Independent Renée vs. Relationship Renée

by | Nov 18, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Independent Renée vs. Relationship Renée

Not sure how many of you watched Seinfeld when it originally aired, but I did, and one episode has been resonating with me lately. George spent that episode torn between two versions of himself: Independent George and Relationship George, with Relationship George slowly killing off everything fun about Independent George.

I have the exact same problem. Relationship Renée (“RR”) is making life difficult for Independent Renée (“IR”), and IR doesn’t get off easy either; plenty of blame to go around on both sides.

IR seems to completely forget what RR’s life is actually like the moment the kids leave to spend time with their dad. To stave off loneliness, IR piles on work commitments, volunteer commitments, social commitments, anything to fill the empty hours. IR must be productive. IR must not wallow.

Then the kids come back, and IR becomes RR. Suddenly RR is making three meals a day, driving kids to activities, and trying to finish whatever unfinished work IR left behind during her supposedly productive free time. The kids interrupt everything. How is RR supposed to get anything done?

At this point, the kids aren’t really dealing with RR anymore. They’re dealing with GR. Grumpy Renée.

GR longs for the peaceful solitude IR had access to. Lonely, IR thought? GR will show her “lonely.” GR would kill for a moment of it right now, in the thick of everything. So GR looks ahead at IR’s calendar and slashes it to nothing. That ignorant IR, GR thinks. I’ll teach her to overschedule and overcommit. She’s doing absolutely nothing this weekend. She’s going to rest, recharge, and get ready for the week ahead.

Then, faster than you’d believe, IR is back, staring down the empty weekend GR just built for her. IR recharges in about a day, and peaceful solitude curdles straight into loneliness again. IR piles things back on to fill the gap and starts drafting rules for RR. RR must go to yoga during the week. RR must get more work done after the kids are in bed. No more Netflix, RR!

Then RR is back, negotiating with rules IR left behind. IR clearly hasn’t been using her brain, RR thinks. She has no idea how exhausting it is to work all day, fight over bedtime, and then somehow also write blog posts and self-improve between nine and eleven at night. I can’t do this, RR thinks. RR spirals a bit and starts wondering what the point of any of it is. There has to be a better way.

As with everything, it comes down to communication. Like the movie Memento, RR and IR have started leaving each other notes on their shared desk.

From RR to IR:

Before taking anything on, ask yourself if it actually fits your values.

What are you really taking this on for?

Would you still do this if you were genuinely short on time, or are you just doing it to stay busy?

(Yes, they’re all some variation on the same theme.)

From IR to RR:

I’m giving up some of my weekend fun time to catch up on the grunt work. Please try to actually let go when you’re with the kids and be present with them.

I’m recharging right now so you don’t turn back into GR. Remember your time with them is short, and the most important thing is being present and taking care of yourself.

Remember to find time to get your work done while you’re RR. Schedule a reasonable amount for it, and don’t forget to schedule something fun for me to look forward to as well.

IR usually adds a bit more, since she has more time to reflect than RR does: I know it’s hard, RR, but remember you do eventually get some solitude. Think of the single parents out there without a co-parent at all. Try to stay grateful.

Slowly, the notes are starting to actually land.

The one message they keep leaving each other, over and over: it’s going to take time to get this right. Be kind to yourself in the meantime. I’ll forgive your mistakes. We learn best from them anyway.

People Turn Up When you need them

People Turn Up When you need them

by | Oct 21, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

“People turn up in your life when you need them.”

Someone said this to me recently, essentially predicting her own appearance in mine. At the time, what I was actually thinking was: I do not need this person in my life at all. She’d blown in the door and immediately started “advising” me on how I was living wrong. Within two minutes of meeting her, she’d decided I was too analytical and needed to think with my heart instead of my head. Then she went further: being analytical, she informed me, was the actual reason I was unhappy.

I was a little thrown by this and immediately started analyzing it, which, yes, is exactly the thing she was accusing me of. I take in information, I sort it, I decide whether it supports or contradicts what I already believe. She’d read me correctly, and honestly, it was a little impressive how fast she’d figured that much out. So I agreed: yes, I’m analytical. But I’m also pretty happy that way, so her actual argument, that this was making me unhappy, didn’t hold. Thinking with my head has never been the problem, whatever she believed.

She didn’t love that response and spent the next hour explaining exactly why I was wrong and needed to adopt her belief system instead. She upped the pressure by informing me I looked older than my age, also apparently a symptom of my unhappiness.

You might be wondering why I sat there listening for that long. I’ll direct you to my earlier post on personal boundaries. In hindsight, the better move would have been to just stop defending myself and walk away much sooner, something I’ll probably be working on for the rest of my life, since the people-pleasing gene runs strong in me.

