers me up with a Shu Uemura mascara. And a new Coach bag. We are not shopping like women with wants. We shop like women with needs. It feels wonderful.

As we stop for a latte, my iPhone beeps with another message. It's Whit Campbell. I smile.

"What?" says Marina.

"Nothing," I grin, looking down at my phone.

"What?" she repeats, insistent that I spill it.

"Just an e-mail from a producer at CNN," I grin.

"Are you going on again?"

"I don't think so," I say. "Lemme check." I check

You guessed right. Lucy the makeup girl told me Spence said that you were cuter than you write. She said she almost fell over. Thank you for waiting to take it out on him during the show and not in the makeup chair. Made for much better television. Everyone here just loved you. Let's have you back soon.
Whit

I must be smiling again because Marina is peering at me like she's missed something.

"Is he cute?" she asks.

"No idea," I say, snapping the phone off and back into my bag.

"He sounds cute ..." she says, narrowing her eyes at me as if I've changed my hair color and she's only just noticed. "Now, where can we find you some new lingerie?

Cole slept in the guestroom last night. We don't bother with the new lingerie.

As I am stuffed into the changing room at Belk with a small mountain of Ralph Lauren, I hear Marina jawing away with someone just outside. They greet each other enthusiastically, and I hear Marina chattering about a hoped-for trip to the beach as soon as Bob is feeling better. When I yank aside the curtain and step out, I am almost rocked right back into the change room in surprise. Standing there, chatting with Marina, in all her elfin gamine glory, is Amanda Matthews, aka Quid Pro Ho.

"Erica," smiles Marina, "I'd like you to meet one of Bob's students, Amanda."

"Amanda," I stick out an unfamiliar herringbone arm and shake hers stiffly.

"Oh, Mrs. Hirshblatt, I saw you at that work-life balance panel at the law school last month. That was, uh, interesting. And now Marina tells me that my new boyfriend happens to be your baby sitter."

I need to move to a bigger town.

***

I'm back, dear readers! For your next assignment: What should be the topic of Erica's next Splitigation post? And where did Amanda meet the Manny? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 18
Updated Friday, Oct. 23, 2009, at 6:44 PM ET

I walk into the foyer, slide my laptop bag off my shoulder, and take a deep breath. One more radio interview pitted against some knuckle-dragger from a fathers' rights group and I'm going to need to borrow some of Ellie's diapers. I take a deep breath and look around at the mess my once-immaculate home has become. If I didn't know better, I'd say we'd been burgled. Or at least invaded by Lego-wielding Visigoths.

I've been blogging from one coffee shop or another all week, and now piles of sweatshirts, toys, and papers are accumulated on every flat surface. This has led to a general absence of flat surfaces. Piles of unopened mail suggest that I am now missing things and poised to miss other, more important, things. Wet laundry sits getting moldy for days without being transferred to the dryer, and baskets of clean laundry have sat at the bottom of the stairs for so long that we all just haul out our clothes from there every morning. We've upped Danny's hours significantly, but there are things you just can't ask a manny to do, chief among them being air-drying your bras. In all the years Danny has worked for us, the word bra has never once been uttered aloud by him or by me. I plan to keep it that way.

I hear Ellie bump down the stairs and catch the flash of pink tulle as she hurtles into view. She has a new bandage on her left shin that I know nothing about. I am not taking care of these people anymore. The case of her Tragically Missing Tutu was resolved last night only after many tears and recriminations. Sam has already normalized the fact that I don't pick him up after school anymore. Danny does it, and Sam appears to be all right with that. As he races through the kitchen, he stops to ask me where I have been all afternoon.

"Working, baby. At a coffee shop," I answer.

"Oh," he says, thinking for a second. "Do you sell coffee now, Mommy?" I laugh and try to flatten the lick of his hair that sticks straight up in back. I'd probably have less stress and a fatter paycheck if I whipped up chai lattes all day. I idly wonder what Cole would think of my vocation if I got a cute little nose piercing and a butterfly tattoo on my ankle.

Instead, I've suddenly become the kind of mom who arrives home at 6:30 p.m. and wonders, just as my own mom used to, what's for dinner and who's going to make it. Cole is recovering from his loss in the Kayne case by diving headlong into the appeal. That means it's frozen turkey chili for the kids and me two nights in a row. I head to the freezer, dislodge a large Tupperware, and put it in the microwave to defrost. "Danny?" I call into the other room. "Are you sure we can't start paying you extra to cook dinner?"

"Hah!" he replies. "Only if you want the kids to go into orange-powder shock from too much mac-and-cheese."

Oh well. Probably for the best, since all my weeks of work for BarCzar have netted us less than Danny's salary and barely enough to afford takeout Mexican food. I tell him to find something on the Sprout channel for the kids and try to excavate clean dishes and silverware. The thing that's surprised me about my return to work is my inability to stop thinking about it when I walk in. I'm checking e-mail every 15 minutes—something for which I used to berate Cole. But I don't want to miss a press call, and they come at the strangest times. Snooze = lose. I've done three more cable news shows—only one of which was on the economics of the Laden divorce—as well as at least two radio shows a day, every day. They often pit me against the distant pre-Cambrian relatives of Spencer Buckley, but I am, so far, holding my own.

