Know Yourself First

by | Sep 30, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

photo-1413742215432-db7ea02bd2dc

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

photo-1420330454265-b682d57d0592

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.

When you Remember the Discussion Differently from the agreement

by | Sep 2, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

When You Remember the Discussion Differently Than the Agreement

I’ve noticed something about how my ex and I approached decisions differently during our separation negotiations, and it’s made me think more generally about how mismatched decision-making styles can quietly sabotage even a well-intentioned agreement.

I tend to gather information until I run out of time or simply have to decide. I’ll tell the full story, get into the minutiae, circle a topic from every angle before I feel ready to commit to anything. My ex, from what I could tell, worked the opposite way: too much information and he’d start to shut down, mentally stepping back from the decision entirely rather than wading through it all with me.

I think about our actual negotiation meetings now and can see exactly where that mismatch caused real damage. I’d tell story after story, walk through every detail I thought mattered. At some point, I now realize, he simply stopped absorbing any of it.

How do I know? Because we’ve had disagreement after disagreement since, both of us convinced the other broke the agreement. I’ll think: how does he not remember we agreed to this out loud? We discussed it for at least an hour, on three separate occasions. But our written agreement doesn’t always reflect those lengthy conversations, partly because time and money pressure eventually pushed me to sign it before every detail was fully nailed down.

At the time, I was certain the agreement captured everything we needed. In some ways, I still think that it’s one of the longer, more thorough agreements I’ve come across. But when it comes to actually applying it to real decisions, we still get stuck, because we walked away from those meetings with two different understandings of what we’d actually settled.

I’ve thought a lot about how to prevent that gap from forming in the first place. What I’ve landed on isn’t a guaranteed fix, just a few things worth trying if you and your ex are heading into real conflict over an agreement:

Keep the agreement’s flexibility limited where you can. Vague, adaptable language sounds reasonable in the room, but it leaves too much room for two different memories of the same conversation.

Make sure the final document actually reflects everything you both deemed important enough to spend real time discussing. If it came up more than once in your meetings, it should be written down, not just assumed.

Get it reviewed by someone whose perspective differs from your own, not necessarily by gender, but by how you and your ex tend to process things differently. I had my dad review mine, and looking back, I doubt he actually read the whole thing; it was long enough that even I understood why. That alone should have told me it needed simplifying. I never had anyone review it who processed information the way my ex did, and that gap might have caught something before it became a recurring fight.

Build in a trial period for anything that doesn’t need to be locked in immediately. Testing a new arrangement in practice, before it’s permanent, tends to surface misunderstandings faster than any amount of additional discussion would.

I have been thinking about how to prevent this from happening, and all I have are suggestions. If there is considerable conflict between you and your ex, then you need to:
  1. Have limited flexibility in your agreement.
  2. Ensure that it reflects everything you deemed important enough to discuss in your meetings.
  3. If you are a woman, have both a man and a woman review the agreement on your behalf and vice-versa. I had my dad review mine, but in fact I don’t think he even read it because it was so long. That should have been a clue that we needed to simplify our agreement. I didn’t have a woman review it, and that might have pointed out where I went wrong.
  4. Have a trial period testing out your new agreement for things that do not need to be decided right away.

Day Zero

by | Sep 2, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

Day Zero

I’ve been thinking about loss lately, and how it drops a person into a stress so heavy it’s often easier to just go back to whatever you were doing before and pretend the loss isn’t sitting there.

I’ve been thinking about it specifically in relation to job loss, using my own experience losing my job as a full-time stay-at-home parent as the closest thing I have to compare it to. My first instinct was to go get a new job, and I went straight back to the exact kind of work I’d done before, even though I’d never actually been happy doing it. That unhappiness came through in every application and every interview, clearly enough that nothing came of any of it.

I’m genuinely grateful for that now. Failing to get hired gave me breathing room I wouldn’t have taken for myself otherwise, room to actually deal with the loss instead of just papering over it with a new job.

I understand how consuming that kind of stress can be. My coach kept telling me to take time and go do something enjoyable. I resisted, convinced I should be doing something more productive instead. Eventually I got low enough that she just ordered it: fifteen minutes of something enjoyable.

So I did, because I always did what I was told. I spent a whole day testing things in fifteen-minute increments, things I used to enjoy, things I thought other people might enjoy, trying to remember what enjoyment even felt like anymore.

I think of that day as day zero. None of it actually worked in the moment; nothing I tried felt genuinely enjoyable. But the next day, my mood was noticeably better, even though nothing in my actual situation had changed. I was still alone. I was still nowhere near figuring out what I wanted. But something had shifted anyway.

That was the moment I realized mood and circumstance aren’t the same thing, and that I had more control over the first one than I’d ever assumed. Once I saw that clearly, I started actually testing different ways of living, rather than just waiting for my circumstances to improve first.

I’m grateful for that lost job now. It handed me time I never would have taken for myself otherwise.

If you’re thinking you don’t have the time, money, or energy to sit with something like this, that reaction was mine too. Getting that time, energy, or space is the actual first step, and it usually takes more creativity to find than you’d expect. I did things I never would have tried before that stretch of my life. Most of them didn’t work either. A few, unexpectedly, did.

Strategies for Dealing with Transition Days

by | Aug 27, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

photo-1429198739803-7db875882052

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.