Divorced and Still on the Hook

by | Sep 15, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Divorced and still on the hook

Growing up, I was always told I’d be responsible for paying my own way through university. My parents wanted me to go, but they also wanted me to learn financial independence early. I’m honestly not sure if that was a deliberate philosophy or just how things had always been done in the family; both of my parents had paid their own way through school too, and my dad had sold his beloved ’57 Chevy Bel Air to cover his tuition. There might have been a little martyrdom baked in: I sacrificed my car, so you can sacrifice too.

I lived at home during university and paid tuition out of my summer job earnings. My parents helped some, covering half a car and its insurance for the years I was in school, and living at home saved me a considerable amount on its own.

So when I think about my own kids and university, I don’t automatically feel obligated to fund it. That said, things cost a lot more now. My tuition ran about $2,000 a year. Today it’s closer to ten thousand, and minimum wage hasn’t come close to keeping pace with that jump. I’ve also always felt like I missed out on something by staying home for school. So I’ve been going back and forth, leaning more toward wanting to help fund my kids’ education if I can, while still believing that support at that stage is a choice, not an obligation.

Then I learned something that reframed the whole question. A friend of mine was still paying child support for a stepdaughter in her late twenties. It turns out parents remain financially responsible for a child pursuing their first university degree, unmarried, essentially regardless of age.

That got confirmed again during my own divorce, when my lawyer walked me through it directly: under the Divorce Act, child support obligations end when a child marries, becomes self-supporting, or turns nineteen, unless that child remains a “child of the marriage” because they’re unable to become self-supporting due to illness, disability, pursuing an education, or another qualifying reason.

Here’s the interesting part: divorcing your spouse can actually leave you with a greater ongoing financial obligation to your kids than staying married would have. Married parents can simply agree together that their adult child is on their own now. Divorced parents, if a child chooses university, generally can’t make that same call unilaterally.

I understand why the law exists. I’ve seen how badly things can go without it: a parent encourages the kids toward a school far from home, then refuses to help pay once they’re there, leaving the other parent to fund the bulk of it alone, occasionally with some help from the kids themselves. I’ve watched a situation like this play out over several years, court decisions repeatedly siding with the parent seeking support, and payment still not materializing. The frustration of getting a ruling in your favour and still not seeing the money is its own particular kind of exhausting.

Even with the law clearly on your side, enforcing it can turn into a long, draining process. Much of the difficulty lies in the details: figuring out exactly what amounts should be split and tracking and accounting for them over years.

The way to avoid landing there yourself is communication, early and often. Talk to your spouse about what you both envision for your kids’ education. If you’re separating, get clear, specific language about postsecondary funding written directly into your agreement, not vague gestures at “supporting education,” but actual clarity on amounts and how they’ll be calculated and tracked. If your current agreement is silent on this, start that conversation with your co-parent now, ideally before your kids have already set their hearts on a school far from home.

If your co-parent genuinely isn’t on board with sharing the cost, that’s worth a hard, honest conversation with yourself: can you fund it alone, or do you need to start helping your kids adjust their expectations of what this stage of their life is actually going to look like?

And if you do decide funding their education matters enough to you to do it regardless, take a real look at your financial situation to see whether it’s actually possible, and if it’s not yet, what would need to change to get there.

Working from home with kids

by | Sep 10, 2015 | Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Working From Home With Kids

I keep a file of half-started blog posts, and today, searching for something to finish, I opened one called “Working From Home With Kids.” Surprise, surprise: it was blank.

That probably says everything already.

It’s hard to work from home when your kids are also home. I keep expecting to be more productive these days, since they mostly do their own thing now and don’t need me for much. So why don’t I have long, productive stretches of work to show for it?

Turns out I’m on constant low-level alert whenever I’m the only one home with them. Something about becoming a mother flipped a switch, and danger started feeling like it was everywhere. As my kids have gotten older, some of those dangers have faded, and new ones have taken their place. These days it’s mostly the fear that they’ll actually kill each other mid-argument. Logically, I know that’s not going to happen. My mom-brain doesn’t seem to care what logic says.

