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.

Communication – Rules for Life

Communication – Rules for Life

by | Nov 3, 2017 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Rules for Communication (or Rules for Life)

I’m an accountant. Accountants are notoriously bad at communication, and there’s usually a reason: numbers are straightforward, clear, concise, easy to line up and sort. I love doing taxes. You put the numbers in their place, finalize the return, send it off, and you’re done.

Except you’re not, not always. Sometimes the Canada Revenue Agency wants to talk about that dinner meeting, or those moving costs, or that dependent credit. That’s when you realize numbers were never as clear as you thought.

I saw this everywhere in my work, but nowhere more than in my years as a Financial Neutral in the Collaborative Divorce Process. I discovered I was working more with communication than numbers, and that the real work happened in communication, which is hard, especially for an accountant. The numbers are so clear. Why can’t my client decide?

Wanting a concrete answer, the way accountants do, I ended up with five rules. I call them rules for life.

Rule 1: Know Yourself and Know Your Financial Situation

After my divorce, I enrolled in a career program to learn how to write a resume, having been out of the workforce for five years as a stay-at-home mom. Six weeks later, I sent out resumes and heard nothing, zip, zero, nada.

The problem wasn’t the resume. The problem was I didn’t want any of those jobs, and it showed in every cover letter I wrote. I was following someone else’s template because I didn’t know what I actually wanted.

I spent six months waking up in a panic about money, writing cover letters I didn’t believe in, finding ways to scrape by in between. Slowly, with the help of a coach, I got to know myself well enough to realize I needed to start my own business, despite a vow I’d made to myself at fifteen that I never would. As soon as I said it out loud, people started calling to ask for my help. I had to look honestly at my finances first, panic filters and all, and once I did, I saw I could manage the short-term dip it would take to get there.

Rule 2: Know the Person You’re Communicating With

The flip side of knowing yourself is knowing the person across from you. This is where it gets tricky and emotional, which accountants tend not to love.

I had to tell my co-parent I was starting a business, since his child support depended on my income. I told him by email. He responded almost instantly, which was unusual. I got defensive. We went back and forth until we hit a six-month deadlock, and eventually ended up in court.

Which means I broke Rule 2 before I’d really learned it, and had to detour through Rule 3 to get back to it.

Rule 3: Set Up Neutral Time and Space to Communicate

Court is not neutral. It’s public, it’s stressful, and a judge who has heard it all before will look at you like you’re both being unreasonable, then send you off to try again before he’ll even set a hearing.

That’s what happened to us. Instead of a hearing, we were assigned time with a mediator to try to resolve things privately, at a time we chose together, without an audience. She listened to both of us and made us listen to each other, then sent us to counselling. Back to Rule 2.

Rule 2, Again

We sat in a counsellor’s office for three hours doing one thing: taking turns speaking and repeating back what the other person said, before either of us was allowed to respond. I wanted to interrupt constantly. I was rolling my eyes, squirming, nearly at a breaking point.

Rule 4: Shut Up and Listen

If you actually want to resolve a conflict, you have to understand what it’s about. I could have argued my case all day and never once understood what was driving my co-parent. The counsellor made me sit still and paraphrase what he’d said, feeding me the words when I couldn’t find them myself: “Renée, say this back to him.”

So I did. And as I sat there repeating his feelings back to him, I noticed something. Something in him settled. Some of the fight went out of the room. He looked like he felt heard.

Then it was my turn to speak, and his turn to repeat what I’d said. Hearing my own words come back to me, without being argued with, took some of the fight out of me too. I felt heard.

When I’d finished, the counsellor asked, “How can you help him with how he’s feeling?”

“I don’t know. I can’t fix it,” I said.

“And you don’t need to.”

That single line took apart every argument I’d been building. I couldn’t change how he felt, and he couldn’t change how I felt, but just having it acknowledged did something neither of us expected. I understood, finally, that what he was doing had nothing to do with me.

If you find yourself interrupting, or feel a “but” rising in your throat, that’s the moment you’ve been triggered. You don’t have to argue with how someone feels. You just have to hear it. Arguing only entrenches people further, since now they need to defend the feeling instead of moving through it.

Rule 5: You’re Never Done

Being an accountant, I hoped that would be the end of it. Resolved, filed, closed. It wasn’t. There are always new numbers to wrangle, new issues to sit through. I got a lot of practice, and in the process, learned enough to help other people do the same.

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.

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.

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.