There aren't enough strong women's voices in the media, I think. Not on law. Not on business. Not on the economy. I've tried to tone down some of the strongest grrrrl power stuff in my media appearances and blog posts, if for no other reason than to reassure my husband that I have no plans to leave him. But the more I read my e-mail, the angrier I get. The minute the courts get involved, women start to lose ground and the legal system doesn't seem to recognize that a woman is biologically hardwired to give up everything she's entitled to, just to keep her children.

If I could use Splitigation to persuade every woman in America to a) keep a separate bank account her husband knows nothing about and b) sock away at least six months of living expenses there just in case, I think I could stave off a lot of future pain and suffering. It's not that all husbands cannot be trusted. It's just that it's impossible to tell from the sepia-toned wedding photos which ones can't.

It's Friday, and I'm back in D.C. for my power lunch with Zoe Fine, at which we are meant to be discussing the future of Splitigation. In my view, that means we're here to talk seriously about money. But Zoe seems to thinks it means talking seriously about how I should work harder for much less money.

She picked a trendy Asian restaurant near Metro Center. I order soup while she gets a ton of sushi. Zoe eats only the insides of her sushi rolls, and she has stacked up a rather enormous pile of smoke rings of rice as she talks, without a pause, about co-branding, cross-platform optimalities, video opportunities, reader participation via Facebook and Twitter, and live chatting.

"I'd need a team of interns to do anything like that," I interrupt her. "Plus an advanced degree in Web development because I barely understand how to work the caps lock key on my keyboard."

"Look, Erica, this is all about branding, and your brand is superhot right now. But one little blog isn't worth anything until you kick it across multiple platforms. You need to be doing a lot more than a little writing and television. You need a YouTube video. You need a podcast. You need to be thinking about writing a major, major, book. And I am looking into a sort of edgy newly single mom's clothing line for you at Kohl's. I'm thinking of calling it Laughing Last. Fabulous, no?" She sucks a line of cucumber and shrimp out of the center of a maki roll and looks at me expectantly.

A line of divorcee fashions? Is she kidding? I look down at my navy skirt and white cashmere turtleneck. If I've learned anything at all from Marina's near-miss-divorce, it's that newly divorced moms mainly need tiny short skirts and plunging necklines. Not my style.

"That all sounds really intriguing, Zoe," I say, "but I am already working at least six hours a day on the blog and the media stuff. And before I start designing bras that burn themselves in protest, we need to rethink my compensation here."

"Erica, Erica," she says, in her world-weary voice—of which I have quickly grown weary—"we talked about this. We don't do money at BarCzar. Nobody does money. Even California tried to issue IOUs. We are getting your name out there. How do you put a price on that? Two weeks ago nobody had even heard of Splitigation."

"And today, I am driving 80 percent of BarCzar's traffic," I say. "I represent 100 percent of the traffic coming over from the networks and YouTube. You know I look at the traffic numbers, Zoe. BarCzar has become a viable business in the last week wholly as a result of my labor."

"Well, that's great and all, but next week we launch our elder-care blog, It All Depends I guarantee it's going to be hit candy in the 70- to 90-year-old demographic . Look Erica, everyone here is totally, totally grateful for your hard work on Splitigation, but you need to be a bit more realistic about the current economic situation."

"I am being realistic about it, Zoe, which is why, if you can't pay me more than just milk money for my almost full-time labor, I need to go back to a law firm job right quick. My nanny makes more than I do right now! You can't treat this as if it's a serious Web site if you're going to pay your talent like summer interns. I'm not sure what other bloggers are doing to make money, but they probably don't have mortgages and car payments and college funds. I am not in a position to do this purely recreationally any longer. That's why God invented pedicures."

"Look, it's just not there."

"I need $15,000 a year, Zoe. That's a serious bargain for BarCzar, and it's the minimum that I can accept. I could make exponentially more than that working part time at a law firm. Between the huge uptick in your traffic and the new advertisers that have flocked to the site, that seems more than fair to me. If you can't make that work, I have to walk away. I don't want to do that, but I need to be earning an income that signifies something close to my worth here. And if I can't take the blog with me, it'll just die on BarCzar when I go back to a firm."

I don't know why I think it might mollify Cole if I were earning enough money to call my writing a serious job. But it's not really possible for me to ask that he take me or my work seriously when right now my blogging costs our family more than it nets us.

Zoe inhales deeply and stubs out a sliver of cucumber in a small bowl of wasabi. I can see the fight's leaked out as well and she nods curtly, looping her hand in the air for the waitress to bring the check. "I'll scare up the money," she says. She's not happy with me. It feels pretty good.

Splitigation

I've been giving a ton of thought to the issue of prenuptial agreements, in large part because we as a society are so strangely willing to discuss sex before marriage but we can't bring ourselves to talk frankly about money. If you are bringing to your marriage a lot of assets, or your children, or your own business, a prenup probably makes good sense for you!

So why can't we talk about it openly? Because the mere thought of a prenup crashes into the pink tulle Barbie Camper wedding fantasies we've been gorging ourselves on since we were toddlers.

