I am sorry to report that I am no longer a card-carrying member of the National Association of People Who Have No Business Living With Each Other (But Who, Inexplicably, Do So Anyway).

If you read this column with any regularity, you are likely aware you need to cruise over to WebMD.com very soon and get paired up with a therapist. But in addition, you are probably aware that for the past eight months, I have been living with my ex-wife, her boyfriend, and our five-year-old child in a one-bedroom apartment. (And you thought you needed a therapist.)

Honestly, this has not been the worst thing in the entire world. Ann (the ex-wife) and I worked through all our issues long ago and have since become good friends. Fred (the boyfriend) was not hard to take once I acknowledged him as a human life form, the stage of acceptance that came after he had been, in my esteem, a larvae, a parasite, an arachnid, pond scum, Rush Limbaugh, and a vicious, bloodsucking leech. (It was difficult to keep calling him a "Pus Bucket" while my daughter insisted on calling him "Daddy.") And of course, being close to my kid during her first year of kindergarten has been great. I haven't even minded the lack of space in our tiny little apartment.

So it wasn't as bad as it sounds, this living with my crazy Italian ex-wife and her Republican boyfriend and our precocious five-year old in a place roughly the size of an Altoids tin. What was a little tough was lying about it.

Why did we have to lie? For the same reason my family had to move in with me to begin with - landlords don't like children. They're like the evil kid-catcher in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang who rounds up all the children and locks them in cages, except that instead of cages, a landlord would put the children in quilted laundry bags to cut down on the noise problem. Ann, Fred and Marie could find no landlord willing to rent a one-bedroom to a family, so after all the other options had been exhausted, including living in a refrigerator box under the overpass, I opened my doors to the lot of them.

But unfortunately my lease does not say, "Nathan Hartswick and His 'Lot of Them.'" It simply says "Nathan Hartswick," so I was forced to keep the existence of these three extra people a secret, because if the landlord had found out, it would have been back to the cardboard box, not just for my Lot, but also for me.

And so began a domestic journey that included keeping the window shades drawn continuously, prohibiting Marie from playing in the yard, and at times, elaborate plans involving the three of them hiding at the laundromat across town for six hours while my landlord fixed the toilet in the apartment. (This was the same plan that included first throwing every vestige of proof that three other people lived there into a closet and closing the door.)

Living a lie this involved is a little like being an ill-behaved, well-meaning dog in a house with a lot of expensive furniture. This kind of dog will live his entire life slinking around with his tail between his legs and a wistful, permanently guilty look on his face because he is pretty sure he has done something in the recent past for which he is going to be punished severely. And of course, he's right.

And we were no different. We knew what we were doing wasn't entirely ethical. But it would have been hard to go about our daily lives constantly, consciously thinking about how unethical we were being. So instead we buried our guilt, and took to slinking around the house with our shoulders hunched up and our blinds drawn down, jumping at every footstep in the driveway like a bunch of persecuted war prisoners.

This was not assisted by the fact that my landlord, despite being an extremely nice woman against whom I have nothing personally, was as nosy as Joan Rivers on amphetamines and twice as hyper. Not only would she rifle through the other tenants' mail, she would tell me (and I'm sure, anyone else who would listen) the contents of the other tenants' mail (and, probably, tell the other tenants the contents of mine). So I had a lot of conversations with her standing within six inches of the front door, my arm resting casually against the wall to prevent this woman from faking right, dodging left into my living room, and ruining the whole lousy plan.

And it's likely if we had come clean about the damn thing, she would have simply charged us an extra hundred bucks and been fine with it. But we couldn't take that chance, because if it backfired, we'd be back underneath the overpass again. (And they won't forward your mail there, which means she'd probably keep it, open it up and read it all.)

One day a few weeks ago, Ann and I were sitting around, cohabitating, and she suggested, in the delicate and sensitive manner that only a loving best friend can, that I get the hell out. And I agreed, because we were all finally beginning to feel a bit cramped. It was time to move on. And with the problem of the Children-Hating Landlords, we thought I should be the one to find a new apartment, and leave the old one to them. This makes sense, as I am a pathetically single non-smoking bachelor with no pets, which, as long as I lie about my income, means landlords shower me with lease agreements whenever I look at an apartment.

So that first day, we set up an appointment to look at a one-bedroom. It was perfect and I took it. And the best part is, just so there wouldn't be any more deep cover domestic intelligence missions, we explained the whole bloody soap opera to the new landlord, and she thought it was great. Marie charmed the hell out of her. She even found Ann's neurotic questions about the apartment endearing.

And to my nosy former landlord's credit, when we finally did come clean, though we only admitted to sharing the apartment for the last month, she was totally cool. She let us transfer my lease over to Ann so I could move into the new place, and I am now comfortably settled and incredibly, blissfully alone.

Comfortable, that is, if you don't count the fact that my box spring wouldn't fit down the hallway and I had to throw the stupid thing out on the curb. This means it's back to the old Feng Shui setup of my college years, where I sleep on a mattress on the floor and literally roll out of bed in the morning.

But hell, I can think of worse places to sleep. Like underneath an overpass.

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