Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It

by | Sep 2, 2026 | Advocacy, Divorce and Separation

Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It

When telling the story of my divorce, at some point I say: I was lucky that when my spouse and I separated, the news was spotlighting the Collaborative Process. A news article led us to find the lawyers who helped us transform our lives and get us back on track.

When I discovered my spouse had filed for divorce, I was in a terrible emotional state. I spent my days anxious. What would become of our children, and us? Where would we live? How would we survive? Some days I seriously wondered if I’d make it to the next one, half-convinced I might have a heart attack from the stress alone. Our seven-year-old and four-year-old sons picked up on it all. Our eldest broke out in cold sores and started isolating himself from the rest of us. Our youngest had frequent breakdowns, more screaming, more hitting than we’d ever seen from him.

After my first consultation with the lawyer who’d become my Collaborative lawyer, I actually considered hiring a bulldog instead. But everything I kept reading said the same thing: children suffer most when their parents have a high-conflict divorce.

Choosing a Collaborative lawyer was a hard call at the time because I genuinely believed I was right and that I’d win if I took my spouse to court. I didn’t understand yet that when one spouse wins, the children lose.

I also didn’t think a Collaborative lawyer could actually get my spouse to engage honestly and productively. What I didn’t understand was that the law here already has a strong default built in: the starting point for financial separation is fifty-fifty on assets and income. Policy and case law have built a family law process specifically designed to leave both spouses starting from roughly the same financial position afterward. A bulldog lawyer might have made my spouse look bad in front of a judge, but it wouldn’t have moved the financial outcome much at all. It would have cost me thousands more, and bought nothing but more conflict inside my own family.

Our lawyers helped us reach something we could both grudgingly live with, and helped keep our conflict away from our kids.

Today our children are sixteen and thirteen. We just celebrated our eldest’s birthday together: pitch and putt, dinner at his favourite restaurant.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs there is, and juggling full-time parenting on a part-time basis has never been easy. My ex and I have navigated plenty of hard parenting decisions over the past nine years, but fortunately, we navigated them together, for our kids.

I’m grateful we found lawyers who understood that the real work of separating is keeping the family together while the finances come apart.

And I’m doing what I can to make sure luck stops being the deciding factor for families going through this. It shouldn’t come down to chance. The default family law system needs to put families and children first, as a baseline, not as something you happen to stumble into.

The Slowest Way (But Really, It’s Faster)

by | Dec 27, 2023 | Divorce and Separation

The Slow Way (But Really, It’s the Fastest)

There’s a version of my own separation agreement on page five that laid out my plan to get my old job back. It was there because everyone around me- lawyers, family, well-meaning friends- assumed that was obviously the right direction. I assumed it too, for a while. It took me years to notice that plan wasn’t actually mine. It was just the most well-worn path in sight, and I’d stepped onto it without really choosing it.

I think that’s how most people get stuck. Not because they lack options, but because the only paths they can see are the ones everyone else is already walking.

From what I’ve seen, people usually try one of three ways out.

The first is waiting to be rescued, waiting for something outside yourself- a partner, a job, a lucky break- to show up and fix what feels broken. This rarely works, mostly because you’re handing the change itself to something you don’t control. And even when it does work for a while- a new relationship, a new hobby, a fresh distraction- the lift is usually temporary. Eventually you’re back where you started, except now there’s one more person or pursuit tangled up in the mess too.

The second is fixing yourself to match somebody else’s picture of a good life. This was my path. I had a version of my future handed to me, mostly built from other people’s expectations, and I spent real effort trying to make myself fit it, rather than asking whether it fit me. This path can look like real progress from the outside: you’re working hard, achieving things, checking boxes, but it’s often just as unmoored as staying still, because none of it is actually pointed anywhere you chose. The particular cruelty of this path is that even when you reach the destination, you usually find out you’re still unhappy, and now you’ve spent years getting there.

The third is blowing it all up. Something dramatic, a sudden decision made out of built-up anger or exhaustion from the first two paths not working. It does get you moving. But you rarely get to choose what happens next, and the fallout from that kind of change can take years to clean up, sometimes longer than it would have taken to walk away from the wrong path more carefully in the first place.

There’s a fourth way, though it’s harder to spot, because from the outside it looks exactly like standing still. Mostly because it is, for long stretches. The difference is what’s happening underneath: one decision at a time, so gradual you can’t actually see the path forming until you’re already partway down it.

Standing still is uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel like progress, and everything in you wants to grab the next visible direction just to feel like you’re moving again. But trust the stillness long enough, and something shifts. You notice you’re already closer to your own path than you thought, not because you found it somewhere out there, but because you finally stopped long enough to see it was already forming underneath you.

I eventually got off my own version of path two. Not through any dramatic reckoning, just an ordinary Tuesday where I finally looked at the life I was building and realized none of it was mine. I hadn’t chosen the job, hadn’t chosen the version of “fine” I was aiming for, hadn’t chosen most of what I was working so hard to become. Once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it.