Look, I am the first to concede that the very existence of a prenup creates a legal issue ripe for over-lawyering. An angry spouse and overzealous attorney can persuade themselves that they can invalidate the thing in a way that drains the marital estate and inflates the attorney fees. But on balance, a prenup makes a lot of sense and forces a couple to be completely transparent about their assets and expectations in advance of the wedding.

Now I know there are some romantics out there thinking that marriage is just about love and that a prenup is essentially a promise that the marriage will fail. But especially if one party is giving up an income for the sake of the marriage, isn't that a financial arrangement that should be handled coolly and yes, contractually? Back in the day, your great-grandma would just give you a diamond bracelet to keep for yourself, "just in case." For all the sparkly tulle, it's worth remembering that throughout history, even U.S. history, marriages were first and foremost a legal contract between families, a way to arrange for the distribution of assets and provide for heirs. We've layered the whole idea of marrying for love over the marriage contract, but I don't think marriage is about love alone. In a truly strong relationship built for the long haul, does this not represent the perfect opportunity to express the very embodiment of a couple's love and solidarity? I think so. Let me know if you disagree!

When I wake up at 6:45, I reach for the iPhone on the bedside table. This morning's offering from Whit Campbell is time-stamped 4:22 a.m.: Good morning, Momzilla. Way to go on the prenups post. So when can America see you again? Can't wait to get you on the show for round two. Even Spence has requested you by name. And this time, I will personally debrief you ahead of time. :)

You would think that 4 a.m. is when he sleeps, if he sleeps at all, but often I find two or three e-mails from Whit when I wake up, musing on the news of the day or offering feedback about something I posted on the blog. They are invariably flirty, cute-ish, and short, and I have taken to reading them in the bathroom, in the wee hours of the morning, or in parking lots because reading them tends to lead to sudden bright red splotches on my neck and chest that I'd just as soon not have to explain to Cole. I quickly read the message again.

"Debrief? Debrief?" The welts on my neck are so red and so hot I suspect I'm melting parts of Greenland. Cole sleeps peacefully beside me, unaware that his wife is having an e-mail affair with a CNN producer who may well be 14 years old. I try to put Whit Campbell out of my mind. In the manner of seventh-grade girls everywhere, I have a self-imposed rule wherein I always wait five hours before responding to him.

Cole and I are hosting a small dinner party tonight, in honor of Bob's return to the law school next week. I have a million things to do to get ready, none of which involve handcrafting tiny appetizers, which I am lazily defrosting from Trader Joe's.

But first I need to check my traffic and my reader mail.

***

Dear readers: What advice might Bob have for Erica? And is Erica selling herself too cheaply? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 19
Posted Friday, Oct. 23, 2009, at 6:44 PM ET

Cole has taken the kids to the grocery store while I try to clear enough of a landing strip to host a dinner party tonight. I'm way past organizing bins. I'm now stuffing piles of massed clothes and shoes and broken toys into closets and slamming doors before they tumble out. I hear a car pull up and wonder who would possibly be stopping by unannounced at 10 a.m. on Saturday. A yellow taxi sits in my driveway. The passenger door pops open and a petite pair of Ferragamo flats emerge. I drop the armful of Hot Wheels I'd collected. There's only one person I know who takes cabs in Charlottesville. My mother.

I race outside, hair sweating. Her bag, a small, rolling overnight case, assures me this isn't going to be any kind of extended visit. A red light at the back of my Martha Stewart brain flashes briefly but urgently to remind me that I don't have enough place settings for nine tonight. Also, Marina and my mom have never attended the same social event without one accusing the other of being the death of the entire women's rights movement.

I'm wondering if Frances mysteriously and suddenly forgot how to use her cell phone or send an e-mail. She never shows up without calling. But she must be seeing all of these thoughts chase themselves across my face because as she pays the driver, tipping generously, like a New Yorker, she says briefly, "I'm giving a speech in D.C. tonight, so I thought I'd fly down here and take a car up this afternoon. Catch up for a few hours."

Thank God. I grab her bag, and she remembers to kiss me on the cheek. She kisses as she always has: like she's working, not playing. I ask her if she wants a cup of coffee.

"Please," she says. She's in her off-the-bench uniform of crewneck cashmere sweater and wool pants. You'd never know she'd been on the 7 a.m. flight from New York. There's not a wrinkle on her. She's wearing a tasteful scarf and tasteful gold earrings. She is among the last generation of women whose flesh has never come into contact with denim. I look down doubtfully at my fraying jeans. I am of a generation that feels like it's in costume when it wears anything else.

"How are my grandchildren?" she asks, as I bump her suitcase up the front steps and into the foyer.

"They're at the grocery store with Cole, but they should be home soon," I reply, taking her trench coat. I open the closet door, and sweatshirts, mittens, and boots tumble out. She raises a delicate silver eyebrow. I stuff everything back in and drape her coat across a chair. Chairman Meow promptly jumps on it and settles himself in a pile before he begins fiercely licking his own rear end. My mother wrinkles her nose and wordlessly leads the way to the kitchen. The coffeepot is down to a quarter-inch of black tar. I search for new filters, wondering whether she has even seen me in greater disarray and wondering why I care.

