Transition Days

by | Aug 18, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Transition Days

I often wonder if there are other parents out there like me. I start wondering about five minutes after dropping my kids off at school. Day one of five days they’re with their dad, on our 2255 parenting schedule.

Are there other parents out there who know what a 2255 parenting schedule even means? I haven’t met one yet. When I try to explain it to friends in intact families, their eyes glaze over. “How do you keep track of that?” Oh, we have a shared Google calendar, but honestly, I don’t need it. I always know exactly when my kids are coming back, and exactly when they’re leaving. I sometimes wish I didn’t, since both the anticipation of their return and the dread of their leaving tend to wreck my whole day either way.

I call the days on either side of a handoff Transition Days. Some weeks it feels like every other day qualifies.

I’m always caught off guard by the waves of sadness that show up. Just thirty minutes earlier, hustling the kids into the car, I was mostly annoyed; nobody could find their school bag, nobody would put their shoes on. The night before had been exhausting too: a full day as an accountant in the final stretch of tax season, then home as a single parent to two wound-up sons who wouldn’t settle down for bed. My six-year-old stayed up until ten, wanting me to sleep next to him, probably picking up on the tension in the house even if he couldn’t name it. I needed some time alone to recharge after the day I’d had. The irony wasn’t lost on me; five full days of alone time were about to start in twelve hours. He eventually fell asleep on the couch in the next room while I was watching TV, and I carried his warm, sleeping weight up to bed, trying to hold onto the feeling of it, because I knew by morning it would already be gone.

I’ve learned to schedule things for the stretches when the kids are gone, but I can’t schedule all of it. I’m single now, and when they leave, I put myself to bed alone and wake up alone too. This particular morning, I was meeting a friend; she’d text around eight, but I was up at six, and the silence of the house made it impossible not to notice they weren’t there. The house feels small, crowded, and messy when they’re home. The moment they leave, I basically live in one room, and even that room feels too big.

There’s no getting around being alone when they’re gone. I try to think of the friends who tell me they’d kill for a chance to sleep in and have a day entirely to themselves. I try to remember that just yesterday I was trying to fade into the background at home so nobody would notice me and demand a round of Crazy Eights. I know my kids are happy with their dad, well taken care of, not to my exact standard, sure, but getting a different version of how to live and see the world, which probably isn’t a bad thing for them in the long run.

But my first thought waking up and my last thought falling asleep both circle back to the same place: the time I get with my kids is already short, and it’s just been cut in half again. Then the sadness moves in. I wonder sometimes if it ever fully goes away, or if I’ll just be managing this particular grief until they’re old enough to be leaving the nest for good anyway. Maybe by then it’ll finally let go of me too.

How Do You View the Past?

by | Aug 7, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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How Do You View the Past?

When you think of your life up until this point, does it make you happy, or do you focus on the negative aspects of your past and use it as an excuse to stop moving forward?

How we view the past often depends on how we perceive our present life. If you’re living with challenging circumstances, it’s hard not to let your current situation colour your thoughts about the past, present, and future.

When I was going through my divorce, I was looking for proof of how I’d gotten to that point. In the thick of it, every memory of shared moments with my ex took on a negative hue. I’d mine my own memories for evidence that I was never meant to marry that person in the first place. Then I’d beat myself up for having been so stupid. Clearly, every memory pointed to the same conclusion: we were never supposed to be together. How could it have taken me twenty years to realize this?

So I decided to try not to think about it at all.

Since I’d shared twenty years of my life with this person, that meant wiping out a good chunk of genuinely happy memories along with it. I went further still and reasoned that my childhood had led me to this partner in the first place, so I wrote off those memories too. My whole life path had funnelled into one single point of failure: divorce. Failure kept looping through my brain. All I had left, or so it felt, was one failed marriage, no career, and unhappy kids.

People, and plenty of self-help books, told me to hold onto the good moments I’d shared with my ex, hoping to stop me from doing exactly what I was doing, letting my past overshadow my present and future. Because that’s exactly what was happening. I was projecting my past straight into my future, and it was stopping me cold. What was the point of a future that looked just like my very unhappy past?