Eventually I did walk away, and went to read How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. That book showed up exactly when I needed it. The timing was funny too: my attacker had just told me I needed to dye my hair, and here was Caitlin Moran questioning why women spend so much energy maintaining a youthful appearance while men spend that same energy trying to get ahead.

Eventually the woman got the hint and left me alone, and I sat with what had just happened. (I’m analytical. Of course I sat with it.)

What I landed on was the difference between coaching and advising. My own coach listens to what I actually say and helps me work out what matters to me and what’s actually driving me forward. That’s a completely different thing from someone who’s already decided how life works and is trying to install that belief system in you. Coaching worked for me. I don’t have to force myself into things; I already want to do the things I end up doing. Advising worked too, for a while, back when I actually followed what people told me to do. But eventually the gap between how I was living and what I actually valued left me stuck. Living someone else’s version of my life stopped moving me forward at all.

After all that thinking, I landed on the one thing she said that I actually agreed with: people do turn up in your life exactly when you need them. It just sometimes takes a bit of work, and a bit of analysis, to see why.

Step 9

by | Oct 10, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Step 9

Divorce is usually the end result of a fairly typical progression:

  1. You get married.
  2. You begin navigating married life together.
  3. You and your partner start facing real challenges.
  4. You realize you approach those challenges differently.
  5. You try to negotiate a way through it together.
  6. That negotiation fails, sometimes slowly, over a long stretch of time.
  7. One or both of you decide the marriage is over. By now you’re both emotionally exhausted.

Then comes the hard part. People often get stuck right at step 7. They know the marriage is done but have no idea what to actually do next. It can feel so daunting that some people just stay married anyway. Others hand it entirely to lawyers. Some try mediation or the Collaborative Approach. Others simply live apart while staying legally married.

At step 7, my ex and I tried a bit of everything. Lawyers, mediators, and eventually we landed on the Collaborative Approach, because we figured the obvious next step, step 8, had to be getting a separation agreement. You need one to get divorced, after all. We wanted to stay out of court, and Collaborative seemed like the best route there.

By this point in the process, both partners are usually running on empty, and neither one particularly wants to sit down and hash things out with the person they can barely stand at that moment. It’s a fair bet that if you’ve reached this stage, you dislike your spouse enough that working with them on anything feels unbearable. You couldn’t agree inside the marriage. Why would drafting its ending go any better?

Still, the separation agreement had lodged itself in both our heads as the obvious next milestone. We worked hard at it, nine months with our Collaborative team. I wanted that agreement at almost any cost, because once I knew we were done, I needed the whole thing sewn up and settled. My ex wanted the same. We both wanted a rulebook that would define how our new lives would work.

We got our agreement. Done, right?

Not even close. We had a document, but two very different understandings of what it actually said. We spent another three months arguing over its meaning and made almost no progress actually implementing any of it.

Every time we tried to work through a section, I’d get angry, and I know he did too. We kept hitting deadlock, and the conflict never really eased. Eventually we ended up in court over a single disputed section. We were supposed to be finished. Instead, here we were.

Turns out having the agreement didn’t mean we were done. We were far from done with each other.

I wasn’t done with my own anger, and I still couldn’t have a level conversation with him. Judging by his emails, he wasn’t done with his either.

Which brought me to a step nobody had listed: step 9, heal and let go.

That step took a long time, and it had plenty of sub-steps of its own. But now that I’m actually through it, our divorce finally feels done. Truly done.

Plenty of people had told me to do step 9 first, and at the time, I simply wasn’t able to. Looking back, I wonder if that order would have served us better. If we’d both been in a steadier emotional place, we might have actually heard each other, and the agreement we built together might have reflected something we both genuinely understood the same way.

I’m not sure it’s realistic for most people to fully heal before starting the separation agreement process. With hindsight, I’d probably choose a different order if I could do it again. But at the time, I wanted that agreement, whatever it cost me.

Where are you in the process? And what steps are you choosing to take next?

Know Yourself First

by | Sep 30, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Know Yourself First

When I realized my marriage was over, one of the first things I started thinking about was how much harder my life was about to get. Everything was going to be harder. I was becoming a single parent for half my waking hours, starting that new chapter with drastically reduced finances. Those thoughts were part of why I’d tried to hold the marriage together for as long as I did; it genuinely seemed easier than starting over with a whole new set of harder circumstances.

I went into my divorce carrying a huge amount of fear and uncertainty. I also felt like everyone else- my ex, my lawyer, the broader machinery of how divorce is “supposed” to happen- was the one actually controlling my life. I didn’t feel like I had any say in what came next.

