by Renee leNobel | Oct 18, 2016 | Divorce, Parenting
The following post was written when I was recently separated and had two young children. At the time of writing, I was consumed with feelings of grief and anger. I primarily directed my anger towards my ex-spouse and felt like I had no control over my life. I was also resentful that the value parents bring to the world was not recognized. It was only when I accepted my life, including my former spouse and his role as a parent, that I stopped blaming myself and became a better parent to my kids.
Have you ever thought of yourself as a bad mother? I know I have. In fact, “I’m a bad mother” is like a tagline that accompanies all my parenting mistakes. Despite knowing that parenting is challenging and I couldn’t possibly be expected to get it right the first time, I still beat myself up when parenting does not go as expected.
I can remember almost weekly instances of calling myself “A BAD MOTHER” since my oldest was born ten years ago. I took him outside without a hat. I’m a bad mother. I yelled at him when I found him irritating – bad mother again. Didn’t tell your child to look both ways when crossing the street? BAD MOTHER! My friend and I were going to get matching t-shirts that said “dumb mum.” “Oy,” as she would say.
We are wired to beat ourselves up over our decisions and actions as a species. We forgive others, but we do not forgive ourselves.
I have also realized that calling myself a bad mother serves no purpose. In fact, it does incredible damage.
I was reminded of this again this past weekend.
My children’s dad asked me to parent the kids for him this past weekend.
He asked me on Wednesday. I was flooded with work and was determined not to work on the weekend.
My answer should have been a clear no. I already had plans for the weekend; I was looking forward to having some time and space to get recharged. “No” seemed so simple to say.
Yet it wasn’t.
No was on my lips (or the tips of my fingers as I started to reply to his email request), but something stopped me.
What stopped me?
This thought: “I’m a bad mother.”
Imagine not wanting to be with my kids!
Their dad was asking for help. How could I even contemplate not supporting my co-parent?
How could I put my interests before my children’s?
Yup – it all screamed BAD MOTHER!
And so, instead of saying no, I said yes.
I cancelled my plans and told myself that the thoughts rattling around about the time I needed were selfish. I am a selfish and bad mother.
I’m wondering if you can guess what kind of weekend my children and I had.
I will say, not good.
It all started to go south when my youngest called me at 2:30 on Friday from school. He had a tummy ache.
ARGH.
I knew he did not. I knew it was an emotional tummy ache. He does not like last-minute changes, and just switching up the parenting schedule is enough to give him an emotional tummy ache. What’s the saying? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. He needs time to process change, just like his mum does.
I had been planning to use all the time until I had to get them from after-school care to get my work done, and I just lost 3 hours of very efficient work hours.
I was thrown into a situation I did not have time to prepare for emotionally.
I got to school, and the first words out of my mouth to my seven-year-old were, “Do you really have a tummy ache?”
As I heard the words come out of my mouth, I heard the tagline that fast approached on their heels.
“I am a BAD MOTHER”
And then I spent the rest of my weekend with my kids, taking out my terrible mood on them.
And that is how our weekend went.
And then I beat myself when they left by calling myself a bad mother yet again. I had been bad. I had not said no to their dad even though I knew better. I knew I needed that time. I had been bad in so many ways. I thought I had shaken that people-pleasing tendency of mine, but clearly, I had not, as I had said yes when I should have said no. How could I have not learned this lesson by now? BAD, DUMB, STUPID ME. You get the picture.
I added the tagline “I am a bad mother” to every single decision I made and every action I took this past weekend.
When did the lightbulb go off?
Monday morning.
When the kids were gone, I had time and space to process my thoughts again.
I cried as I realized how I had beaten myself up all weekend.
I cried as I realized I still had work to do and didn’t want to do it as I felt sad and terrible.
Then I started to write, and I realized something.
I realized I had just gotten some life-changing proof.
I had just gotten first-hand confirmation that I had to retire my I’m a BAD MOTHER tagline forever.
As it dawned on me what I had learned this past weekend, I started to feel grateful.
What was I grateful for? My crappy weekend.
I looked back on this past weekend and said, “Thank you, incredibly crappy weekend.”
I am going to remember you always, crappy weekend.
Weekend – you were the nail in the coffin for the tagline “I am a BAD MOTHER” and all the other taglines I’ve used to beat myself up with.
Thank you crappy weekend.
by Renee leNobel | Oct 3, 2016 | Divorce
I like to find answers to the problems in life. I realize that this is impossible and I will drive myself crazy trying to find one answer to life but this week I really feel like I’m getting close.
Really. Close.
This week I’ve decided that when we get into a rough patch it’s all Blame’s fault.
Blame was being quite obnoxious this past week.
There was Blame when my children were pounding on each other in the back of the car when all I was trying to do was get them to school on time. I know you know what this looks like. “He looked at me funny!” “His arm was on my side of the car!”
(Not surprisingly Blame was also there when I yelled at my children in response. I am such a bad mother, why can’t I talk calmly to my children?)
