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, an A-plus for me.

That night, we were all asked 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 was 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. After all, he earned the income; therefore, he had more value since he made more money. I believed this for most of my life. Honestly, some part of it still lurks under the surface in me, the same way I think it lurks under the surface of our society.

I felt like I couldn’t live according to my own values. 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 figure out what I actually wanted, but I didn’t know myself. 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, working with people navigating their own divorces, I’ve noticed we’re mostly 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 figure out what you actually want, separate 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 figure out what I wanted 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.

Communication – Rules for Life

Communication – Rules for Life

by | Nov 3, 2017 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Rules for Communication (or Rules for Life)

I’m an accountant. Accountants are notoriously bad at communication, and there’s usually a reason: numbers are straightforward, clear, concise, easy to line up and sort. I love doing taxes. You put the numbers in their place, finalize the return, send it off, and you’re done.

Except you’re not, not always. Sometimes the Canada Revenue Agency wants to talk about that dinner meeting, or those moving costs, or that dependent credit. That’s when you realize numbers were never as clear as you thought.

I saw this everywhere in my work, but nowhere more than in my years as a Financial Neutral in the Collaborative Divorce Process. I discovered I was working more with communication than numbers, and that the real work happened in communication, which is hard, especially for an accountant. The numbers are so clear. Why can’t my client decide?

Wanting a concrete answer, the way accountants do, I ended up with five rules. I call them rules for life.

Rule 1: Know Yourself and Know Your Financial Situation

After my divorce, I enrolled in a career program to learn how to write a resume, having been out of the workforce for five years as a stay-at-home mom. Six weeks later, I sent out resumes and heard nothing, zip, zero, nada.

The problem wasn’t the resume. The problem was I didn’t want any of those jobs, and it showed in every cover letter I wrote. I was following someone else’s template because I didn’t know what I actually wanted.

I spent six months waking up in a panic about money, writing cover letters I didn’t believe in, finding ways to scrape by in between. Slowly, with the help of a coach, I got to know myself well enough to realize I needed to start my own business, despite a vow I’d made to myself at fifteen that I never would. As soon as I said it out loud, people started calling to ask for my help. I had to look honestly at my finances first, panic filters and all, and once I did, I saw I could manage the short-term dip it would take to get there.

Rule 2: Know the Person You’re Communicating With

The flip side of knowing yourself is knowing the person across from you. This is where it gets tricky and emotional, which accountants tend not to love.

I had to tell my co-parent I was starting a business, since his child support depended on my income. I told him by email. He responded almost instantly, which was unusual. I got defensive. We went back and forth until we hit a six-month deadlock, and eventually ended up in court.

Which means I broke Rule 2 before I’d really learned it, and had to detour through Rule 3 to get back to it.

Rule 3: Set Up Neutral Time and Space to Communicate

Court is not neutral. It’s public, it’s stressful, and a judge who has heard it all before will look at you like you’re both being unreasonable, then send you off to try again before he’ll even set a hearing.

That’s what happened to us. Instead of a hearing, we were assigned time with a mediator to try to resolve things privately, at a time we chose together, without an audience. She listened to both of us and made us listen to each other, then sent us to counselling. Back to Rule 2.

Rule 2, Again

We sat in a counsellor’s office for three hours doing one thing: taking turns speaking and repeating back what the other person said, before either of us was allowed to respond. I wanted to interrupt constantly. I was rolling my eyes, squirming, nearly at a breaking point.

Rule 4: Shut Up and Listen

If you actually want to resolve a conflict, you have to understand what it’s about. I could have argued my case all day and never once understood what was driving my co-parent. The counsellor made me sit still and paraphrase what he’d said, feeding me the words when I couldn’t find them myself: “Renée, say this back to him.”

So I did. And as I sat there repeating his feelings back to him, I noticed something. Something in him settled. Some of the fight went out of the room. He looked like he felt heard.

Then it was my turn to speak, and his turn to repeat what I’d said. Hearing my own words come back to me, without being argued with, took some of the fight out of me too. I felt heard.

When I’d finished, the counsellor asked, “How can you help him with how he’s feeling?”

“I don’t know. I can’t fix it,” I said.

“And you don’t need to.”

That single line took apart every argument I’d been building. I couldn’t change how he felt, and he couldn’t change how I felt, but just having it acknowledged did something neither of us expected. I understood, finally, that what he was doing had nothing to do with me.

If you find yourself interrupting, or feel a “but” rising in your throat, that’s the moment you’ve been triggered. You don’t have to argue with how someone feels. You just have to hear it. Arguing only entrenches people further, since now they need to defend the feeling instead of moving through it.

Rule 5: You’re Never Done

Being an accountant, I hoped that would be the end of it. Resolved, filed, closed. It wasn’t. There are always new numbers to wrangle, new issues to sit through. I got a lot of practice, and in the process, learned enough to help other people do the same.

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.

The Checklist doesn’t solve it

by | Sep 14, 2017 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

The Checklist Doesn’t Solve It

My blog post ideas usually hit me on the head when I’m struggling. Today’s struggle was getting my kids out the door to school.

This seems straightforward in theory. I even made a checklist, taped to the fridge:

Wake up, 7:30 am. Get dressed. Eat breakfast. Dishes in the dishwasher. Brush hair. Brush teeth. Lunch in your bag. Water bottle in your bag. Coat on. Shoes on, 8:30 am.