So even with them upstairs in their room, my attention splits in half, part on whatever I’m doing, part permanently on guard. Eyes in the back of my head, switched on. There’s a low hum of anxiety sitting in my stomach that makes me even less productive than I’d otherwise be.

What I’ve noticed is that I can still manage low-acuity work in that state. Bookkeeping, reconciliations, data entry, things I’ve done so many times I could do them half-asleep. Fine.

Talking to a new client about what they need? I tried. It felt like texting while driving.

Writing a new blog post from scratch? Apparently my brain needs actual space for that.

Except, wait. I just did it.

Where are the kids? It’s suspiciously quiet in here.

Better go check.

—

They were fine. I’m finally finishing this post two weeks later, with the kids back in school and some real uninterrupted time in front of me. Turns out I really do need that kind of stretch to do anything new or genuinely challenging, which became obvious the hard way over the past few weeks of summer break.

So how do I actually get that uninterrupted time? I could park them in front of a screen, or send them off to their rooms, but neither solution felt great, and both seemed to feed that same anxious feeling rather than solve it. They ended up getting plenty of screen time anyway, and I still only managed the low-level stuff.

What I actually need is better planning and more realistic expectations. Going into summer, I was anxious about only having half the summer with them, since the other half was with their dad, and I thought I’d have all this time to catch up without them around. So I hoarded the time I did have, avoided signing them up for day camps that would’ve taken them away from me even more. What I need to actually accept is that I can’t do real, effective work while they’re home with me, and trying anyway just generates anxiety for all of us.

The unexpected upside of finally understanding this: it’s going to be a lot easier now to feel genuinely grateful for the time they’re with their dad. I never thought I’d get there; I assumed I’d just be sad about it indefinitely, but I’m slowly adjusting to sharing half their lives instead of resenting it.

When you Remember the Discussion Differently from the agreement

by | Sep 2, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

When You Remember the Discussion Differently Than the Agreement

I’ve noticed something about how my ex and I approached decisions differently during our separation negotiations, and it’s made me think more generally about how mismatched decision-making styles can quietly sabotage even a well-intentioned agreement.

I tend to gather information until I run out of time or simply have to decide. I’ll tell the full story, get into the minutiae, circle a topic from every angle before I feel ready to commit to anything. My ex, from what I could tell, worked the opposite way: too much information and he’d start to shut down, mentally stepping back from the decision entirely rather than wading through it all with me.

I think about our actual negotiation meetings now and can see exactly where that mismatch caused real damage. I’d tell story after story, walk through every detail I thought mattered. At some point, I now realize, he simply stopped absorbing any of it.

How do I know? Because we’ve had disagreement after disagreement since, both of us convinced the other broke the agreement. I’ll think: how does he not remember we agreed to this out loud? We discussed it for at least an hour, on three separate occasions. But our written agreement doesn’t always reflect those lengthy conversations, partly because time and money pressure eventually pushed me to sign it before every detail was fully nailed down.

At the time, I was certain the agreement captured everything we needed. In some ways, I still think that it’s one of the longer, more thorough agreements I’ve come across. But when it comes to actually applying it to real decisions, we still get stuck, because we walked away from those meetings with two different understandings of what we’d actually settled.

I’ve thought a lot about how to prevent that gap from forming in the first place. What I’ve landed on isn’t a guaranteed fix, just a few things worth trying if you and your ex are heading into real conflict over an agreement:

Keep the agreement’s flexibility limited where you can. Vague, adaptable language sounds reasonable in the room, but it leaves too much room for two different memories of the same conversation.

Make sure the final document actually reflects everything you both deemed important enough to spend real time discussing. If it came up more than once in your meetings, it should be written down, not just assumed.

Get it reviewed by someone whose perspective differs from your own, not necessarily by gender, but by how you and your ex tend to process things differently. I had my dad review mine, and looking back, I doubt he actually read the whole thing; it was long enough that even I understood why. That alone should have told me it needed simplifying. I never had anyone review it who processed information the way my ex did, and that gap might have caught something before it became a recurring fight.

