Excerpt: 'Ten Minutes from Normal'

— -- Former White House communications director Karen Hughes writes about her experiences working closely with President Bush in a new book, Ten Minutes from Normal, which hits bookstores March 29. Below is an excerpt.

Chapter 1 — Tug-of-War

I still remember the moment I first said it out loud. My husband and I were standing at the sink in the kitchen of the beautiful house that wasn't ours, talking as we cleaned up the dinner dishes.

"Maybe we should just move back home this summer," I said, and the look of relief that immediately crossed his face confirmed what I had suspected, what my husband still denies, but that all our friends believe—that he deeply missed Texas and was ready to go home.

"Why do you say that?" he asked, cautiously, much more cautiously than in the usual after-dinner, after-eighteen-years-of-marriage conversation. This was uncharted territory, and only I could venture there first.

"Robert's unhappy; I'm not even relevant in his life anymore. He misses his friends; we miss Leigh and Lauren and all our friends. Everyone said it would take a year to adjust, but it's been more than a year, and I don't see signs that we're making any progress," I said, the months of frustration and worry about my family spilling out into the open yet again. "Robert doesn't go out or have fun or have friends over or do anything except sit downstairs and watch TV and study. He's never even had a single kid come to our house except for the ones we invited with their parents," I said, my voice getting louder as I recited the litany that had played too many times in my head. The subject of our greatest concern, my teenage son, was away on a school baseball trip, so my husband and I didn't have to worry about his overhearing.

"I go to work when you all are asleep and I come home long after Robert's home from school and he's downstairs studying and he doesn't even want to talk to me. He never asks me to do anything for him anymore because he knows I probably can't. And if he did, I would probably be too tired, as I was last week when he wanted to make brownies. Too tired to make brownies-what does that say about our life?"