Twenty minutes, easy. I got up at 6 am today. By 8:30, we were nowhere close to ready, and I found myself wondering if my neighbours were about to call the police over what sounded like a domestic disturbance in my kitchen.

Nothing was wrong with the list. My kids are good at following lists. Something else was missing.

It reminded me of my work with clients, which starts the same way: a template. A spending plan, property, debts, all filled in over what should be a couple of hours. Both the checklist and the template look concrete and achievable on paper. Both take longer than they should, and both come with more angst than the task itself would suggest.

Because the real work was never the checklist or the template. The real work with my kids was figuring out what was actually going on underneath, the reason two siblings kept finding new and creative ways to torment each other. That meant talking to their dad, coordinating with grandparents whose old discipline methods weren’t landing the same way with these kids, and doing the relational work instead of hoping a fridge list would fix it. That work is slow and uncomfortable, and it’s the part I tend to avoid.

The spending plan template works the same way. Filling it in takes two or three hours, tops. That part really is easy. But the ease is only on the surface, the same way the checklist looked easy until it didn’t hold.

When I did this work with clients, I’d ask what was actually going on underneath, whatever was likely to stretch a simple two-hour process into something much longer, and I’d encourage them to deal with that first. Not because the spreadsheet mattered less, but because reviewing a spending plan is quick. It’s only worth doing once the angst underneath it has somewhere to go.

I used to tell clients: this will take three hours if I’m working in a total vacuum the moment I get your information. But nobody works in a vacuum. It could take three hours, or a while longer. We’d figure it out as we went, and I’d keep them posted as best I could.

Custody of Kitty

by | Aug 15, 2017 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

This is Kitty And this is Kitty out enjoying nature. 

Looks like a fireman Lego with a Darth Vader cape and falling-off headphones, you might think. Oh, how wrong you’d be.

Kitty, the combination of Lego man and Lego cat, the unit is called Kitty, caused a lot of conflict in our household last week.

I was dutifully cleaning up the dishes when I started to hear screaming coming from the area my kids had disappeared to. They always make themselves scarce when there’s work to be done. Someday soon they’ll be trained on dinner dishes.

I went to investigate, and as I got closer, the screaming became clearer.

“You’re an idiot!”

“No, you are!”

“Get out of my room, you’re always taking my stuff.”

“Kitty’s mine! Give it back!”

As I rounded the corner, my youngest hurtled by, clutching something in his hand. I reached out to grab him.

“What’s going on?”

I got a stereo synopsis of the situation. The kids were fighting over Kitty.

I yelled, ” Stop, ” and asked them to hold onto Kitty while we figured things out. The yelling continued, so I yelled stop again.

I called a time-out. “Okay, we all need to calm down, and then in ten minutes we can discuss what’s going on here, but we all need to get to a point where we can talk and not yell. I can’t help you two figure out anything while you’re yelling.”

So my kids went to their respective corners, not easily done. When my eldest is ramped up emotionally, he needs ten minutes alone in his room. Really, he needs twenty-four hours, but we’re working on ten minutes so he doesn’t lose an entire day. My youngest gets thirty seconds of screaming his head off, stomping, slamming doors. Thirty seconds. It’s fun, but it’s what we have to work with. It used to be three minutes. We’re whittling it down.

The kids had their time-outs, and I used the time to strategize and breathe before becoming mom-mediator. Not enough time.

We started to discuss what to do. Both kids wanted Kitty. Both were convinced Kitty was theirs. So first we explored that.

“How do we prove who Kitty belongs to?” I asked.

They started arguing over which set Kitty must have come from. A fireman set? Seemed reasonable. Then they argued over which kid had gotten the fireman set. They tried to get me to cast the deciding vote, but honestly, I couldn’t remember. I tried the analytical approach: you, oldest child, never liked firetrucks, you liked SpongeBob, so in theory Kitty is more likely from a set belonging to the youngest. This led to a lot of protesting from the older one, who explained that various pieces had come from multiple sets he’d creatively combined.

Still stuck. They dragged out every Lego manual to trace where each piece had come from. We did this for a while, until my oldest remembered he’d taken most of the manuals to his dad’s.

All the while, I was trying to help them think past “this is mine and therefore not yours.” Could we find equivalent pieces to build a second Kitty? Apparently not, there was only one cat. Could they take turns? Clearly not.

So I tried getting each of them to see the other’s point of view. I asked my oldest to explain what Kitty meant to him. He walked through the whole inspiration behind Kitty’s creation, how he’d picked each piece and why they belonged together as one unit. I’ve since forgotten the details, but at the time I could tell he felt real pride in what he’d built.

As he explained, my youngest rolled his eyes and huffed. I asked him to stop and listen, he’d get his turn too.

He did. And he repeated almost exactly what his brother had said, for nearly identical reasons. He loves his older brother and wants to be just like him.

I believe my oldest actually created Kitty. I also have a very non-self-aware youngest who genuinely believes he did.

After hearing what Kitty meant to each of them, I wanted them both to get to play with him. But they were still dug into their positions. I’d hoped that hearing each other out might lead somewhere, a duplicate Kitty, a sharing arrangement, even one of them stepping back and saying Kitty clearly meant more to the other. No such luck. They were stuck, and so was I.

I had to pull out the judge card.

“Well, it looks like we need a custody arrangement for Kitty. I’ll hold onto him overnight while I think about who gets the first play shift.”

I’ve had Kitty ever since. He’s been living in my car, riding around with me. I’ve become quite attached.

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.