The other three paths feel faster. They rarely are. Path one costs you the time spent waiting, however long that turns out to be. Path two costs you years spent becoming someone you weren’t. Path three costs you however long it takes to clean up whatever the explosion left behind. None of them show you the bill upfront.

The slow way is the opposite. It feels like it’s taking forever precisely because you can feel it happening in real time. The cost is visible from the start instead of arriving later, all at once, disguised as something else.

Zip, Zero, Nada

by | Nov 20, 2023 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

Zip, Zero, Nada

Does salary level determine a job’s worth, or a person’s?

Most of us would say “no way,” including myself, yet actions and behaviour speak louder than words.

When I was earning a decent salary, some might have called it indecent for my age; people treated me differently. They seemed to respect me automatically, and I never felt I had to justify my actions. I was making a lot of money, so my work was worthy, and by default, so was I.

Then I became a stay-at-home mom, and we all know how much stay-at-home parents get paid. That amount is zip, zero, nada.

Nobody questioned my decision when I first decided to become a stay-at-home parent. I had some savings from work and was expecting my second child. I had worked enough to be guaranteed parental leave benefits when my second child was born.

Now that I think about it, it’s fascinating how many people had opinions on my new status.

Most people told me I was making a good decision. They said, “Your children are only young once; you’re lucky to spend time with them when they’re young.”

And I agree. I was fortunate to spend time with my kids when they were young.

But the other message I internalized from this comment was that I wasn’t genuinely working, or that I was working at a job that benefited anyone other than me.

As time went by and my kids got older, four and two, my justification for staying home became more and more of a topic of conversation, and I became more internally defensive. I started keeping a mental list of how I was contributing to our household, one I began obsessing over almost daily.

The first question out of my spouse’s mouth when he got home from work was, “What did you do today?” He probably wasn’t looking for proof I’d worked, but I had my list ready anyway, just in case, to show I hadn’t spent the day surfing the web. My husband never had to justify his actions. He brought home a paycheque every two weeks that did it for him.

To feel more justified in what I was doing, I decided I could live with less “fun” money than my husband. I cut my leisure spending to one-third of his.

It’s telling what that pay cut did to our family dynamic. I didn’t need the extra money, but in a sense I’d taken a notional pay cut, which further minimized my sense of worth. My relationship with my spouse became more unbalanced. We were no longer equal, not in my eyes, and not in his.

At that point, my husband and I had monetary proof that my job wasn’t as worthy as his.

This concept carried into our divorce process. We barely discussed how I’d contributed to the household. My contribution was glossed over, and the main conversation revolved around when I would start “work.” We didn’t discuss the fact that I had effectively lost my job, because being a stay-at-home parent is not recognized as a job. I’d been on a lark, apparently, and now I had to get down to business and find something worthy.

What was the difference between my job and my now-ex’s? His was paid. Mine wasn’t.

If you’re considering becoming a stay-at-home parent, I’d encourage you to set up your finances like this:

Take your spouse’s salary, divide it by two, and automatically transfer half into your own bank account every pay period. Then you and your spouse each pay half of the joint family expenses, and cover your personal spending from what’s left over.

If you’re about to become a stay-at-home parent, talk through a financial arrangement like this with your spouse before the baby is born. If your spouse doesn’t support a proposal like this, that’s worth talking through further before you give up a career for a job with no paycheque attached.

If your spouse does support it, you’ll know they consider the work a worthy endeavour, worthy enough that they’re willing to pay for it. Because, despite the saying, money does define the worthiness of jobs and people, at least in how we treat each other. Actions and behaviour speak louder than words.

Divorce is a Stoplight

Divorce is a Stoplight

by | Feb 6, 2018 | Divorce and Separation, Money

Divorce Is a Stoplight

A few months ago, I was at a presentation about money. It wasn’t about tax rules or investing. It was about how hard it is to talk about money.

I know that; I thought to myself: A-plus for me.

The presenter asked us what money meant to each of us. Answers varied, but I knew mine right away.

For me, money is strongly linked to my sense of self-worth. That undercurrent drives a lot of our society, whether we admit it or not.

When I was negotiating my divorce, I felt like I had no voice and no value, because I wasn’t earning any income as a stay-at-home mom. Every meeting with divorce coaches and lawyers was torturous, because I didn’t feel heard. I felt lost. I didn’t know why I did the things I did, or what value I brought to the family. I believed everyone was listening to my co-parent. He held the power, because he earned the money, and somewhere along the way I’d equated the two. I believed that for most of my life. Some part of it still lurks under the surface in me, the same way I think it lurks under the surface of our society.

That belief followed me into every decision, including the one that mattered most: whether my own life had to be justified in the same terms. I’d walked away from a well-paying job as a financial analyst to be a stay-at-home parent, and during our legal meetings, the only thing I kept hearing was some version of: when is Renée going to get her high-paying job back?

When, indeed.