Build in a trial period for anything that doesn’t need to be locked in immediately. Testing a new arrangement in practice, before it’s permanent, tends to surface misunderstandings faster than any amount of additional discussion would.

I have been thinking about how to prevent this from happening, and all I have are suggestions. If there is considerable conflict between you and your ex, then you need to:
  1. Have limited flexibility in your agreement.
  2. Ensure that it reflects everything you deemed important enough to discuss in your meetings.
  3. If you are a woman, have both a man and a woman review the agreement on your behalf and vice-versa. I had my dad review mine, but in fact I don’t think he even read it because it was so long. That should have been a clue that we needed to simplify our agreement. I didn’t have a woman review it, and that might have pointed out where I went wrong.
  4. Have a trial period testing out your new agreement for things that do not need to be decided right away.

Day Zero

by | Sep 2, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

Day Zero

I’ve been thinking about loss lately, and how it drops a person into a stress so heavy it’s often easier to just go back to whatever you were doing before and pretend the loss isn’t sitting there.

I’ve been thinking about it specifically in relation to job loss, using my own experience losing my job as a full-time stay-at-home parent as the closest thing I have to compare it to. My first instinct was to go get a new job, and I went straight back to the exact kind of work I’d done before, even though I’d never actually been happy doing it. That unhappiness came through in every application and every interview, clearly enough that nothing came of any of it.

I’m genuinely grateful for that now. Failing to get hired gave me breathing room I wouldn’t have taken for myself otherwise, room to actually deal with the loss instead of just papering over it with a new job.

I understand how consuming that kind of stress can be. My coach kept telling me to take time and go do something enjoyable. I resisted, convinced I should be doing something more productive instead. Eventually I got low enough that she just ordered it: fifteen minutes of something enjoyable.

So I did, because I always did what I was told. I spent a whole day testing things in fifteen-minute increments, things I used to enjoy, things I thought other people might enjoy, trying to remember what enjoyment even felt like anymore.

I think of that day as day zero. None of it actually worked in the moment; nothing I tried felt genuinely enjoyable. But the next day, my mood was noticeably better, even though nothing in my actual situation had changed. I was still alone. I was still nowhere near figuring out what I wanted. But something had shifted anyway.

That was the moment I realized mood and circumstance aren’t the same thing, and that I had more control over the first one than I’d ever assumed. Once I saw that clearly, I started actually testing different ways of living, rather than just waiting for my circumstances to improve first.

I’m grateful for that lost job now. It handed me time I never would have taken for myself otherwise.

If you’re thinking you don’t have the time, money, or energy to sit with something like this, that reaction was mine too. Getting that time, energy, or space is the actual first step, and it usually takes more creativity to find than you’d expect. I did things I never would have tried before that stretch of my life. Most of them didn’t work either. A few, unexpectedly, did.

Strategies for Dealing with Transition Days

by | Aug 27, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Strategies for Dealing with Transition Days

Are you in the middle of a transition day?

There are two types of transition days: the ones where the kids leave to go stay with their other parent, and the ones where they come back to you. Let’s deal with the leaving days first.

The first thing to do is make sure your remaining minutes before saying goodbye are good ones. Minutes, yes. This is your first real challenge, and it is one. Getting kids packed and ready to leave is stressful on its own, and in my experience, kids rarely cooperate. It’s hard to stay calm when your child won’t stop what they’re doing long enough to put their shoes on, and it’s doubly hard when part of you doesn’t want them to leave at all.

So how do you stay calm instead of spending those last minutes yelling? Practice. Practice reminding yourself this is genuinely a hard situation. Practice giving yourself a break if you do end up yelling anyway. Apologize to your child if it happens, and tell them why. Then remember to say you love them and that you’ll see them soon. Remind yourself you’ll get plenty more chances to practice this, and that it does get easier with time.