"I have presents for the children," Frances says, carefully unzipping her suitcase on the kitchen table. I wonder how she can top last Hanukkah's offerings: A copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves for Ellie and Rosetta Stone Latin starter CD-ROM kit for Sam.

"Hah!" Frances crows, pulling forth a set of matching T-shirts that read "Guns Kill People!" The smaller one is pink.

I decide not to remind her that this is Virginia, where it's widely believed that only people kill people. My mother tends to suspect that one only ever leaves New York City because one has failed somehow.

"So, what brings you down, Mom?" I ask carefully, keeping my gaze on the coffeepot as I prepare a fresh batch. "I haven't heard from you in almost two weeks." I turn to look at her. She has the good grace to look embarrassed as she folds and refolds the tiny T-shirts on the table in front of her.

"I was ... absorbing," she explains, "trying to understand what it is you've leapt into here and why."

"And what have you decided?" I flick the switch on the loaded coffeepot. She's still folding and unfolding the shirts. This is the most protracted domestic activity I've ever witnessed from her.

"I'm not sure yet, Erica. I used to think you loved the law. You always seemed to love it. But the way you write and talk about it, like it's a big punch line—"

"What?" I cut her off. "Let me guess. It's unworthy?"

She looks startled. "No, nothing like that. You have a voice again. A clear, brave voice, and that's fabulous. I couldn't be happier that you are capable of speech after all these years doing … whatever you've been doing. Although I do find it very hard to catch sight of your articles and my clerks have to locate them on Google. I really do wish you could write for The Nation or something …

"You just have to bookmark Splitigation," I begin.

"But I don't understand why you seem to hate the law so much. Every sentence is a sneering put-down."

"What are you talking about?"

"Everything you write and everything you say is so full of contempt for the law, for lawyers, for judges. It's like you have taken this great edifice and reduced it to a few catchy, dismissive phrases."

"Well, there isn't really time for string citations when you are doing cable news, Mom!"

"But then why talk about it at all if you're going to write about the law like its last night's Phillies game, with winners and losers and unfounded opinions about which side stinks? The law doesn't really care about your opinion, Erica. It's immutable and ennobling."

"Wow." I shake my head in utter disbelief. "It's awfully hard to hear you speaking so loftily about a kind of law you've always dismissed as 'fighting over the Tupperware.' I'm trying to write and talk about how soft and subjective family law is. It's really not about justice. It's just mired down in judges' ideas about gender and money and what constitutes good mothering. I'm guessing half these family court judges are working out their own mommy issues on the bench."

I make a quick mental note to write that last line in my next Splitigation post. It's guaranteed to kick up a fuss.

"And is there any chance at all, Erica, that you are working out your own mommy issues on your blog?"

I fill up a mug and plop it in front of her. She doesn't say thank you. She takes her coffee black, but I shove the sugar bowl toward her anyhow.

"Are you really as convinced as my husband that all of my career choices are about lashing out at you?" I pour myself a cup of coffee and add a splash of milk.

She takes a small sip. "Are you absolutely certain they aren't?"

Are we really going to replay the entire fight I just had with my husband, but with my mother reading the part of Cole?

"Oh good grief, Frances. If you're going to psychoanalyze me, let's just get it over with." I stir my coffee furiously, slopping some over onto the table. I reach for a paper towel, but the roll is empty. As it has been since Monday.

My mother thinks for a long time. She has always been more of a talker than a thinker. Her silences are almost as startling as her kisses. When she does speak, it's in a tone I don't recognize. Almost as if she's reading it from someplace far away. "I feel like we somehow created a whole generation built exclusively out of our regrets. We built a generation of daughters who have turned their lives into the sum of all the holes they think we've left behind. You're all so angry. I just don't get it. We were getting things done. And I could never understand why you and your friends wanted lives that were so much smaller than ours, so much less consequential."

I count to 10, breathing deeply. Is that what passes for an apology among the path-breaking feminists these days? She's apologizing for the fact that my life is trivial?

"Mom, it's a little late for the great big Kumbaya talk about what an absent mother you were, don't you think?"

Frances looks startled yet again. She sips, then she says, "But I'm not having the Kumbaya talk, Erica. I'm not sorry for any of the choices I've made. I just wish I knew why you feel guilty for all of yours. You girls started apologizing when you were 7 years old, and you've never really stopped. What are you so sorry about? And why do you think you can fix it with Pottery Barn place mats?" She shakes her head, then sips again. "Good coffee."

"Mom, I don't have the energy for another throw-down in the Feminism Wars. I'm sorry you think you and your warrior women friends raised an entire generation of ungrateful, boring housewives but it sounds like you aren't even happy with my efforts to remedy that. I have a job. I am getting paid. I am using my legal degree to start an important conversation about a topic that is rarely discussed except when celebrities are caught in the pool house with the nanny. You know, most people in this country have no interaction with the legal system other than during their divorces. But you know how much we talk about family law at law schools? Never. At the Supreme Court? Never. In the appellate courts? In the media? Family law lives in the dirty little sub-basement of the legal system, and all I have tried to do is throw open the windows—"

"Then go to a law firm. Get an advocacy job or a position at the law school. Write a law review article. You've proven you're a great writer. Write a book. Right now it just feels like you're throwing a very public tantrum on television every night."

