Zip, Zero, Nada

by | Nov 20, 2023 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

Zip, Zero, Nada

Does salary level determine a job’s worth, or a person’s?

Most of us would say “no way,” including myself, yet actions and behaviour speak louder than words.

When I was earning a decent salary, some might have called it indecent for my age; people treated me differently. They seemed to respect me automatically, and I never felt I had to justify my actions. I was making a lot of money, so my work was worthy, and by default, so was I.

Then I became a stay-at-home mom, and we all know how much stay-at-home parents get paid. That amount is zip, zero, nada.

Nobody questioned my decision when I first decided to become a stay-at-home parent. I had some savings from work and was expecting my second child. I had worked enough to be guaranteed parental leave benefits when my second child was born.

Now that I think about it, it’s fascinating how many people had opinions on my new status.

Most people told me I was making a good decision. They said, “Your children are only young once; you’re lucky to spend time with them when they’re young.”

And I agree. I was fortunate to spend time with my kids when they were young.

But the other message I internalized from this comment was that I wasn’t genuinely working, or that I was working at a job that benefited anyone other than me.

As time went by and my kids got older, four and two, my justification for staying home became more and more of a topic of conversation, and I became more internally defensive. I started keeping a mental list of how I was contributing to our household, one I began obsessing over almost daily.

The first question out of my spouse’s mouth when he got home from work was, “What did you do today?” He probably wasn’t looking for proof I’d worked, but I had my list ready anyway, just in case, to show I hadn’t spent the day surfing the web. My husband never had to justify his actions. He brought home a paycheque every two weeks that did it for him.

To feel more justified in what I was doing, I decided I could live with less “fun” money than my husband. I cut my leisure spending to one-third of his.

It’s telling what that pay cut did to our family dynamic. I didn’t need the extra money, but in a sense I’d taken a notional pay cut, which further minimized my sense of worth. My relationship with my spouse became more unbalanced. We were no longer equal, not in my eyes, and not in his.

At that point, my husband and I had monetary proof that my job wasn’t as worthy as his.

This concept carried into our divorce process. We barely discussed how I’d contributed to the household. My contribution was glossed over, and the main conversation revolved around when I would start “work.” We didn’t discuss the fact that I had effectively lost my job, because being a stay-at-home parent is not recognized as a job. I’d been on a lark, apparently, and now I had to get down to business and find something worthy.

What was the difference between my job and my now-ex’s? His was paid. Mine wasn’t.

If you’re considering becoming a stay-at-home parent, I’d encourage you to set up your finances like this:

Take your spouse’s salary, divide it by two, and automatically transfer half into your own bank account every pay period. Then you and your spouse each pay half of the joint family expenses, and cover your personal spending from what’s left over.

If you’re about to become a stay-at-home parent, talk through a financial arrangement like this with your spouse before the baby is born. If your spouse doesn’t support a proposal like this, that’s worth talking through further before you give up a career for a job with no paycheque attached.

If your spouse does support it, you’ll know they consider the work a worthy endeavour, worthy enough that they’re willing to pay for it. Because, despite the saying, money does define the worthiness of jobs and people, at least in how we treat each other. Actions and behaviour speak louder than words.

Living Apart Together and Personal Finances

by | Sep 2, 2019 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

We’re Basically a LAT Couple

Living Apart Together, LAT for short, is the latest acronym for couples who are romantically involved but choose not to move in together. After yuppies and DINKs, now we have LATs.

I sometimes wonder why this wasn’t a thing when I was young and just assumed you moved in with a boyfriend as the next obvious step. My wasband, that’s the past tense of husband, and I might still be married if we’d never combined a household in the first place.

Here’s what nobody points out: divorced co-parents are already living some version of a LAT relationship, minus the romance. My wasband and I have weekly meetings about the kids, their homework, their schedules. We have more genuinely constructive conversations now than we ever managed while married. We coordinate, we compromise, and we show up for the same goals and events from two separate addresses.

Which got me thinking about actual LAT couples, the ones who want the relationship without the shared roof. This seems to show up most among people who’ve already been divorced once. Once you’ve lived through that particular type of hell, you understand exactly why you might not volunteer for round two. Being divorced doesn’t mean you’re sentenced to being single forever, but it also doesn’t mean cohabitation is the only legitimate way to be in a relationship.

Living apart cuts out an enormous amount of the friction that comes from actually sharing space. The toilet seat. The shoes colonizing the closet. Whoever never loads the dishwasher. Keeping two addresses means skipping most of that entirely.

So why doesn’t everyone just do this?