While you’re getting your child ready, pay attention to the feeling rising in you that tends to lead to yelling. This is a good moment to remind yourself the kids are leaving soon regardless, and it genuinely doesn’t matter if they forget something or run a few minutes late. It’s also a good moment to remember your kids are capable, and this is exactly the kind of situation where natural consequences can do some of the teaching for you. Help them remember what they need, help them pack, then wait for them outside once they’re ready. Sit down. Take a few deep breaths while you wait.

Set a rule with your kids that they always look you in the eye to say goodbye. There’s nothing worse than watching your child sprint off without a backward glance, whether they’re leaving straight from your home or somewhere you’ve driven them. You don’t want your last memory before two days, four days, or a full week apart to be the back of your child’s head running away from you, thinking, I didn’t even get to say goodbye. What if something happens to one of us?

Then they’re gone. You might have somewhere to be, or you might not. You might fill the time deliberately so you don’t sit with the absence, or you might find yourself with more open time than you know what to do with. If it’s the latter, grief tends to creep in. Let it. Sit with it for a while. Powering through a feeling, or burying it, just means you never actually learn how to move through it. Face it directly, give yourself grace for being sad, and over time, these grief stretches tend to get shorter.

Then remind yourself that none of it will go exactly to plan. Things happen. Don’t beat yourself up if whatever plan you made for “how the next transition will go” doesn’t play out the way you pictured. You made that plan while the kids weren’t even there, and the actual push and pull of parenting rarely follows the version you designed in their absence.

That said, don’t stop making the plans. Pieces of them do eventually find their way into your real transition days, in a good way, even if the whole plan never survives contact with reality.

Transition Days

by | Aug 18, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Transition Days

I often wonder if there are other parents out there like me. I start wondering about five minutes after dropping my kids off at school. Day one of five days they’re with their dad, on our 2255 parenting schedule.

Are there other parents out there who know what a 2255 parenting schedule even means? I haven’t met one yet. When I try to explain it to friends in intact families, their eyes glaze over. “How do you keep track of that?” Oh, we have a shared Google calendar, but honestly, I don’t need it. I always know exactly when my kids are coming back, and exactly when they’re leaving. I sometimes wish I didn’t, since both the anticipation of their return and the dread of their leaving tend to wreck my whole day either way.

I call the days on either side of a handoff Transition Days. Some weeks it feels like every other day qualifies.

I’m always caught off guard by the waves of sadness that show up. Just thirty minutes earlier, hustling the kids into the car, I was mostly annoyed; nobody could find their school bag, nobody would put their shoes on. The night before had been exhausting too: a full day as an accountant in the final stretch of tax season, then home as a single parent to two wound-up sons who wouldn’t settle down for bed. My six-year-old stayed up until ten, wanting me to sleep next to him, probably picking up on the tension in the house even if he couldn’t name it. I needed some time alone to recharge after the day I’d had. The irony wasn’t lost on me; five full days of alone time were about to start in twelve hours. He eventually fell asleep on the couch in the next room while I was watching TV, and I carried his warm, sleeping weight up to bed, trying to hold onto the feeling of it, because I knew by morning it would already be gone.

I’ve learned to schedule things for the stretches when the kids are gone, but I can’t schedule all of it. I’m single now, and when they leave, I put myself to bed alone and wake up alone too. This particular morning, I was meeting a friend; she’d text around eight, but I was up at six, and the silence of the house made it impossible not to notice they weren’t there. The house feels small, crowded, and messy when they’re home. The moment they leave, I basically live in one room, and even that room feels too big.

There’s no getting around being alone when they’re gone. I try to think of the friends who tell me they’d kill for a chance to sleep in and have a day entirely to themselves. I try to remember that just yesterday I was trying to fade into the background at home so nobody would notice me and demand a round of Crazy Eights. I know my kids are happy with their dad, well taken care of, not to my exact standard, sure, but getting a different version of how to live and see the world, which probably isn’t a bad thing for them in the long run.

