No Hobbies

by | Jan 27, 2016 | Money

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No Hobbies

Do you have your own business? Are you thinking about starting one? I’d tell you to put some structures in place for work-life balance.

Or not.

I was conflicted about this for a long time. I loved my work so much that everything else basically fell away. Someone once asked me what my hobbies were. Hobbies? I genuinely didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to admit that Netflix had become the closest thing I had. I felt bad about it for the rest of the day.

Once I couldn’t come up with an answer, I started beating myself up over it. How had I ended up here, when my old tagline used to be something like “the only thing Renée is truly passionate about is her leisure time”?

Part of it was practicing gratitude. Once I started looking at my life through everything I was grateful for, including the work itself, it felt completely different. I wanted to be doing it. I’d chosen all of it. No one was making me.

But there was something else going on too. When you work for yourself from home, there’s no clean line between the workday starting and ending. The moment you’re awake, you’re potentially working.

A friend put it well once: someone with a nine-to-five has clearly defined hours they’re not being paid for. A sole proprietor doesn’t have that boundary built in anywhere, which makes it easy to just default to working whenever nothing else is scheduled, especially when you actually love the work.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I did what needed doing (the kids, the laundry, the shopping), and every remaining hour went to work by default. If nothing else was on the calendar, I worked.

As much as I loved it, I could see where that was headed: burnout, too many hours at a screen, not enough of anything else.

What I eventually landed on was that leisure time has to be scheduled deliberately when you’re self-employed. Just having free time doesn’t actually work. It’s a vacuum, and work rushes straight into it.

So I booked a weekly exercise class and paid for it upfront, since accountants hate wasting money more than almost anything else. I gave myself an actual non-work schedule and held myself to it the same way I’d have held myself to a time card if someone else had been the one setting my hours.

The Part-Time Single Parent

by | Jan 19, 2016 | Parenting & Co-Parenting

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The Part-Time Single Parent

When my first son was in his first year, I remember being so relieved I wasn’t a single parent. I was in awe of anyone who was.

Years later, I’m a single parent to two spirited boys for half of my life. The other half, I’m supposedly footloose and fancy free, though really it’s just catching up on the work I didn’t get to while the kids were with me.

So I don’t really think of myself as a true single parent, except on the days I am. Fortunately, I don’t have much time to sit with that thought, though it creeps in sometimes: single parenting really sucks.

On those days, I wake up at my usual 5:30, my body simply won’t stay asleep, and I sneak to my work nook to get ahead while I can. If I’m quiet enough, my morning child won’t hear me. He has some kind of instant mommy sense and knows the second I’m up, then follows me down asking if he can watch TV. If I dodge him, I work. If I don’t, I’m entertaining him until his brother, the late sleeper, wakes up. I make breakfast, make lunch, get them out the door for school, come home, work, work, work, pick them up, make dinner, clean up the mounds of stuff they haul home, get them to bed, try to squeeze in a little more work, and pass out, only to do it all again the next day. That was a run-on sentence, and it mirrors pretty well what those days actually feel like.

Every so often my kids’ dad travels for work, and I have them for two weeks or more straight. Those stretches are when I really feel how hard single parenting is, and I’m always grateful knowing a break is coming once he’s back.

Having a co-parent isn’t automatically easier, though. We couldn’t live together for good reasons, and parenting together across two households is still genuinely hard. On the days we disagree the most, part of me wishes I were just the one in charge, no negotiating, no dealing with someone I find unreasonable in that moment.

Then I get the kids back, and I have to figure out how to work with him again anyway.

All of this has led me to a few fairly firm conclusions.

Single parents need a lot of support. A lot. I’ve spent the past few years actively building that for myself: breaks I can count on, even if they’re not frequent, other people in similar situations to talk to, and a real backup plan if I ever hit a wall, which for me is my co-parent. Society’s slowly getting better at recognizing how hard this is, and support exists if you look for it. I also built plenty of my own, partly because the people around me kept nudging me to.

The other thought that keeps circling in my head: we talk a lot about single moms, and not nearly as much about single dads. They’re out there too, and they need support just as much. I did a quick search once for single-dad support groups and found almost nothing nearby; the closest one I could find was clear across the country. I wonder if that’s part of why dads seem to move into new relationships faster than moms sometimes do, needing another parent-figure in the mix because the structural support just isn’t there for them the way it increasingly is for moms.

My last thought is simpler: relying on my co-parent only works if we can actually get along. I’m not going to ask for help from someone I’m not speaking to.

I went through real anger at him, especially right after we separated. I held back from going for blood during the divorce and chose the Collaborative Approach instead, both of us agreeing to stay out of court, because I understood that conflict between parents is what actually hurts kids the most. I picked the path with the least conflict and talked him into it too. Only now do I see how much that choice has benefited both of us as parents. We can talk. We’ve built real systems for getting along. If we’d gone for the jugular instead and dragged each other through court, one of my biggest support systems right now simply wouldn’t exist. And the kids would’ve paid for that, along with two burnt-out parents.

If you’re heading into life as a single parent, know that it’s hard. Build whatever systems you can to support and sustain yourself.

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Ex Flare-Ups

by | Jan 10, 2016 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

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Ex Flare-Ups

Some things in life flare up on you. No warning, no pattern you can predict; they’re just suddenly there.

That’s how I’ve come to think of dealing with my ex. Not constant, not even frequent, but when it happens, it happens fast and hits harder than you’d expect for something so infrequent.

I’ve noticed these flare-ups tend to cluster around the predictable stress points: birthdays, holidays, the usual suspects. And I have exactly as much control over the timing as you’d expect: none.

I know the honest counterargument here: I chose to marry him, and whether something he says or does actually counts as a “flare-up” is really just my own interpretation. It’s not an illness. It’s a reaction. That distinction matters, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But the useful part of the comparison holds anyway: whether something is a genuine crisis or just my own reaction to it, having a strategy for managing the reaction still matters. So over time, I built one.

The flare-ups come on suddenly, out of nowhere, infrequent but sharp. I never see them coming. Instead, I built a response system for after they hit.

First, I write out my full, unfiltered, knee-jerk emotional reaction, everything, no editing, no restraint, in an email. I ensure the “to” field is empty before I even start typing, so there’s no chance of accidentally sending it to him. When I’m done, I send it to a dummy account of my own instead. I don’t fully understand why it works, but it does. Something about hitting send, even into the void, gets it out of my system.

Then I give myself time. I don’t run straight to my support network to vent about whatever the latest thing was, not for a few days at least.

I breathe. I try to meditate. I remind myself that things rarely turn out as badly as my imagination insists they will.

None of this makes the flare-up disappear. But it does take the edge off the worst symptoms, the sleeplessness, the short temper, all of it.

More importantly, it gets me to a place where I can actually deal with him productively. Before I had any of this in place, my instinct was either to fight or to avoid entirely. Fighting feeds the flare-up. Avoiding leaves you sitting in dread, waiting for the next one.

So this time, I emailed him and proposed we talk in person, with some ground rules set in advance to keep the conversation collaborative.

After a few conversations, things settled. We’re back in a good routine, and I’m still working on ways to keep these flare-ups further and further apart.