Instead of figuring out what I actually needed to move forward, I proposed a plan to do exactly that: get back to that job. It was written into our separation agreement, my plan for getting my career back, laid out clearly on page five. I wanted that agreement. I thought once I had it, I’d be able to move on. The divorce coaches and lawyers, all collaborative, tried to help me get clear on what I actually wanted, but I didn’t know myself yet. Being the type-A person I am, and wanting to save money, I kept driving the process forward while burying the emotions that kept trying to surface. I did the budgets. I figured out how to divide the money. I thought that part was the easy part.

My life since then hasn’t followed the clear path I thought it would. It was never just a matter of making logical choices to reach an end goal.

Underneath it all, I was fighting a battle against my own assumptions about what was expected of me, and it wasn’t until I got a handle on that that decisions started to feel easier.

Since then, having worked with people navigating their own divorces, I’ve noticed most of us are on the same path. I’ve yet to meet someone who can easily choose between financial options when they’re in the middle of separating. I’ve yet to meet someone who can clearly articulate what they’re actually feeling about their financial situation as it happens.

Financial professionals are often the first people newly separated couples contact. Society has driven home the message that divorce is about dividing the money, so it makes sense that people go looking for someone who knows the rules for splitting it. But that’s not actually where to start.

Divorce is a stoplight. Life is telling you that you’re not living according to what actually drives you, and you’ve reached a point where you can’t keep going down the road you were on. You can sit at that intersection a long time before you figure out how to make it turn green.

The truth is, no single professional gets you through that intersection alone. You need a team: a financial professional to help you understand where you stand and what your options actually look like, a mental health professional or coach to help you separate what you want from what everyone around you expects, and a lawyer to handle the legal side and document whatever you decide.

I didn’t have that team working together the way I needed. My separation agreement ended up outlining a life I didn’t actually want, because nobody had helped me get there before we wrote it down.

If there’s one thing worth taking from my own experience, it’s that: don’t let your separation agreement quietly become a document that maps out someone else’s expectations of you.

What the Lemonade Stand Taught me

by | Aug 9, 2017 | Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

What the Lemonade Stand Taught Me

I used to go to camp with my kids a couple of weeks a year. A rustic, all-inclusive, moms and kids only, canoeing and swimming, alongside candlelight yoga and sessions on “living your authentic life.” Every year leading up to it, I’d feel a little “meh.” Every year, on the last night, we’d sit in a circle and share what we were grateful for, and every year I said some version of the same thing: no meal prep, no laundry, no grunt work, and a real reminder of how I wanted to live according to my own values.

Camp was a reset button, and reset buttons are hard to come by. Most of us live in reaction mode more than we’d admit. I certainly did, finishing one project only to realize there was no time to reflect before starting the next, mostly my own doing, since I tended to be a little too optimistic about what I could fit into a day.

So of course, at camp one year, I did it again. An email came in asking for help on a project I loved: building a spreadsheet to get someone real clarity on their finances. I said yes immediately. The only catch was a tight deadline, and with other people handling my kids and the day-to-day grind, that detail didn’t register.

It registered the moment I got home and was back to making lunch.

The kids left for their week with their dad, and I got real, focused work done, with no shopping or chores pulling at me. Then they came back, the project wasn’t finished, and I was suddenly working while arranging childcare, shopping, and cooking at the same time.

I sat at my desk building the spreadsheet while my kids entertained themselves nearby, occasionally getting a snack tossed their way or a yell to stop fighting.

They’d just come back from an entrepreneurship day camp their dad had signed them up for, and they were full of ideas about making money. Naturally, they landed on a lemonade stand.

“Can we walk to the store for supplies?” “Yes, yes, just be quiet, I’m working.”

They set it up. I paused to help carry a table and chairs and check that the lemonade was food-safe, then couldn’t resist inserting myself into their pricing. “How much are you charging?” I asked, though really I told them: seventy-five cents a cup. Last time, they’d made forty dollars in an hour, and instead of pride, I’d felt horrified, convinced they were overcharging.

They agreed, reluctantly, and went to sell.

I finished the spreadsheet, proud of it, sent it off, and went to check on them.

A couple of dads on bikes had stopped. “We always stop for these, gotta support the kids.” One added, “You guys need a better street, not much traffic here.” They handed over three fifty for two cups. “Don’t fill it too full.”

Later, the kids told me every customer that day had paid more than seventy-five cents.

That’s when it hit me. I’d just spent an entire project quietly finding ways to charge my client less, working extra hours unbilled, telling myself it didn’t count because I loved the work and was learning.

Turns out I needed the lesson from my own kids. They weren’t gouging anyone. Their customers wanted to pay more. Two kids selling lemonade from concentrate, on a low-traffic street, had tapped into something people were glad to pay for.

Do you do this too? Minimize what your own work is worth?

Learn from a ten- and eight-year-old with a card table: keep enjoying what you do, but don’t let that be the reason you give it away. Charge what it’s actually worth. Take on less. Keep making what you do better.