My coach helped me find a way out of that loop by helping me shift how I saw my present.

She started by telling me it wasn’t my life that had failed. It was my relationship with one specific person. From there, she helped me define what success actually meant to me, on my own terms, and helped me find real evidence that I’d already succeeded by that definition.

Once I started seeing that, my past began to look different too. I was focused now on where I’d actually succeeded, by my own measure. And once I could see that clearly, she pointed out something else: my past had gotten me exactly to where I was standing. All those things I’d filed away as mistakes were really just lessons, specific to me, moving me closer to what I actually wanted out of life.

None of this was a quick fix. It took real time and real practice.

But the recipe itself is simple: look for the success already present in your current life, and the evidence you find there will reach backward into your memories and forward into a future worth having.

The Rules We Make up and then live by

by | Jul 31, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

The Rules We Make Up and Then Live By

I think about a certain kind of conversation I’ve had more than once over the years, always some version of the same shape. Someone in the middle of a hard divorce, scared of what a judge might decide, has quietly built a set of rules for herself that make her fear feel like fact rather than fear.

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The shape usually goes something like this. She’s the higher earner in the marriage. Her ex works in a less lucrative field, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. Everyone else assumes she loves her work: successful, outgoing, good at it. Then it comes out that she doesn’t, not really. She stayed because someone had to earn enough to support the family, and she’s quietly dreamed for years of doing something else entirely. But she believes she can’t act on that now, because a court might read a career change as a deliberate attempt to dodge support obligations.

Then the resentment starts flowing toward the ex: if he’d just go back to a higher-paying job he’s clearly capable of, this whole calculation would look different. Why should she be the one stuck carrying an obligation that traces back to a choice he made.

The underlying belief, stated plainly, usually sounds something like: everyone has to work; that’s just how it is. Which really means: everyone has to take the highest-paying job available, whether they’re happy in it or not, and choosing otherwise is either selfish or naive.

I’ve pushed back on this kind of thinking before, and it tends to get a little heated, because underneath it are a few unspoken rules that feel like settled fact to the person holding them. Something like: you have to take the best-paying job you’re capable of if you have kids and responsibilities; otherwise, you’re flaky. Work generally sucks, and if you actually like what you do, it doesn’t really count as work. And life is inherently unfair, so whatever position you happened to hold at the moment of separation, you’re now locked into for good.

What strikes me every time is how quickly these get treated as facts about the world rather than one person’s fear-based read on their own situation. They’re not the only possible outcome. They’re just the outcome that becomes far more likely once someone decides the rule is true and stops looking for any other path.

That’s the real trap. Not the divorce, not the finances, but the rules someone builds for themselves along the way and then quietly agrees to be governed by, permanently.

If I could say one thing to anyone caught in that pattern, it would be this: hold your own rules up to the light before you decide to live inside them forever. Ask what you actually want, separate from the fear driving the rule. There’s usually more room to move than the rule wants you to believe.

The five-minute fix

by | Apr 23, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

The Five-Minute Fix

People love telling you that time heals all wounds. It takes time. You’ll look back on this and laugh someday. And yet, if you ask around a bit more, plenty of people will also tell you honestly that some of the hurt never fully leaves; it just gets quieter and comes back at odd moments for the rest of your life.

I know my own hurt from my divorce hasn’t fully disappeared, though I feel like myself again most days now. But that’s not actually what I want to write about here.

I want to write about short-term time, because I’ve realized that even ten minutes can be enough to genuinely shift how I feel, and just knowing that fact has gotten me through some seriously painful moments.

My divorce coach was the first person to show me this. I’d just found out my soon-to-be ex had filed for divorce without telling me first, and then refused to find anywhere else to stay. I’m not saying I had no part in how things got there, but I was in shock at the time. Almost anything could trip me into anxiety or a low spiral in those early days. Every other day, I packed an overnight bag to stay with a friend just to avoid sharing space with him. Walking away from my life and my kids, who I’d never spent a night away from before, left me emotional in a way that basically became constant, with sharper spikes hitting every hour or so.

