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.

What If?

by | Dec 3, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

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What If

What do you normally think right after those two words?

I tend to think: what if… catastrophe.

My propensity to imagine the worst is so deeply ingrained that even after proving to myself, again and again, that the worst case never actually happens, catastrophe is still my automatic first thought whenever something even slightly unusual happens in my life.

I get a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency? Oh no, I’m being audited; I’m going to owe thousands of dollars. It was a certificate thanking me for volunteering to help low-income seniors file their taxes.

My co-parent asks to talk about our parenting schedule? Oh no, he’s going to upend everything we’ve worked hard to build, and my life is about to fall apart as I adjust to some new arrangement. He wanted to swap Sundays because he had an event to go to.

My kid’s teacher wants to schedule a talk? Oh no, my child is a bully. She wanted to ask if I’d come speak to her class about financial literacy.

I first noticed this pattern in the middle of my divorce, imagining every possible horror my post-divorce life might hold. A friend finally said, “Renée, things never turn out the way you imagine. Have you ever once been able to predict the future?”

I scoffed at her. What did she know? She wasn’t in the middle of the horror show I was living. But her words lodged themselves somewhere in my brain anyway, whether because I wanted to prove her wrong or because my analytical brain genuinely wanted to test the theory, I’m still not sure.

So I tested it. And things didn’t turn out anything like I’d imagined. What surprised me more was that they never turned out nearly as bad as I’d feared.

I started paying closer attention: to the dire thought right after “what if,” and then to what actually happened afterward. Every time, the gap between the two was enormous. Turns out I really can’t predict the future. Damn it.

I also noticed how much those dire thoughts cost me. Hours spent worrying about outcomes that never arrived. Once I saw that clearly, I was pretty annoyed with myself. What a colossal waste of time.

Then I noticed something else. I’m not the only one who does this. Almost everyone I know does it. Everyone.

And if you’re in an especially stressful stretch, separating from a spouse, negotiating an agreement, your worst-case machinery runs into overdrive. I get it. I lived it too.

So take it from me, and from the friend who called this out in me first.

It will never be what you imagine. It will probably be considerably better.

And one more thing worth knowing: whatever the future actually turns out to be, you’ll be able to handle it.

Not Enough

by | Nov 24, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Money

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Not Enough

What’s your relationship with money? I ask because I’ve assumed for a while now that yours looks something like mine. Lately I’ve noticed my assumptions tend to get me into trouble.

Here’s my money history, in case it helps you check.

I’ve always operated from one core fear: there isn’t enough, and it might run out. That thought shows up everywhere. I check my finances compulsively to confirm there’s still enough today. I’m frugal to a fault, hand-me-down queen, proudly. And spending money hurts, whether it’s on something fun or a plumbing bill. All of it stings equally.

Funny enough, I know people with the same fear, not enough money, who respond by spending as fast as they can before it disappears: same fear, opposite behaviour.

My fear came true when I separated from my husband. He’d been the one with the paycheque, and suddenly the money I’d been afraid would stop flowing actually stopped. I believed my savings were gone too, most of it eaten by the lawyer and the split. Nothing is more terrifying than watching your worst fear materialize. It took over my life for a while.

Eventually I had to find a way to let go of “there’s not enough,” because that thought was the thing actually causing the pain, more than the situation itself.

I started permitting myself to spend on things like clothes or eating out, without the usual sting attached. I also started increasing what came in, while still making sure I never spent more than that. Not more spending for its own sake, just less fear attached to the spending I was already doing.

Looking back, my money history wasn’t all bad. My obsessive tracking gave me an unusually precise understanding of exactly what I need to live on. My obsession with an emergency cushion meant I actually had options when the divorce hit. Both of those habits, born from fear, ended up serving me well.

Now my relationship with money is different. My baseline thought is: there’s enough. I still pay attention. Some months I still have to cut back or find new ways to bring money in. I still keep an emergency cushion because the unexpected still happens, two plumbing emergencies in one week recently, and for once I wasn’t even bummed, because the cushion was there.

My relationship with money isn’t a painful one anymore.

So, what’s yours?

Avoid then capitulate

by | Oct 31, 2016 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Avoid, Then Capitulate

Collaboration works through exploration. Here’s what I mean by that.

We’re all a bit like icebergs. A small part of us shows above the surface, but the real mass, the values and experience that actually shape how we respond to things, sits underwater where no one else can see it. Other people only see the tip, and they build assumptions about us from that alone. Most conflict comes from exactly this gap: neither person can see what’s actually driving the other.

To work through conflict, you have to explore what’s under the surface, both yours and theirs. Once you both understand what’s actually going on down there, solutions tend to become obvious, and because you both arrived at it together, you both actually buy into it.

The catch is that almost none of us are trained to be collaborative, and the moment you actually need the skill is usually the moment you’re too emotional to use it. So instead, everyone falls back on whatever style of conflict was trained into them, not through a course, but through personality and life experience layered together over time. Some people are trained to fight and win. Some avoid. Some capitulate.

I was trained to avoid first, then capitulate once avoidance stopped working. I know this about myself. I know it doesn’t serve me. I still fall into it every single time.

Knowing that, I’ve built myself some guardrails.

Rule 1: Never answer right away. Give yourself time to think, even when you feel completely certain, calm, and clear. You’re probably not as settled as you think.

This past weekend, someone asked me a favour. I said I needed time to think, even though I already knew my answer was no. I felt sure of it. I said I needed time anyway, because I’ve surprised myself before.

Rule 2: Don’t poll people outside the conflict. I broke this one almost immediately, because I assumed everyone would agree with me. They didn’t. What I got instead was a pile of other people’s values and beliefs that had nothing to do with mine, which left me more confused and a little guilty, not more decided. Interestingly, the opinions split cleanly along gender lines: the women leaned toward capitulating, and the men said, “Do what makes you happy.”

Confused and stuck, I spent Sunday morning just sitting with each possible answer to see how it felt. Saying yes felt bad, and saying no felt equally bad.

Rule 3: When you start to cry, snap, or turn into someone you don’t like, stop and take a break. So I rode my bike. That should be its own rule. Find your version of the bike ride. It feels indulgent when there’s a conflict to resolve, but it’s not optional. Most of us were trained to think enjoying ourselves is somehow wrong, especially with work left undone.

Rule 4: Once you’ve fallen back into your old pattern, return to the process. After my ride, I felt clear again. This morning I emailed the person who’d asked the favour and asked to meet again, since there’s no clean answer yet. We need to explore what’s actually underneath the request, and what’s underneath my resistance to it. Once we both understand that, a solution will show up that actually works for both of us.

If the other person doesn’t want to meet that way, that’s simply a new conflict, and the only real move is to explore why, using the same process all over again, more practice. Endless practice.

Rule 5: Implement the solution, then go live your life. Sooner or later, another conflict will show up, and you’ll get to do all of this again.

I still don’t know how this particular one turns out. But writing through it, same as the collaborative process itself, has already done what it needed to do.