The BAD MOTHER tagline

by | Oct 18, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

I wrote the post below back when I was recently separated with two young children, in the thick of grief and anger, most of it aimed at my ex. I felt like I had no control over my own life. photo-1470319149473-af271634cecf

The Bad Mother Tagline

Have you ever thought of yourself as a bad mother? I know I have. “I’m a bad mother” has been the tagline running under nearly every parenting mistake I’ve made since my oldest was born, ten years ago now. Forgot his hat. Bad mother. Yelled at him for being irritating. Bad mother. Forgot to remind him to look both ways when crossing the street. BAD MOTHER. A friend and I once joked about getting matching T-shirts that said “dumb mum.”

We’re wired this way as a species, apparently, quick to forgive everyone except ourselves.

I got a fresh reminder of this a few weekends ago.

My kids’ dad asked if I could take them for the weekend. He asked on Wednesday. I was buried in work and had promised myself I wasn’t working weekends anymore. My answer should have been an easy no. I had plans. I needed the recharge.

No was right there, on the tip of my fingers as I started typing my reply. Then something stopped me.

The thought: I’m a bad mother.

How could I not want to be with my own kids? Their dad needed help. How could I put my own interests ahead of theirs?

So instead of no, I said yes. I cancelled my plans and told myself that wanting that time in the first place had been selfish.

You can probably guess how the weekend went. Not well.

It started going sideways Friday at 2:30, when my youngest called from school with a tummy ache. I knew immediately it wasn’t real, not medically. He hates last-minute changes, and switching up the schedule on short notice was enough to give him an emotional stomachache. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. He needed time to process the change. So did I.

I’d been counting on those hours to get my work done before pickup. Instead, I found myself standing in front of my seven-year-old, and the first words out of my mouth were: “Do you really have a tummy ache?”

I heard myself say it, and right behind it came the tagline, on schedule: I am a bad mother.

I spent the rest of the weekend taking my mood out on my kids in small ways I’m not proud of, and by the time they left, I was cycling through the whole tagline lineup. Bad. Hadn’t learned a thing. Still the same people-pleaser I thought I’d outgrown.

Monday morning, kids gone, I finally had space to think. I cried, partly from the weekend itself, partly because I still had work waiting and no energy left for it.

Then I started writing, and something clicked. I’d just gotten the clearest proof I was ever going to need that the “bad mother” tagline had to go. For good.

Looking back at that weekend now, oddly, I’m grateful for it. Thank you, terrible weekend. You were the thing that finally put that tagline in the ground, along with the others I’d been using to beat myself up for years.

The Importance and Contradiction of Alone Time

by | Sep 18, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

A photo by Joshua Earle. unsplash.com/photos/ZMcLVBi9xx4

The Importance and Contradiction of Alone Time

School’s back, and so is the annual pressure to sign my kids up for everything. I’ve bought in, fully. My older son is resisting hard, and I need to let him win this one, right after I sign him up for swimming, choir, and cross country. Just for the bus ride after school to the park near us, obviously.

Dance is where I’m really stuck.

I put him in dance a couple of years ago because team sports never clicked for him, and because at the beach, a place he claims to hate, he’d break into dance completely unprompted. I decided that meant dance was his happy place. He did well. I loved the year-end concerts. His teacher told me he was a natural.

Now he tells me it’s boring. Same moves, over and over, one more obligation to please people, including me, including the woman who runs the studio. I still want to sign him back up anyway, because if he doesn’t keep at it, how will he ever know what he actually loves? He’ll fall behind. He’ll lose the thing that lit him up at the beach.

That’s the argument running in my head, the one currently badgering my kid into a dance class he’s already told me he hates.

This weekend gave me a clearer look at what’s actually going on.

My hiking trip got rained out. No kids; they were with their dad, no plans, an entire Saturday stretching out empty in front of me. I texted a friend to see if she still wanted to hike in the downpour. No. So I sat on my couch and felt the whole day loom.

I ran to my closet, put on my gear, and drove myself straight to the Grouse Grind. Came home, worked for a while, and when that wore off, I started beating myself up for having no life outside of work and exercise, so I started texting everyone I know. A friend offered to have me over to cook with her.

I hate cooking, always have, despite coming from a family of genuine foodies. When she asked, I realized what I actually wanted was to stay home, alone. She heard that in my voice, laughed, and told me to make a to-do list instead, something to distract myself from the “I’m alone” thoughts.

So I made the list. I’m a very dutiful friend, and as I started writing things down, I felt a small flicker of panic that the list was eating into my alone time. Which was absurd the moment I noticed it. I’d been upset about having alone time in the first place, wanting to fill it, and the second I actually started filling it, I missed the alone time instead.

I went to yoga instead. Then that same friend, the one who years ago introduced herself by randomly offering pizza to strangers walking past her house, invited me over for exactly that: bacon and potato pizza. I said yes. I came home that night, still alone, and it was fine. Completely fine. I went to bed happy and woke up happy.

Which brought me back to my son and his dance class.

