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.

Rest Got me here

by | Jul 24, 2017 | Divorce and Separation

Rest Got Me Here

My blogging has taken a hit lately. My last post was February 3rd. That’s a long time.

Blog hiatuses are a pattern with me. Tax season, kids, summer, Kits Pool, biking, hiking, life in general- they all get in the way.

In the past, guilt would have made that list too. I’ve learned guilt doesn’t actually do anything for me except drag me down and eat up time I don’t have. Its voice still shows up, but I face it down and send it away now. That takes about thirty seconds these days. It used to take weeks.

Self-blame used to eat up even more time. I’d spend hours arguing with myself over why I wasn’t blogging. It went something like: you spent every night this week watching Netflix after the kids went to bed; you could’ve been working, or blogging, or exercising. And my answer: I was so tired I probably would have made mistakes, written badly, or hurt myself. Then I’d eat some chocolate chips to feel better, and pass out.

None of that guilt or self-blame ever actually brought me back to blogging.

What did was taking time for myself.

Last week I was at camp with my kids. Someone else cooked every meal. No laundry. Tax season was finally over. My kids are at the age where they disappear with friends, and I only see them for our daily hour together and at bedtime. I had time. I read a book. I swam every day. I actually got to talk to other moms.

Five days of real rest, and here I am blogging again, from a place of calm instead of guilt. It’s so much easier this way. This post took me an hour. The guilt-and-self-blame ones used to take days.

This theme keeps circling back for me: rest leading to everything else working better, and I see the opposite of it constantly in my work with people navigating separation and divorce. So much angst and blame gets wrapped up in that process.

I understand it firsthand. The years around my own separation and divorce were brutal. I used to sit on the couch wondering if I was having a heart attack. I felt guilty any time I took time for myself, so I kept pushing through, certain things would get better eventually. I blamed myself, my co-parent, probably my parents too, for the state of things. I took almost no time for myself, and my life was hard because of it. Arguments with my co-parent could drag on for weeks. Nothing worked.

Things got better once I started actually resting. That took time. It’s been four years since my separation, and rest still isn’t a permanent fixture in my life, but it’s getting closer because I can feel what it does when it’s there. Blame is mostly gone too. Mostly. It’s a sneaky one.

When I’m not in emotional upheaval, everything runs more smoothly. Simple to say. Not simple to live.

I’ll come back to this theme again. It’s the kind of thing that needs repeating.

Four Years Out

Four Years Out

by | Apr 11, 2017 | Divorce and Separation

Four Years Out

It has been four years since I separated from my husband.

My kids have gone from four and seven to eight and eleven.

I have a pretty fantastic life right now. It has its struggles, but I’m in a new career that still excites me, and I get up every day looking forward to work. My co-parent and I now share the burdens and joys of parenting far better than we ever did together. Most of my days are content. Some are genuinely amazing. The bad ones last a day, sometimes two, and then I’m back to content.

If someone had told me four years ago how long it would take to get here, it would have made things worse. But I’d have been just as surprised to hear how happy I’d end up. Back then, I thought of my life purely in terms of being a mom, and when that job was done, I’d be done too. Except moms are never really done, so I’d never have been done, and I’d have spent the rest of my life in a smaller, sadder version of the one I actually have now.

I was reminded of this recently.

I met someone in an unhappy marriage. She wants out. Her husband doesn’t. They each have their own reasons. In my case, it was the reverse: my ex was the one who wanted out, and I didn’t. I wasn’t happy either, but fear kept me there. He was probably afraid too, but his unhappiness must have outweighed it, because he stepped out first. I’m grateful now, both for the end of that marriage and for the path it put me on.

Before, I lived in fear, and fear drove almost every decision. I took jobs I didn’t want because I was afraid of not finding work. I stayed in a marriage I wasn’t happy in because I was afraid of what divorce would do to my kids. I stayed small and contained because I assumed change would only make things worse.

Change was hard. I had to change nearly everything I thought I knew about being a woman, a mom, an accountant, someone single with children. All of it. And I couldn’t do it alone.

None of it was easy. But every step down that new path opened up a life I never would have believed I’d get to live in.

So if you’re hesitating: reaching out for help is what puts your feet on your own path forward.

Start with the Envelope

Start with the Envelope

by | Feb 3, 2017 | Money

Start With the Envelope

Most people don’t ease into looking at their finances. They wait until the discomfort of not looking outweighs the discomfort of actually doing it, then they do it all at once, under pressure.

I get it. I’ve done the same thing with plenty of things that were genuinely good for me. Exercise. Eating well. This blog. Something about human nature resists doing the good-for-you thing until it becomes harder not to. I call it reactive mode. That’s where most of us live.

If you’ve never built a real picture of what you spend, the word “budget” alone is probably enough to make you want to stop reading. Fair. It’s a loaded word. But you don’t need a full budget to start. You need one small habit that gives you real information.

Here’s where I’d start: pick one category. Lunch is a good one, since it’s small, contained, and easy to track without much effort.

For two weeks, get an envelope, label it “lunch,” and keep every receipt that touches that category: restaurant receipts, grocery receipts with lunch items on them, all of it. At the end of the two weeks, add it up.

That’s it. No spreadsheet, no full accounting of your life, just one number you didn’t have before.

Once lunch feels manageable, do the same thing with dinner. Then do the same with whatever else you’re curious about. You get to choose what you track next, and no rule says you have to track everything at once.

Small, gradual changes tend to stick better than dramatic overhauls anyway. I know someone who overhauled her entire diet by cutting one thing at a time: milk from her coffee first, then one small change every couple of weeks, spread out over a year. Nothing about it was fast, but nothing about it fell apart either.

The same logic applies here. You don’t need the whole picture on day one. You just need to start seeing one small, honest number, and let that be enough for now.