Any time I tried to explain what was going on, even to my own coach, I’d relive it and start crying all over again. So she taught me a technique to calm myself down enough to actually function: tapping, also known as EFT. There’s a whole body of theory behind how and why it works, but all I really knew was that it interrupted whatever thought was making me cry and bought me five or ten minutes back. After tapping for even that short a stretch, I was always calmer. More than once I ended up laughing at myself while someone nearby clearly wondered what on earth I was doing.

Over time I picked up other techniques too: meditation, which I still genuinely struggle with, switching tasks entirely, writing, or just sitting still and letting whatever I was feeling move through me without fighting it. All four of those, in their own way, are just different methods of injecting time, and over the past couple of years I’ve noticed I always feel better once I’ve taken some.

What’s actually made the biggest difference is recognizing that time itself is doing the work. That’s been a hard lesson for someone as type-A as me, someone who’s always measured efficiency by output. Sitting on the couch staring at a wall never used to register as productive.

Now, instead of trying to muscle through emotional pain to stay efficient, I let time do what it does. If I’m having a bad moment, I reach for one of my usual strategies to buy some space.

If I’m in conflict with someone, sitting through a mediation session with my ex, say, and we’ve hit a wall, I get up and take a five- or ten-minute break.

If a conflict is turning into a back-and-forth email fight, I stop myself from replying for a full day.

If I’m just sad, I let myself cry for twenty minutes, or however long it actually takes until I feel like doing something else. Almost without fail, after twenty minutes, I do.

If I’m angry, I sit down and write the email to the person I’m angry at, then send it to myself instead.

I remind myself of what I now know to be true: I might feel sad, or angry, or like everything’s hopeless right now, but in a day, sometimes even less, I won’t be able to summon this exact feeling anymore, because I’ll already be feeling like myself again.

Processing Verses Ranting

by | Apr 15, 2015 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Processing Versus Ranting

In the years leading up to my divorce, I’d get together with friends and, occasionally, sit around discussing how irritating our partners were being that week.

As things got worse between me and my ex-husband, that became basically the only thing I ever talked about. I kept a running mental list of every way I’d been wronged, and I’d go around collecting everyone’s opinion on whether I was being reasonable. I got very good at laying out the full sequence of events leading up to the latest incident, and I took pride in how fair and objective I thought I was being. When I got the support I was fishing for, I felt even more justified in feeling a little sorry for myself.

I thought this was a solid self-care strategy until the day I realized my friends and family, however much they loved and supported me, couldn’t actually stop my ex from doing the things that upset me. Nobody could. A wave of hopelessness hit me that day: the realization that I’d be dealing with this person, difficult as he was, for a very long time; my kids were still young. I’d started to think of my list of grievances almost like a case filed in the court of my own brain, argued and decided with a jury of friends and family, and I was just sitting there, waiting for a sentence that was never actually coming.

That day, I’d projected the whole catalogue forward into my future. I’d be dealing with this person, and these same kinds of incidents, indefinitely, and he was never going to be sentenced in any way that would actually satisfy me.

I knew I couldn’t keep going the way I had been.

So I started paying attention to what actually made things worse, and what made them better.

I noticed that surrounding myself with people right after something upsetting happened, and ranting to them about it, actually made it take longer to move past. Days later, someone would ask how I was doing, and that alone would drag me right back into reliving the whole thing, injustice and all.

I noticed that ranting into an email I sent only to myself took some of the pressure off needing to rant to anyone else.

I noticed that if I actively looked for something positive that had come out of the incident, I moved past it faster too. As an example: I genuinely have to credit my ex for teaching me how to deal with difficult people. That might sound a little cheeky, maybe even facetious, but nobody gets along with everyone, and before my divorce, my strategy for difficult people had always just been avoidance. I can’t avoid my ex. So I had to actually learn how to deal with him without it wrecking me. That skill has changed a lot for me since.

I noticed that time spent building a case for the court of public opinion was time not spent on my own growth or happiness, and entire days could vanish into nothing but anger.

And I noticed that the moment I stopped talking about an incident with friends, it started fading out of my head on its own.

So next time you catch yourself gossiping or complaining about someone, it’s worth asking: who is this actually serving?