There was Blame again when I discovered I had made more than one mistake at work in the beginning of September. It was all back to school’s fault – there was just way too much to do.
Blame cropped up in every conversation I had last week.
It cropped up in the conversations I had with people in the middle of a divorce.
It cropped up in multiple conversations with friends who were blaming themselves for their misery.
Blame sidetracked and diverted me from getting anything done last week.
Everyday I tried to tackle Blame in a blog post and every day it thwarted me. It would just not submit. Darn you Blame!
But I think I’ve finally gotten the best of Blame. Oh yes Blame – I’ve got your number.
I’m not going to you anymore. You can take a hike and this is why.
Everytime you turn up you distract everyone from what is really going on.
Blame – you’re a trickster and you steal the show. You are like some piece of glitter that we cannot turn our eyes away from.
Blame – you trap people. You suck people into trying to prove that you are wrong. The person on the other side of you is dodging and weaving trying to get away from you instead of working with the person that is using you like a shield and a sword.
Blame – you lock people into believing there is one answer. The world is not black and white Blame.
And the worst thing you do Blame? You are the weapon people use to hurt themselves.
Get out of the way Blame – move aside. It’s time to make room for communication, understanding and forgiveness.
I’m done with you Blame. I’m moving on.
by Renee leNobel | Sep 26, 2016 | Divorce
If not, there’s a good reason.
My divorce was a Collaborative Divorce. What does that mean? On the surface, it means that you agree to keep your divorce out of the courts. That was one of the reasons why I agreed to try the process when I was getting a divorce from my husband. There had been more talk about the Collaborative Approach to Divorce at the time of our separation as the family law in British Columbia was undergoing a change and as part of that change, lawyers were required to begin informing their clients about Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR – an acronym that lawyers use a fair bit – did you know what it means?).
So we heard from many at that time that the Collaborative Approach to divorce was the new way to get a divorce. It was the better way and so those two concepts (new and better) convinced me and my husband at the time to try it to get our separation agreement so we could get a divorce.
So we tried it.
And I really did not like it.
Of course, divorce is incredibly stressful and trying to come to an agreement with someone that you are in conflict with is already a challenge so it is no wonder I didn’t like it. But I think I hated it even more than what I imagined the alternative was, which was to have a no holds barred fight.
I had been trained all my life to avoid conflict. Many of us are. I had also been trained to think I was a reasonable person that could deal with almost any situation. What this meant for me was that I tended to let things go a lot. But I didn’t really let them go. Instead, I buried them and sat on them and then tended to explode when I couldn’t do that anymore. That was where I was at when I finally separated from my spouse and had to figure out a way to now come to agreement so we could get a divorce.
The Collaborative Approach is the opposite of the all consuming war that I had been training up for and which I have to say many of us envisage when we think divorce. We think fight. We think courts and nasty revenge. We think there will be at least one loser in this war and often there are two. We have been trained by society (TV really) to have a certain picture of what divorce looks like.
The first four way meeting in our Collaborative Divorce we went to with our lawyers I almost had a coronary. I should explain what a four way meeting is. It’s a meeting with you, your spouse, your lawyer and your spouse’s lawyer present. You get to a separation agreement by way of these four way meetings. I don’t know if either of our lawyers could have talked any slower. And the stuff that was coming out of their mouths? Seriously? I felt like I was back in kindergarten where I was being told how important it was to share. At the same time I was thinking “this is costing us two hourly lawyer rates to sit here and learn about manners.”
I already knew what the answer to our problem was and so sat through this “Collaborative Approach.” for 8 months until we got there. In the end, the agreement we got was pretty close to what I had wanted. “Hey – I guess the Collaborative Approach worked for us” is what I thought at the time.
Little did I know that I never really understood “Collaborative” even after we were done.
Why is that? How could I have spent 8 months in meetings with 4 different professionals that practiced the Collaborative Approach to divorce and still not understand how it was supposed to work? They had all explained how it was supposed to work – at the beginning of the process, during all the meetings and at the end where they said – “see, we have an agreement – it all came together.” And when I think back on it now, out from the fog of emotion, I know that they did. They were explaining it clearly but something was preventing me from hearing and understanding it.
How did that happen?
Well, I think part of the reason that happened is that I had each spent 40 years learning a different way to resolve conflict. I had spent my life learning how to avoid conflict. Then I had learned that if the conflict was still there and bothering me, I had to really stand up for myself and battle through to make that conflict go away. My belief about myself was that I don’t get all bent out of shape over minor issues but watch out if someone crosses me. I switch from being an avoider to being a highly motivated person who is going to win at all costs.
So instead of seeing how we had just resolved our conflict a different way than I knew; because how can you learn a new way of doing conflict in 8 months after spending your entire life training a different way to do conflict, I slotted our divorce into my old way of seeing things. I had avoided separating from my husband and then when I realized it was unavoidable, I found a solution and hammered it through. Because deep down, I felt like I had been the one driving our agreement process. I had made sure the meetings happened, I made sure my ex did the “homework” and I made sure our agreement got signed.
