Bringing Back Time

by | Oct 9, 2017 | Divorce and Separation

Bringing Time Back

I start new posts all the time. Most of them are about time, fittingly, since I usually run out of it before I finish writing them. Lately even the starting has slowed down.

I noticed this a few months ago and didn’t want to admit it. I’m admitting it now, on the tail end of Thanksgiving weekend, visiting my sister, kids fed, dishes done, nothing left demanding my attention for once.

I sat with that stillness and asked myself what I actually wanted to do.

Last week my life felt out of control. Everything felt like too much. I was close to doing something dramatic just to feel like I’d taken my life back, my old way of dealing with pain. Drama changes things for a while. It doesn’t fix the actual problem. But it feels like it will.

The actual problem was that I’d taken on too much.

So instead of anything dramatic, I took time to figure out what I actually needed. I stopped trying to finish everything on my list and started figuring out what could wait. I did only what was essential. I ate properly. I finally went grocery shopping so my kids could eat too. I went to bed when they did. I told clients clearly what needed doing and by when, and started turning down new work and social invitations I didn’t have room for. I made it back to yoga for the first time in weeks.

As I built that space back into my life, things got better.

It reminded me of the hardest stretch of my separation and divorce, when my instinct was to plow through and just get it over with. That approach didn’t lead anywhere good. I got through the divorce, but I paid for the way I got through it in other ways too.

Now, working with people navigating their own separations, I’ve noticed something: the ones who take their time, who let their emotions settle before sitting down with a spouse, who take care of themselves instead of taking their frustration out on their kids, come out the other side in better shape than the ones trying to force it all through at once.

I’m reminded, again, that time and care is how I want to live, and that I should probably practice what I preach.

This Thanksgiving, I was grateful for the extra day the long weekend gives us. It was that one bonus day that gave me the space to remember what I’d stopped doing for myself.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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.

Marriage is Easy, Divorce isn’t. Get a Marriage Agreement

by | Dec 14, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

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Marriage Is Easy. Divorce Isn’t. Get a Marriage Agreement.

It’s pretty easy to get married. All you need is a license, and when I was practicing, it cost about $100. Some people have fancy weddings, which take real planning and money, but that’s a choice. Nobody’s forcing you into a big production.

You don’t get the same choice with divorce. It only takes one person deciding they want out. Marriage needs both people to say “I do.” Divorce just needs one person to file. If the other spouse doesn’t respond, it goes to court, and a judge decides for you. Courts don’t always make good calls for families, so I’d always recommend working things out with your soon-to-be ex before it gets there. Court was expensive too, roughly five thousand dollars a day back when I was seeing clients through it, and that’s before the cost of preparing to get there in the first place.

A desk-order divorce, doing all your own paperwork, was cheaper, around eighty dollars. But it was rarely realistic to actually do it all yourself. The real sticking point was always the Separation Agreement. Mine ran a hundred and forty-nine pages, every one of them describing something contentious, except the two signature pages. A hundred and forty-seven pages of contention took us a year to work through and felt like a full-time job. I used to call ours “the Beast.”

Here’s a start on what has to go into an agreement like that in British Columbia.

You have to agree on the date your relationship started. You’d think that would be simple. It rarely was. I saw clients argue over it constantly, sometimes over surprisingly small technicalities, like whether staying at a partner’s place regularly while keeping a different mailing address still counted as living together. The date matters because it can shift the financial outcome for either person, so it was rarely neutral.

Agreeing when the relationship ended was often even harder. Some people felt it had been over for years. Others still couldn’t quite believe it was ending. Again, the date carried real financial weight.

Then there’s parenting, time and money both, which usually ate up the most time of anything, especially when one parent had been the primary caregiver and the two of them had to rebuild enough trust to share parenting equally going forward. There was a lot to learn too. Most people don’t know, for instance, that a fifty-fifty parenting split doesn’t always mean no child support changes hands.

Then come the assets and debts. People often discovered assets they didn’t know existed, and even more often, debt one spouse hadn’t told the other about. Sorting that out took time and trust that usually wasn’t in great supply by that point.

A Separation Agreement, in the end, is a document that maps out every piece of your future life, negotiated with someone you probably don’t like very much right now. It takes time and enormous emotional energy, and it’s usually built during one of the darker periods of a person’s life.

So.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to build that kind of agreement before the wedding, while everyone’s still happy? It seems a little absurd that our system lets anyone get married on the strength of a hundred-dollar license bought online in a moment of blind optimism, while divorce comes wrapped in rules, requirements, and a court system that’ll make you comply if you won’t agree.

What if the agreement got made in that early, hopeful stage instead?

It might save a marriage, or save someone from marrying the wrong person to begin with. It would almost certainly make the divorce easier, if one ever came. Ask anyone who’s been through it. Divorced people are usually the first to say they wish they’d had one. Which is, of course, preaching to the converted.

How do you reach the people who haven’t gotten there yet? The happy, blissful, about-to-be-married ones?

I don’t know. I only ever saw the aftermath of the people who didn’t have one. Maybe you have a better idea.