Money, mostly. It’s expensive to be a single adult, and the math gets tempting fast once you’re spending real time with someone who’s also paying rent or a mortgage somewhere else. Combine two incomes, and suddenly there’s room to actually save, or go out more, or just breathe a little. In a city like Vancouver, that math isn’t really optional for most people; it usually takes two incomes under one roof just to stay financially stable at all.

Which is exactly why the co-parenting version is worth noticing. My ex and I get the real benefits of LAT: low-friction collaboration, real partnership on the things that matter, without having to solve the financial math of merging two households, because we’re not trying to be a couple. We’re just two people who figured out how to run a shared project well from a distance.

Turns out you don’t need romance to make LAT work. You just need a good reason to stay coordinated, and enough distance to skip the toilet seat argument entirely.

September

September

by | Sep 3, 2018 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

September

September

September. Labour Day. A day of transition, and that’s underselling it.

If you’re a parent to school-aged kids, September can be a lot. If you’re separated or divorced and sharing parenting with a co-parent, September can be too much.

It can be too many decisions, and too many decisions to implement, especially when you have to navigate them with someone you no longer live with. It really can be too much. But does it have to be? It depends on how you approach it.

Let me tell you a story about two parents with a five-year-old and an eight-year-old, heading back to school.

Both parents had recently signed their separation agreement. Both believed the agreement was the clear document they needed to make decisions. They’d spent a lot of money and done a ton of work to finalize it. They were pinning their hopes on it.

I’m sorry to say they were a bit deluded. They had a separation agreement. That was all they had. They didn’t share an understanding of how to interpret it, and they didn’t have a process for building one.

What did they have? A lot of anger, grief, and blame directed at each other. And a joint decision to make.

Which parent would buy the back-to-school shoes?

Seriously. Was buying shoes the big decision? Yes.

Parent A, call them type A, had always done the back-to-school shopping. Parent B, type B, had worked outside the home and, in the past, had paid for it. Under the new agreement, they were meant to share both parenting and its costs, but they had very different ideas of what that looked like.

Parent A went from full-time parent to part-time parent, trying to find work to cover a part-time single-parent household. The bills got covered. There was nothing left for extras.

Parent B had gone from full-time employee to full-time employee with a new part-time parenting job that felt full-time. Money felt tight too, running two households on one income while Parent A was still job hunting, and while paying child support on top of it.

Cue the back-to-school shopping.

Parent A had bought the summer shoes. It was Parent B’s turn. Parent A was tired of being taken for granted, tired of no one giving credit for years of unpaid work at home. That was going to change. Parent B could buy the shoes.

Parent B had just sent child support. Child support is supposed to cover the basics. Shoes are basics. Parent A needed to understand how hard it was to fund two households. Parent A could buy the shoes.

The first day of school approached. The kids were still in their Crocs. “Has Parent B taken you shoe shopping?” Parent A asked. “Nope,” the kids said.

To keep them out of the middle, though the kids likely noticed the eye-roll that followed “nope,” Parent A called Parent B. “It’s your turn to buy the shoes, but I know you’re busy, so I’ll buy them if you pay me back.”

Parent B disagreed.

Well, Parent A thought, the kids can go to school without new shoes. Maybe then Parent B will finally understand the work I did all those years and stop taking me for granted.

So the kids didn’t get new shoes. The teachers sent notes home. The kids said they needed running shoes. Parent A and Parent B dug in.

“I just gave you child support,” Parent B said. “You can buy the shoes.”

“I’ll buy them if you pay me to,” Parent A said. “I bought them last time. It’s your turn, based on our fifty-fifty split. I charge fifty dollars an hour for parenting services, and I’ll gladly do this on your behalf if you cover the rate.”

This argument happened at the five-year-old’s first soccer game, in front of both kids.

Eventually the shoes got bought. The kids also got put squarely in the middle and watched their parents have an embarrassing fight at a five-year-old’s soccer game.

Parent A and Parent B hadn’t figured out how to have these conversations differently. They were still using the old method: someone wins, someone loses. So the next joint decision went the same way. And the one after that.

Every simple decision took days, weeks, months. This is exhausting, both of them thought separately. Life is hard enough running a single-parent household without a difficult co-parent on top of it. Do simple decisions really have to take this long?

Back-to-school. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Birthdays. Spring break. Summer. It was already stressful enough without the decision-making battles layered on top.

Both parents knew it couldn’t keep going this way. They tried different things. Counselling. Coaching. Separately at first, then together, once they’d learned how to be in a room with each other again.

Parent A and Parent B have been separated for five and a half years now, divorced for four. Their kids are twelve and nine. They are not the parents they used to be. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment they became true co-parents. I know it wasn’t the day they signed the agreement.