But my first thought waking up and my last thought falling asleep both circle back to the same place: the time I get with my kids is already short, and it’s just been cut in half again. Then the sadness moves in. I wonder sometimes if it ever fully goes away, or if I’ll just be managing this particular grief until they’re old enough to be leaving the nest for good anyway. Maybe by then it’ll finally let go of me too.

How Do You View the Past?

by | Aug 7, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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How Do You View the Past?

When you think of your life up until this point, does it make you happy, or do you focus on the negative aspects of your past and use it as an excuse to stop moving forward?

How we view the past often depends on how we perceive our present life. If you’re living with challenging circumstances, it’s hard not to let your current situation colour your thoughts about the past, present, and future.

When I was going through my divorce, I was looking for proof of how I’d gotten to that point. In the thick of it, every memory of shared moments with my ex took on a negative hue. I’d mine my own memories for evidence that I was never meant to marry that person in the first place. Then I’d beat myself up for having been so stupid. Clearly, every memory pointed to the same conclusion: we were never supposed to be together. How could it have taken me twenty years to realize this?

So I decided to try not to think about it at all.

Since I’d shared twenty years of my life with this person, that meant wiping out a good chunk of genuinely happy memories along with it. I went further still and reasoned that my childhood had led me to this partner in the first place, so I wrote off those memories too. My whole life path had funnelled into one single point of failure: divorce. Failure kept looping through my brain. All I had left, or so it felt, was one failed marriage, no career, and unhappy kids.

People, and plenty of self-help books, told me to hold onto the good moments I’d shared with my ex, hoping to stop me from doing exactly what I was doing, letting my past overshadow my present and future. Because that’s exactly what was happening. I was projecting my past straight into my future, and it was stopping me cold. What was the point of a future that looked just like my very unhappy past?

My coach helped me find a way out of that loop by helping me shift how I saw my present.

She started by telling me it wasn’t my life that had failed. It was my relationship with one specific person. From there, she helped me define what success actually meant to me, on my own terms, and helped me find real evidence that I’d already succeeded by that definition.

Once I started seeing that, my past began to look different too. I was focused now on where I’d actually succeeded, by my own measure. And once I could see that clearly, she pointed out something else: my past had gotten me exactly to where I was standing. All those things I’d filed away as mistakes were really just lessons, specific to me, moving me closer to what I actually wanted out of life.

None of this was a quick fix. It took real time and real practice.

But the recipe itself is simple: look for the success already present in your current life, and the evidence you find there will reach backward into your memories and forward into a future worth having.

The Rules We Make up and then live by

by | Jul 31, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

The Rules We Make Up and Then Live By

I think about a certain kind of conversation I’ve had more than once over the years, always some version of the same shape. Someone in the middle of a hard divorce, scared of what a judge might decide, has quietly built a set of rules for herself that make her fear feel like fact rather than fear.

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The shape usually goes something like this. She’s the higher earner in the marriage. Her ex works in a less lucrative field, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. Everyone else assumes she loves her work: successful, outgoing, good at it. Then it comes out that she doesn’t, not really. She stayed because someone had to earn enough to support the family, and she’s quietly dreamed for years of doing something else entirely. But she believes she can’t act on that now, because a court might read a career change as a deliberate attempt to dodge support obligations.

Then the resentment starts flowing toward the ex: if he’d just go back to a higher-paying job he’s clearly capable of, this whole calculation would look different. Why should she be the one stuck carrying an obligation that traces back to a choice he made.

The underlying belief, stated plainly, usually sounds something like: everyone has to work; that’s just how it is. Which really means: everyone has to take the highest-paying job available, whether they’re happy in it or not, and choosing otherwise is either selfish or naive.

I’ve pushed back on this kind of thinking before, and it tends to get a little heated, because underneath it are a few unspoken rules that feel like settled fact to the person holding them. Something like: you have to take the best-paying job you’re capable of if you have kids and responsibilities; otherwise, you’re flaky. Work generally sucks, and if you actually like what you do, it doesn’t really count as work. And life is inherently unfair, so whatever position you happened to hold at the moment of separation, you’re now locked into for good.