"You know how many people log on to Splitigation each night, Mom? Thousands more than read law review articles."

"And do you know that if you allow yourself to be paired up against the handful of men in America who hate women every night on cable television, you will start to convince yourself that all men think that way?"

I almost spit out the last of my coffee. "You? Now you are giving me the men-are-people-too speech? After a whole lifetime spent proving they aren't?!"

My mother stands up to her full 5 feet, 3 inches. Not a hair is astray. She isn't even angry. She is using her jury-instruction voice. "I've never had a problem with men, Erica. Not even with your father. I've just wanted what was fair for women. We live with our choices, but we have to make them first. And yet I never ever see you making a choice. I only see you running away from your last one—or mine."

I stare into my mother's eyes, trying to fathom what she sees when she looks at me. Frances spent a whole lifetime doing battle. Every day she watched as judges directed their rulings at her breasts, and clients sent her out for coffee. I went to law school because I wanted to be a warrior, too. But now I am not sure why. I am always looking for some middle place between what she was and what she wasn't. In her mind, that cheapens everything she's done. But I think I've found a middle place here. A place that works for Cole and Sam and Ellie, and for me. Even with the house a shambles and Cole and me, for the moment, speaking to each other like two polite strangers in a waiting room, I still know we are happier as a family than I ever was growing up.

I'm just not sure why nobody can see that but me.

The back door flies open and Sam and Ellie charge in, sticky with contraband midmorning chocolate bars and the layer of goo that seems to accumulate on them by 11 each day. When they see their grandmother at the kitchen table, they hurl themselves gleefully into her arms. Her face softens and her eyes light up as she gathers their chocolate-smeared selves to her small cashmere chest.

"Franma," shouts Sam.

"Franma," bellows Ellie.

"Well look who's Miss Chatty, Little Ellie," Frances lifts Ellie onto her lap and kisses the top of her head. She shoots me a quick look of approval. She'd been more worried about Ellie's delayed speech than I was. My mother can't acknowledge how much of my work has gone into these grandkids of hers, but some part of her sees it. Maybe that's all I'll ever get. She might be the toughest cookie on the federal appellate bench, but these rare opportunities to see her crumble may be the only way she says thanks.

Amanda and Danny are here to watch my children and Marina's while the grown-ups eat dinner. Amanda's become something of a fixture in the past few days. I realize that whatever residual anger I feel toward her non-Quid Pro Ho persona is both unfair and irrational, and so I am trying hard to get past it. It turns out that she is brilliant and funny and fantastic with kids. Amazingly, it was Marina's stalking behavior that actually led the happy couple to meet. Somehow when the QPH frenzy was at its peak, I had left her Facebook profile open on the home computer. Danny saw her photo and fell hard. He friended her. She accepted. The rest is recent history. Maybe I should think of all this as the one good thing that came out of our misadventures with imaginary online infidelity. Nevertheless, it's probably too early to suggest that Cole draft the prenup.

In addition to Bob and Marina, I've invited Kate from Cole's firm and her partner, Karen, and a tax professor and his wife, who teaches intellectual property. As I clear the soup plates and serve the salads, I take a moment to enjoy the whooping laughter of children in the playroom. Only in the years following Toy Story can the words, "Ellie, you're stepping on my Buzz!" and "Stop grabbing my Woody!" be so completely benign. The kids have feasted on macaroni and cheese and are stuffing themselves on Pixar. It's by no means an elegant affair, but I feel myself relax for the first time in days.

Cole is juggling a tray of chicken satay with peanut dipping sauce from Trader Joe's and a platter of steaming mini quiches. After a long, fraught lunch with my mother, we couldn't motivate ourselves to do anything more exotic than eclectic freezer tapas tonight. I am quite delighted to discover that tiny apple-cheese-walnut raviolis are amazing. Nobody seems to mind. There's a lot of beer and the over-representation of the cheese-and-dough food group appears to have gone unnoticed. In other happy news, nobody has yet been taken out by a closet avalanche. I am desperate to talk to Cole about my mother's criticisms, but they map so perfectly onto his own that I don't quite know how to start. We had a nice afternoon, sharing some good red wine as we oversaw the thawing of All Things Trader Joe's. I never saw the need to bite one's tongue as a feminist trait, but I am learning the wisdom of it—and from my mother, of all people.

Cole and I have always talked clearly and openly. Now we are being crushed by our own subtext. We're just shouting at each other's fears. My mother may have inadvertently just taught me that, as well.

I hear the beep of a new e-mail and wonder vaguely if it's from Whit. Ignoring it, I head to the dinner table with a baked brie I have doctored up with some cranberry chutney. Cole is explaining to Kate and the Dean that he's feeling good about Kayne's chances on appeal:

"There's some interesting new case law out of the California Supreme Court suggesting that a custodial parent's proposed relocation will almost always have a negative impact on the relationship of the noncustodial parent and the children," he's saying. "And I do think the judge made an error in factoring in the child care here. We also have a bunch of experts saying that this is being done principally to hamper dad's relationship with the children, and we've discovered some e-mail threats from the mother to do whatever she needed to get dad out of the picture."