Filling up every hour of a kid’s schedule teaches them that being alone, or bored, is a problem to be solved rather than a state worth sitting in. My son is an introvert, and he’s also a rule-follower, which means he does the thing he’s told even when he’s already said he doesn’t want to. I’ve been telling him he’s wrong to want out of dance, while insisting, in the same breath, that all I want for him is his own happiness. Those two things don’t actually fit together.

He needs time that isn’t scheduled toward anything, the same kind of time I finally gave myself this weekend, if he’s ever going to find out on his own what actually lights him up. Not because someone signed him up for it. Because he found it, the way he found the beach dancing nobody asked him to do.

How do You Know When to Pull the Plug on Your Marriage?

by | Sep 13, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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The Two Fears That Almost Kept Me Married

When do you decide to give up on a marriage, actually call it quits, and ask for a divorce?

I ask because I honestly don’t know the answer. I never made that decision myself; my ex made it for both of us. Left to my own devices, I probably would have stayed until death do us part. I have a high tolerance for pain, and I’ve always preferred trying to fix things over walking away from them. I still want an answer, even though I’m slowly learning there isn’t a clean one, which is basically why I’m writing this at all. When do you actually call it quits?

Put another way: what’s actually stopping you from initiating a divorce, if part of you wants to?

From what I’ve seen, mostly fear. Two fears in particular tend to do the heaviest lifting: money and the kids.

Let’s take them head-on.

Fear One: You’ll Be Much Worse Off Financially

Being poor was one of my fears too. Combined, my husband and I could live comfortably in an expensive city on one income. Divorced, that math falls apart. I’d need a job, we’d need childcare, we’d need to split assets and fund two households instead of one. Both our standards of living would drop. That was a genuinely depressing thought, enough on its own to keep divorce off the table. I’d rather be unhappy and financially stable than happy and broke, or so I believed at the time.

My divorce happened anyway, and yes, my net worth dropped. My cash flow took a real hit. That brought real anxiety with it. I used to build monthly budgets just to confirm, yet again, that there wasn’t enough coming in to cover what was going out, which only fed the anxiety further, until I finally made the connection that stressing myself into a spiral wasn’t actually accomplishing anything.

Eventually I realized I’d always managed, one way or another. I cut my spending, found ways to bring in more money, made decisions, and kept moving forward in a direction that matched what I wanted for my life. For some people that means earning more. For others, it means spending less. Either way, there’s usually a path through.

Three years out, I can say plainly: being happier on my own is worth far more than what the divorce cost me financially.

Fear Two: The Kids Will Suffer

I’d been the primary caregiver for our two kids, four and six at the time we separated. I genuinely couldn’t picture their dad managing them alone for half their lives. Surely they’d go unfed, unbathed, put to bed late, and laundry would pile up forever. And beyond the logistics: my kids wouldn’t be with me for half their lives. They were four and six. They needed their mother. I needed them. They were, in a lot of ways, my whole purpose.

To be clear, my kids wanted us to stay together. My youngest once cooked up a plan where I’d rent an apartment in the same building as his dad, so we could live down the hall from each other. Adjusting to only having one parent around at a time was hard on them at first. But they adjusted. Honestly, it wasn’t even that different from before; my ex and I had barely occupied the same room together for the two years leading up to our separation anyway. They still have to manage two different sets of house rules, switching gears twice a week, but that’s just life. We all have to manage shifting expectations across different parts of our lives, jobs, family, everything. Kids of divorce just get more practice at it earlier than most.

It was harder on us, the parents, I think. I missed my kids desperately for a full three years after the divorce; I have the blog posts to prove it. It took my mom asking me this past summer, while the kids were away for their two-week stretch with their dad, “Do you miss your kids?” for me to actually notice something had shifted. I said, “No, I don’t miss them,” and then really sat with what I’d just said. The old version of me would have felt like a traitor for saying that out loud, wondering what kind of mother doesn’t miss her kids. Instead, I recognized it for what it actually was: a real milestone, for me, for their dad, and for them.

It took three years to build a life that could actually make me happy while my kids were away, and three years to genuinely trust they’d be fine with their dad. What I’ve come to believe, in that time, is that kids do better with two parents who are both actually capable of caring for them. Yes, it takes more coordination, and the back-and-forth between households is tiring, sometimes a little painful. But now they have two parents who can feed them, get them to school, sign them up for activities, and arrange their own plans. Two parents genuinely involved in their lives. I probably still do more, if I’m honest, but their dad is doing far more than he ever did while we were together. If we’d stayed married, I’d likely still be doing everything, and he’d likely still be on the sidelines. Now I have my own life, and a life as a mom, both. Time for my own things, my own work, my own growth, alongside real trust that my kids are being cared for by someone who loves them. That’s a genuinely good outcome.

It took three years to get here, though. Three years to understand that their dad does love them, and that doing things differently than I would isn’t the same as doing them worse. It’s just different. How do you even judge what good parenting looks like? The best I’ve landed on: a good parent is someone who loves their kids and is genuinely trying to do right by them.

Three years out, the fears that kept me in my marriage turned out to be mostly unfounded. I’m grateful my ex worked through his own version of those same fears and finally ended things. The marriage had run its course. We were done. We’re better for being divorced.

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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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.

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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.