So I switched to autopilot and tried to get through the entire process as fast as possible.

I drove myself through the divorce without ever pausing to actually figure out what I wanted. We used the Collaborative Approach, and after five months of meetings, we had a draft agreement and were essentially done. It took five months mostly because we could only manage one four-way legal meeting per month; coordinating three- to four-hour sessions across four busy schedules wasn’t fast. Our lawyers kept trying to get us talking about what actually mattered to each of us. Mostly I just thought, can we skip the needs and values part and get on with it?

Then I went through a six-week back-to-work program for women. The same thing happened during the early self-analysis portion: can we get on with it? I need to write my resume.

Eventually I was done. Divorce finalized, resume in hand.

But I was no closer to actually knowing what I wanted. Still running on fear. Still convinced the best part of my life was already behind me.

And nothing was working. No job offers. Resumes disappearing into total silence. I was stuck, scared, and unhappy.

Things only started moving once I actually took the time to figure out what mattered to me. Yes, I went on the full mid-life soul-searching bender, because I finally hit the point where fear stopped pushing me forward and started freezing me in place entirely.

Figuring out what actually drives you is an ongoing thing; it never really stops, but about six months into that search, I had a list of my seven core values, because I’m a type-A accountant and I like my lists, and I put it up on my wall.

That list turned out to be genuinely useful for decision-making, especially around money. It helped me figure out both how I wanted to earn it and how I wanted to spend it.

If you’re finding money decisions hard, the way through is some good old-fashioned self-reflection. Once you actually know yourself, it stops being hard to tell when a spending choice is wrong for you, and it becomes obvious when one is right.

Believing in the Plan

by | Sep 23, 2015 | Money

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Believing in the Plan

I hate spending money. Some genetic combination of Scottish, Dutch, and a Depression-era family upbringing turned me into someone who gets anxious just walking up to a cash register. Some people call shopping retail therapy. It’s never once been that for me. Every purchase kicks off an internal debate about whether I actually need it, and that internal chatter slows my decisions down, skews relentlessly negative, and keeps me up at night.

Eventually I got tired of feeling guilty and anxious about something that happens almost every single day. It was exhausting, and I couldn’t keep doing it to myself.

What actually changed things wasn’t much. I just made a decision: start believing in my own spending plan.

I’d always been something of a spending-plan fanatic. Every month, for years, I tracked everything I spent in a spreadsheet. A couple of times a year I’d review it and adjust the plan for the year ahead. It only took about two hours a month, less onerous than it sounds.

But despite years of tracking, I’d never actually bought into the process. I never went back and checked whether a prior year’s plan bore any resemblance to what I’d actually spent. I never looked critically at whether the plan reflected what I genuinely wanted to spend on. I rarely came close to spending what the plan projected anyway. I did it because a financially responsible person was supposed to. I still agonized over every purchase and still felt terrible making them. The plan wasn’t doing anything for me except eating up my time to build it.

So I decided I wanted two things: to stop feeling guilty, and to actually get some use out of the plan I’d already built. To get there, I sat down and really looked at what the plan actually said.

It turned out my spending plan was a fairly accurate reflection of my own values, built up over years of the choices I’d actually made. I don’t spend easily, so if something showed up in my tracking spreadsheet, it meant I’d believed in it enough to spend on it in the first place. My spending stayed remarkably consistent year over year, and I’d built in a cushion for the unexpected. And critically, I always had enough coming in to cover what was going out.

Once I saw that clearly, the logic followed: if something’s in the plan, it’s fine to spend on it. Even the unexpected stuff, because the cushion exists precisely for that. All of it, allowed, without the guilt attached.

This shift has taken time, and I’m not fully cured of the guilt even now. I still don’t love spending money, but it no longer stalls my decisions or eats up days of anxiety, most of the time. September used to be brutal for me, business expenses landing all at once, plus the usual pile of kid-related costs, after-school activities, hot lunches, school fees. Before I trusted the plan, I would have spiralled over all of it for days, second-guessed the whole decision to run my own business, maybe even considered shutting it down. All my energy would’ve gone into stopping the bleeding instead of actually moving forward.

This time, when the bills landed, I felt a little icky, grumbled about the cost of running a business, same as always, but then reminded myself: this is in the plan. It’s allowed. I’m not going to make myself feel bad about paying for professional liability insurance.

If you carry your own money anxiety, tracking your spending and building an actual plan is still the best remedy I know. Without one, every purchase becomes its own little interrogation. With one, you get to move through your spending with something closer to clarity.