Cole is so animated when he gets excited about a case. It's been ages since he's talked this way in front me of. Indeed, he stops talking as I walk into the dining room. We have arrived at a point in our marriage where he is no longer comfortable talking about the details of his big relocation case in front of his blogger wife. I contemplate ducking back into the kitchen for a moment to check if that e-mail was from Whit. Then I think better of it and sail into my dining room with a slightly burnt offering of baked brie.

***

Readers: What goes down at the dinner party? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 20
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009, at 4:46 PM ET

The candles have guttered down into two puddles, and Ellie is fighting sleep as she melts deeper into Cole's lap. Marina's two girls and Sam are piled up in front of the television in the other room in various states of wakefulness. People have had so much beer and wine and dessert, they are now telling backyard chicken stories. Of which there are more than one might expect here in the 21^st century.

"My neighbor has chickens now, in a coop out back," says Kate. "And do you know what they like to eat best of all?"

"Corn?" ventures Marina.

"Soup?" grins Cole.

"Mmmmmm, tofurky?" laughs Rachael, the intellectual property lawyer.

"Chicken!!!" howls Kate. "Turns out the chickens love steak and hamburgers and brisket, but they like cooked chicken best of all!"

"Ewwww ..." Everyone in the room recoils in disgust.

"Soylent Green!" groans Marina.

Then Karen laughs and says she grew up with a weirdly territorial attack-chicken that had staked out a corner of their backyard and scared them all witless. "For years, if we were playing baseball and anyone hit the ball into the chicken's jurisdiction, roughly deep right, it was an automatic home run."

Cole stands up with a snoozy Ellie in his arms. "I'll just put her down," he says. When I get up to follow, he says, "I've got it." I kiss the top of Ellie's sweaty head, and they start up the stairs. Marina starts telling her own backyard chicken story. She is one of the few women I know who tells long, funny stories like a man does—certain she will delight the whole room and laughing before she gets to her own punch lines.

"I grew up on sort of a hippy commune, and there were always chickens around and the dogs were always going after them." Her hand is resting atop Bob's on the tablecloth, and he's smiling like he's never heard this story before. "Once there was a dog going after one of the chickens, and my dad was holding it back and hollering for me to come, and I assumed it was some huge life or death emergency, so I dropped my book and raced outside and jumped off the porch, and somehow I completely blacked out midair! And when I came to, which was only a few seconds later, I started to pass out again, so I grabbed onto the porch steps to steady myself and then my mom and sister came home right at that minute and saw me rocking back and forth holding onto the porch stairs, and they thought I was having some weird transcendent religious experience and started to freak out. And my dad was still holding the barking dog!! And 20 years later, you can ask anyone about the chickens, and they'll say 'Remember the time Marina passed out in midair?' "

Marina is laughing so hard that she's almost collapsed on the table. Bob is smiling gently at her. He has barely said a word tonight, and he looks worn out. He hasn't eaten much of anything, but Marina had told me to expect that. What I didn't expect was that he would look like he's asleep sitting up, like every thread of creativity he'd possessed had been slowly unraveled from the inside out. He holds onto Marina's hand like she's a jumper cable. Rachael turns to ask me how I'm coping with my hectic new schedule.

"It's a little nutty," I say. "I'm trying to put up four or five new blog posts per day, responding to any interesting news stories of marriages or divorces or custody disputes, of which there appears to be an unlimited supply. I started working at cafes, which is better than working at home because the kids and the fridge and all the distractions make it impossible, but there are still TV spots and radio interviews almost every single day and now speeches."

"Erica's been asked to do a big speech called 'Having It All' for the UVA women's law group next week!" Marina brags on my behalf.

"Whatever will she do without Helen Van Patterson-Patton there to support her?" chuckles Kate.

"Oh, Helen will be there," laughs Marina. "If she can get away from the winery ..." Marina's new capacity to laugh at herself is kind of stupendous. "Our Erica is going to be the spokesmodel for having it all, on your own terms. Bye-bye, big law. Hel-lo working from home."

"Blogging part-time is not exactly a viable business model," I say. "Blogs don't pay enough for anyone to live on, unless you're at Gawker or Wonkette."

"Do the radio and TV shows pay any?" asks Karen. I hear Cole's footsteps on the stairs.

"Nope. Not a dime," I say. "Right now I am just kind of careening around from one blog post to the next, and then from the radio studio to the TV studio, and then from Java Java to make dinner. I'm twice as busy as I was two months ago but somehow earning less. It's kind of been a merry-go-round, and I haven't had much time to take it all in." I steal a look at Cole, who is listening intently. "None of us has had time to take it in yet. But I think it's going to slow down a bit, and we'll normalize it all very soon."

"They do have meds for that," says Bob.

And everyone goes very still. Then he smiles, on a slight time delay, and everyone around the table cracks up.

Bob picks up crumbs from the tablecloth with the pad of his thumb and removes them to a new pile three inches away. "It's hard to know when it's adrenaline and when it's just too much," he murmurs, still without emotion. "But it sure gets tiring."