September. Labour Day. A day that reminds them how much easier decisions are now. Which is a relief, since the decisions never stop, and if anything, there are more of them with each passing September.

The Checklist doesn’t solve it

by | Sep 14, 2017 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

The Checklist Doesn’t Solve It

My blog post ideas usually hit me on the head when I’m struggling. Today’s struggle was getting my kids out the door to school.

This seems straightforward in theory. I even made a checklist, taped to the fridge:

Wake up, 7:30 am. Get dressed. Eat breakfast. Dishes in the dishwasher. Brush hair. Brush teeth. Lunch in your bag. Water bottle in your bag. Coat on. Shoes on, 8:30 am.

Twenty minutes, easy. I got up at 6 am today. By 8:30, we were nowhere close to ready, and I found myself wondering if my neighbours were about to call the police over what sounded like a domestic disturbance in my kitchen.

Nothing was wrong with the list. My kids are good at following lists. Something else was missing.

It reminded me of my work with clients, which starts the same way: a template. A spending plan, property, debts, all filled in over what should be a couple of hours. Both the checklist and the template look concrete and achievable on paper. Both take longer than they should, and both come with more angst than the task itself would suggest.

Because the real work was never the checklist or the template. The real work with my kids was figuring out what was actually going on underneath, the reason two siblings kept finding new and creative ways to torment each other. That meant talking to their dad, coordinating with grandparents whose old discipline methods weren’t landing the same way with these kids, and doing the relational work instead of hoping a fridge list would fix it. That work is slow and uncomfortable, and it’s the part I tend to avoid.

The spending plan template works the same way. Filling it in takes two or three hours, tops. That part really is easy. But the ease is only on the surface, the same way the checklist looked easy until it didn’t hold.

When I did this work with clients, I’d ask what was actually going on underneath, whatever was likely to stretch a simple two-hour process into something much longer, and I’d encourage them to deal with that first. Not because the spreadsheet mattered less, but because reviewing a spending plan is quick. It’s only worth doing once the angst underneath it has somewhere to go.

I used to tell clients: this will take three hours if I’m working in a total vacuum the moment I get your information. But nobody works in a vacuum. It could take three hours, or a while longer. We’d figure it out as we went, and I’d keep them posted as best I could.

Custody of Kitty

by | Aug 15, 2017 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

This is Kitty And this is Kitty out enjoying nature. 

Looks like a fireman Lego with a Darth Vader cape and falling-off headphones, you might think. Oh, how wrong you’d be.

Kitty, the combination of Lego man and Lego cat, the unit is called Kitty, caused a lot of conflict in our household last week.

I was dutifully cleaning up the dishes when I started to hear screaming coming from the area my kids had disappeared to. They always make themselves scarce when there’s work to be done. Someday soon they’ll be trained on dinner dishes.

I went to investigate, and as I got closer, the screaming became clearer.

“You’re an idiot!”

“No, you are!”

“Get out of my room, you’re always taking my stuff.”

“Kitty’s mine! Give it back!”

As I rounded the corner, my youngest hurtled by, clutching something in his hand. I reached out to grab him.

“What’s going on?”

I got a stereo synopsis of the situation. The kids were fighting over Kitty.

I yelled, ” Stop, ” and asked them to hold onto Kitty while we figured things out. The yelling continued, so I yelled stop again.

I called a time-out. “Okay, we all need to calm down, and then in ten minutes we can discuss what’s going on here, but we all need to get to a point where we can talk and not yell. I can’t help you two figure out anything while you’re yelling.”

So my kids went to their respective corners, not easily done. When my eldest is ramped up emotionally, he needs ten minutes alone in his room. Really, he needs twenty-four hours, but we’re working on ten minutes so he doesn’t lose an entire day. My youngest gets thirty seconds of screaming his head off, stomping, slamming doors. Thirty seconds. It’s fun, but it’s what we have to work with. It used to be three minutes. We’re whittling it down.

The kids had their time-outs, and I used the time to strategize and breathe before becoming mom-mediator. Not enough time.

We started to discuss what to do. Both kids wanted Kitty. Both were convinced Kitty was theirs. So first we explored that.

“How do we prove who Kitty belongs to?” I asked.

They started arguing over which set Kitty must have come from. A fireman set? Seemed reasonable. Then they argued over which kid had gotten the fireman set. They tried to get me to cast the deciding vote, but honestly, I couldn’t remember. I tried the analytical approach: you, oldest child, never liked firetrucks, you liked SpongeBob, so in theory Kitty is more likely from a set belonging to the youngest. This led to a lot of protesting from the older one, who explained that various pieces had come from multiple sets he’d creatively combined.