What strikes me every time is how quickly these get treated as facts about the world rather than one person’s fear-based read on their own situation. They’re not the only possible outcome. They’re just the outcome that becomes far more likely once someone decides the rule is true and stops looking for any other path.

That’s the real trap. Not the divorce, not the finances, but the rules someone builds for themselves along the way and then quietly agrees to be governed by, permanently.

If I could say one thing to anyone caught in that pattern, it would be this: hold your own rules up to the light before you decide to live inside them forever. Ask what you actually want, separate from the fear driving the rule. There’s usually more room to move than the rule wants you to believe.

Rules for Email

by | May 20, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Rules for Email

When my ex and I first separated, I spent a long time carefully crafting every email to him, trying to make sure there was nothing in it that could be read as offensive. I didn’t want another attack coming back at me; reading those was genuinely painful. How could this person I’d been partnered with for twenty years, who I’d had children with, who I’d put first for most of my adult life, write the things he was writing?

So I spent hours on each email. Clear, concise, no blame, no judgment.

I’d still get an attack back. Something always got misread or twisted.

I’d try to defend myself, take just as much care crafting that reply, and still get something upsetting in return.

It was brutal. He kept finding ways past every defence I put up, every boundary I tried to hold.

One day something finally pushed me over the edge. I was exhausted by the endless back-and-forth. I needed out of that cycle, whatever it took.

So I built myself some rules:

  • Keep emails short. Five sentences, maximum.
  • Wait a day or two after an upsetting reply before responding.
  • Don’t defend myself, especially when asked to. That’s just handing him another opening to attack my values.
  • Don’t discuss the emails with anyone else afterward.

These rules are hard to actually stick to. I get plenty of practice failing at them and trying again. If you’re newly separated, I’d bet you’re getting the same practice.

Eventually the emails got shorter on both ends, and further apart. Not because either of us changed, but because I stopped feeding the cycle new material to work with.

What an attack email does

by | May 20, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

What an Attack Email Does

My ex sent me a doozy of an attack email the other day. He sent it on Monday, and it’s now Wednesday. It was a good reminder of everything I’ve learned this past year, and of the havoc these kinds of emails can cause. I actually have to thank him for it, since it’s inspired me to write something that might help other people and given me a chance to test my own theories on communication in real time.

Let me start with what the email actually did to me. Despite all the work I’ve put into myself this past year, I still take his words in, and I still have to run them through my own internal processing system before they stop provoking a reaction. I’m writing this partly for anyone tempted to fire off a good zinger of an attack email themselves. If you understand what it actually does to the person receiving it, maybe that gives you pause. It helps stop me, at least.

Here’s how I process one:

The first thing that happens is I don’t want to open it. Monday’s was fourteen paragraphs, seven hundred and seventy words. I knew before I read a word that it wasn’t going to be good.

I do a quick speed-read for offensive or attacking language. This one had plenty.

I try to pull out whatever actually needs a response, skip past the barbs, and reply only to what’s necessary, resisting the urge to attack back.

I do a little internal happy dance and pat myself on the back for staying strong and not engaging further. Look at that, all this work actually paid off. (I think about what would’ve happened without the work: I’d have fired something back, and based on past experience, the conflict would’ve dragged on for a solid week.)

Then I try to get back to whatever I was doing before the email landed, in this case, working from my desk. Except now there’s a cloud sitting over the rest of my day, and my billable hours take the hit either way.

I realize I need to actually process this before I can concentrate on anything else.

I journal. I go back and reread the email, break it down, see how it fits the usual pattern, and analyze it properly.

I think about calling a friend to vent. I don’t. I already know that doesn’t actually help. (More on that here.)

I think about what an idiot my ex is.

I think about how to get even. I resist getting even.

I scrub my porch.

I go for a walk.

I go to bed.

Tuesday, I’m better. Productive all day.

Wednesday, it creeps back into my head, though I feel pretty good about how I handled it. Should I follow up with him, walk through what happened so it doesn’t repeat?

Nah. I’ll write this blog post instead.

And then I’ll write this one. (How to write an email to your ex.)