Everyone sips their wine quietly. I don't know if Bob is talking to me, to Marina, or to himself.

"So that's the thing," he says. "We're told how not to be sick, but we're not always told how to be well." Cole takes my hand under the table. I don't know why he's there all of a sudden, but I am glad for it. Then, Bob and Marina's daughter Gemma darts into the dining room to ask breathlessly why the chicken crossed the playground. Without waiting for a response she hollers, "To get to the other slide" and runs back to the playroom. Kate and Karen murmur something about freeing their babysitter and stand up and begin to clear dishes.

The post-party cleanup isn't half-bad when there are no sticky pots or mixing spoons to soak. Cole pops Sam into bed while I rinse wine glasses and fill the recycling box with plastic trays and cardboard boxes. When Cole comes back down to the kitchen, I put my arms around his neck and tell him I'm sorry I have been on such a tear these past few weeks.

"I'm sorry I said blogging was unworthy of you. You were right. That was snotty."

"I love you," I say, glad to be able to say it and relieved that we are inching our way back to apologies, if not perfect understanding.

"Mmmmmmmm. Why?" He strokes my cheek.

"Because you are a wonderful dad, a generous husband, and a masterful operator of the defrost button. You are a good friend to Bob and a better friend to me. And I'm truly sorry if I've been a little self-involved these past few weeks."

"Bob wasn't talking about you back then, you know, right?"

"What?" I look up at him.

"What he said about medication and all the velocity. He wasn't saying that you're manic or anything like that."

"No. I know. And in some ways it's true that I've been a little more manic than is healthy. Or at least that I hadn't quite reckoned on how my own high-speed chase was affecting you or the children. I haven't figured it out yet, Cole. I just know that I need to be back in the world of adults again. I guess Frances was right about that one thing today, even if she was wrong about almost everything else."

"You know what I really, really don't want to do right now?" hums Cole into the warm side of my neck.

"What?"

"Talk about your mother ..."

Another 4:30 a.m. text message from Whit. I read it lying next to a still-sleeping Cole, which feels bad and also delicious.

You continually surprise me. Just caught your session on a podcast of Morning Joe. It's a nice refreshing pause in the middle of my nights to hear a strong, forceful voice instead of all the waxy blonde TV women who have deeply held political opinions only after someone else does it first. You should try the writing in the night route. ... It's amazing how much clearer and calmer your mind is in the dark and with a glass of wine, and what surprising insights you can stumble upon.

I take my phone into the bathroom and hit the reply key.

I need to know why you don't try the sleeping-in-the-night route. It's been working pretty well for several millennia I'm told.
Erica

Two minutes later my inbox chimes with his reply.

Then why are you up, Momzilla?
Whit

Should I tell him I have the red wine hangover or that I now habitually wake up at 4 just to read his e-mails? I decide to tell him the truth.

This is the only time of the day when nobody is asking me to find something lost or fix something broken. Or change something wet. Or water something thirsty. Or pet something that wants to be on my lap. This is the only time of day I don't have to feed the blog or answer my mail. So I like to pretend I'm in Paris. Or still back in New York. ...

Four minutes later.

And what do you think about when you're in Paris? Or New York at 4 in the morning?

I count to 20 then hit reply.

Sleeping.

A minute later he's back, and I can almost see him smiling.

We need to get you back on our set. How's Monday night? Let me know if there's anything I can do that can help make this happen. And don't give me any cheek about your hectic schedule. I'll personally drive down and give you a lift if necessary. It's not every day one's lucky enough to link up with a rising media star.

My body is covered in goosebumps. I hit reply.

Monday works. I have a speech that afternoon but can come up right after.
Goodnight,
E

Minutes later.

It's a date. I'll buy you a drink after. Sweet dreams.
W

It's Monday morning, and I'm in the basement closet going through the winter coats. I can't believe I didn't do this four weeks ago when it started to get cold. Ellie's definitely outgrown her little white furry snowsuit. Sam might get another year out of the mini camelhair trench coat (thanks, Frances!), and Cole has always been more a Patagonia guy than anything else. I'm going through the basket of hats, scarves, and mittens, trying to decide whether to give away the too-small baby things or just put them aside and think about that another day. I thank my six-months ago self for labeling everything and folding it all away neatly in lidded plastic bins.

I'm due at the law school in five hours, and I still can't decide what to wear. Each of the new suits I bought with Marina seems slightly stuffy for a speech to a group of young women, although I guess I need to bring one of them along in the car to tape Spencer Buckley tonight. Danny is going to feed the kids, and Cole says he's going to try to sneak out of the office to hear my talk. Which is making me even more nervous.

I can't even think about the half-promised drink with Whit tonight. If it happens. When a guy asks a married woman to get a drink that's definitely a date, right? Especially if he writes "It's a date"?

Maybe I will bring a third change of clothing. Maybe I will cancel.

I was thinking of going a little bit Stacy London for the speech this afternoon—big white shirt, skinny black pencil skirt, tailored black vest, monster heels. It's powerful and creative at the same time. But then again it's law school, and I'm guessing I need to be in a suit or the students will just think I'm some sort of rodeo clown.