Still stuck. They dragged out every Lego manual to trace where each piece had come from. We did this for a while, until my oldest remembered he’d taken most of the manuals to his dad’s.

All the while, I was trying to help them think past “this is mine and therefore not yours.” Could we find equivalent pieces to build a second Kitty? Apparently not, there was only one cat. Could they take turns? Clearly not.

So I tried getting each of them to see the other’s point of view. I asked my oldest to explain what Kitty meant to him. He walked through the whole inspiration behind Kitty’s creation, how he’d picked each piece and why they belonged together as one unit. I’ve since forgotten the details, but at the time I could tell he felt real pride in what he’d built.

As he explained, my youngest rolled his eyes and huffed. I asked him to stop and listen, he’d get his turn too.

He did. And he repeated almost exactly what his brother had said, for nearly identical reasons. He loves his older brother and wants to be just like him.

I believe my oldest actually created Kitty. I also have a very non-self-aware youngest who genuinely believes he did.

After hearing what Kitty meant to each of them, I wanted them both to get to play with him. But they were still dug into their positions. I’d hoped that hearing each other out might lead somewhere, a duplicate Kitty, a sharing arrangement, even one of them stepping back and saying Kitty clearly meant more to the other. No such luck. They were stuck, and so was I.

I had to pull out the judge card.

“Well, it looks like we need a custody arrangement for Kitty. I’ll hold onto him overnight while I think about who gets the first play shift.”

I’ve had Kitty ever since. He’s been living in my car, riding around with me. I’ve become quite attached.

What the Lemonade Stand Taught me

by | Aug 9, 2017 | Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

What the Lemonade Stand Taught Me

I used to go to camp with my kids a couple of weeks a year. A rustic, all-inclusive, moms and kids only, canoeing and swimming, alongside candlelight yoga and sessions on “living your authentic life.” Every year leading up to it, I’d feel a little “meh.” Every year, on the last night, we’d sit in a circle and share what we were grateful for, and every year I said some version of the same thing: no meal prep, no laundry, no grunt work, and a real reminder of how I wanted to live according to my own values.

Camp was a reset button, and reset buttons are hard to come by. Most of us live in reaction mode more than we’d admit. I certainly did, finishing one project only to realize there was no time to reflect before starting the next, mostly my own doing, since I tended to be a little too optimistic about what I could fit into a day.

So of course, at camp one year, I did it again. An email came in asking for help on a project I loved: building a spreadsheet to get someone real clarity on their finances. I said yes immediately. The only catch was a tight deadline, and with other people handling my kids and the day-to-day grind, that detail didn’t register.

It registered the moment I got home and was back to making lunch.

The kids left for their week with their dad, and I got real, focused work done, with no shopping or chores pulling at me. Then they came back, the project wasn’t finished, and I was suddenly working while arranging childcare, shopping, and cooking at the same time.

I sat at my desk building the spreadsheet while my kids entertained themselves nearby, occasionally getting a snack tossed their way or a yell to stop fighting.

They’d just come back from an entrepreneurship day camp their dad had signed them up for, and they were full of ideas about making money. Naturally, they landed on a lemonade stand.

“Can we walk to the store for supplies?” “Yes, yes, just be quiet, I’m working.”

They set it up. I paused to help carry a table and chairs and check that the lemonade was food-safe, then couldn’t resist inserting myself into their pricing. “How much are you charging?” I asked, though really I told them: seventy-five cents a cup. Last time, they’d made forty dollars in an hour, and instead of pride, I’d felt horrified, convinced they were overcharging.

They agreed, reluctantly, and went to sell.

I finished the spreadsheet, proud of it, sent it off, and went to check on them.

A couple of dads on bikes had stopped. “We always stop for these, gotta support the kids.” One added, “You guys need a better street, not much traffic here.” They handed over three fifty for two cups. “Don’t fill it too full.”

Later, the kids told me every customer that day had paid more than seventy-five cents.

That’s when it hit me. I’d just spent an entire project quietly finding ways to charge my client less, working extra hours unbilled, telling myself it didn’t count because I loved the work and was learning.

Turns out I needed the lesson from my own kids. They weren’t gouging anyone. Their customers wanted to pay more. Two kids selling lemonade from concentrate, on a low-traffic street, had tapped into something people were glad to pay for.

Do you do this too? Minimize what your own work is worth?

Learn from a ten- and eight-year-old with a card table: keep enjoying what you do, but don’t let that be the reason you give it away. Charge what it’s actually worth. Take on less. Keep making what you do better.