What the hell do you wear to a speech about work-life balance, anyway? A suit with running shoes? Pearls alongside the painted macaroni necklace Sam made for me in summer camp last year?

I push past a bunch of old maternity dresses and the massive winter coat I wore through both pregnancies. I need to decide whether to give these away as well. There's a dry-cleaning bag wedged between the winter coat and a hanging bag of maternity suits. I reach back and pull it out: a suit. It's black. I suddenly feel warm and slightly dizzy. It's the Armani.

The dry cleaner's tag bears a Manhattan phone number. Which certainly explains why it's been years since I've seen it. And like one of those games in Sam's Spider-Man coloring book that asks you to find five differences between two seemingly identical pictures, I instantly flash on the obvious differences between this suit and the one from the clothing swap: It's a size bigger, for one thing. I'd forgotten the pants were cuffed. It's not quite as black, somehow. It's not quite as anything, to be perfectly candid.

I am suddenly horrified, remembering how unhinged I became at the clothing swap, wanting to die as I recall accusing Cole of giving it away in order to keep me powerless.

I carefully lift the bag off the suit and carry it upstairs to my bedroom. I lay it across our bed like it's an accident victim. I'd thought this suit signified everything I was missing, but laid out on my bed like this, it looks more like a costume I've outgrown. That said, I'd be insane not to try it on. It's totally gorgeous.

It takes two pairs of Spanx and some intensive breast reallocation, but I get the job done. Of course it still fits, and it could be made to fit better. But as I check out the rear view in the full-length mirror, it's suddenly quite clear to me that my magic suit no longer suits me. If all that New York City hydraulic-piston lawyering was ever right for me, it's not anymore. I like the career I've built much better.

I need to call Marina and process. I need to call Cole and apologize. I need to call my mother and explain that you just can't go Armani again. But turning around once more in front of my mirror, I decide to wear it to my "Having It All" speech. Because if having it all means anything, it has to mean having an Armani you don't even need anymore.

***

Readers: What happens when Erica meets Whit Campbell? Send e-mails to savingface.slate@gmail.com or post on the Facebook page. You can also follow Saving Face on Twitter.

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Chapter 21
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009, at 4:46 PM ET

There's not an empty chair in Caplin Pavilion. It's teeming with what looks to be every last woman at the law school. And a whole lot of the men. Posters of my face appear on every vertical surface in the building. This must be what it feels like to be Angelina Jolie.

I'm sitting in the front row between Cole and Marina, waiting to be introduced. Bob is next to Marina, and a bunch of our friends on the faculty have swarmed us to wish me luck. Also to pay homage to the suit. I smile and make small talk and look at my watch. Just a few minutes to go. As I review my notes, a young man with gorgeous gray eyes introduces himself as Chris Wilson, editor of the UVA student paper. "I am a big fan of your work, Ms. Hirshblatt," he says. "I was hoping to grab you for a photo and a quick interview after your talk today?"

"Sure. I have a bit of time before I have to run up to D.C. to do Spencer Buckley tonight," I smile. "I'd love to."

He introduces me to the young woman who's clutching his left hand and bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. It's Lally Singh, from the brown bag lunch. "My girlfriend is big a fan, too," says Chris. "Seriously …" Lally cuts in. "I think you are giving a whole generation of young women law students some hope that the light at the end of the tunnel isn't going to be a train."

"Hey." I smile. "That's a good line." I shake Lally's hand. "I might have to steal that. Great to see you again, Lally." I am surprised I'm not more nervous. It feels like a homecoming for me, and I am well aware that I am speaking to a group of young women desperate to hear anyone tell them that it's all going to be OK for them in the end. Of course, I'm not at all certain it's going to be OK for them in the end, but I'm going to try to clear a path toward something that isn't the typical Big Law corporate funnel.

Lally steps up to the lectern to introduce me, and the audience slowly quiets down. She's so cute in her little gray interview suit and her big black laptop bag. I can barely remember a time when it was more than enough to just be young and smart.

"Hey there," she says, adjusting the microphone. "Hey. Welcome to this Virginia Law Women event called Having It All: Balancing Work in the Law With a Career and Family. We are so lucky to hear from one of our very own alumnae, Erica Hirshblatt, UVA Law class of 1998. Erica went to Columbia undergrad, where she majored in history and graduated magna cum laude. While she was here, she was editor at the Law Review. She then clerked on the 4^th Circuit and worked for several years at Stanley, Frisk & Fortune in Manhattan. But she's recently become an overnight Internet and TV sensation with her brilliant new blog, Splitigation. She has two gorgeous kids and an amazing legal career, and she's empowering women all over the country to be brave about their work choices. She's the woman who gave new meaning to the immortal words 'take the hard drive.' Ladies and gentlemen, I can't think of anyone better to talk about having it all. Erica Hirshblatt."

The crowd explodes in applause as I climb the steps of the stage and adjust the microphone. I catch Cole's eye and grin, then wink at Marina. I take a sip of water, smile and begin:

"Thank you so much for that really lovely introduction, Lally. I'm not sure that I am the best person to talk about having it all, mainly because I really do believe what a teacher once told me about that in college: 'Sure you can have it all, just not all at once.'

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