And….
How can you learn a new way of doing conflict when you are at your most emotional point in life? I was not calm or rational. I was alternating between being sad and angry on a minute by minute basis. The only thing I was focused on was revenge. I could not hear a thing those professionals were telling me. I was living in an extremely stressful situation where I was sharing a house with a person I did not want to have anything to do with anymore and I had two small children that I was extremely worried about. I was not at my best for learning new concepts.
So, while we used the Collaborative Approach to divorce, it was only on the surface. We stayed out of court. Oh wait – no we didn’t. We ended up in court after we were separated and divorced.
Our agreement allowed us to get a divorce but we were still in conflict and were still not able to resolve it. We reverted to our old patterns and styles of managing conflict as soon as we were released from our professional team.
I think this is what it is like for many people. Everyone has learned a certain style of conflict. Some people may have learned a more collaborative approach to resolving conflict and when they enter the Collaborative Approach to divorce, they get it and things progress and it works.
So what about the rest of us? Those of us who have been trained throughout life not to do things collaboratively?
We need more help. We have to be told again and again what it means and how it works because it is a difficult concept to grasp when you are in the midst of emotional upheaval and have years of resolving conflict in a different way.
I myself only started to understand what it meant about a year after my divorce was finalized and after I had started to train to become a Collaborative professional myself. Here is part 1 and part 2 of posts I wrote when I finally did start to understand what Collaborative means.
Now I find myself helping people with their own Collaborative Divorces. I have heard them say exactly what I said during my divorce: the meetings with the Collaborative professionals are slow, it doesn’t seem like actual issues are being addressed and the divorce is not progressing.
These words have become signals for me to sit up and pay attention. I have to remind myself how much time it took me to understand how Collaborative works. I realize that the best way I can help people is to help them gain that understanding too. I have to fight my natural inclination to go back to my life training to be a problem solver and solve these people’s problems and remember instead I am helping to facilitate a Collaborative process so they can figure out the best way to move forward with hope.
by Renee leNobel | Sep 18, 2016 | Divorce
I was trained to believe that being busy means you are important. This wasn’t overt training. It was training I chose to believe from observing the world around me. OK, there was a bit of overt training in school. I see it now when I see what I’m doing to my children at the start of the school year. The school year has started and the pressure to sign my children up for all sorts of extra-curricular activities has begun. And I have bought in. My older child is resisting hard and I think I’d better let him win this one (after I sign him up for a few things – swimming, choir, cross country – hey it’s only a month and I’m only doing it so he gets the bus ride home to the park near where we live). I am in such a quandary over signing him up for dance though.
I put him in dance a couple of years ago because he does not appear to like the team sport thing. Plus, whenever we were at the beach – a place he claims to hate with a passion – he would break out in dance. I decided that dance was the happy place he needed to go to so I figured he would love it as an extra-curricular activity. So I put him in dance and he did well and frankly I loved the year end concerts and hearing that he was a natural from his teacher. But he doesn’t want to do dance. He tells me that it is boring – they repeat the same moves over and over again and it has become a chore for him. Just one more thing to do to please people, including me, the woman who runs the dance studio and the world. Despite knowing this, I still want to sign him up because if I don’t, how is he ever going to figure out what he loves in life if he doesn’t try it and keep practicing it? He is going to get left behind by his peers. He is going to lose the thing he loves!
Yes, this is the argument that is going on in my head that is leading to me badgering my child to sign up for dance again. Sometimes I really hate self-awareness.
Yet self-awareness is hitting me over the head with a hammer this weekend.
Why?
I am alone.
Why am I alone?
Well, I was supposed to go on a big hiking trip with some friends but then it turned into a torrential rain weekend (of course it did – it was the start of soccer season) and we decided it is not much fun camping and hiking in a torrential downpour.
So I have no kids – they are with their dad this weekend – and I have no plans.
This is a place I found myself in A LOT when I was freshly separated. It was a place I really could not mentally handle at the time. When I was freshly separated and alone I spent a lot of time crying. A lot. I equated being alone and not busy with being useless and a failure. I had no career to bury myself in, I had no kids to take care of (they were with their dad) and all my friends were extremely busy with their families.
It sucked big time and drove me to depression.
Then my coach helped me understand the importance of alone time (especially for introverts like me and my son). She told me it was OK to sit on the couch and cry. She told me eventually I would get tired of it and move on to something else. She also told me to start figuring out what it was I enjoyed doing and to just start doing it when I had that alone time. She told me to recognize the guilt that would crop up when I was doing something that I enjoyed that I didn’t think was a “valuable use of my time” according to the old rules I had taught myself. She told me to push through that guilt and not let it stop me from doing what I enjoyed.
The great thing about this for me was that she prescribed alone time and fun time for me. I am a rule follower, a lot of us are as we are trained to be in life. So I did what I was told and sat very uncomfortably in my alone time because she told me to. I also started to go out and do things that I had enjoyed in the past. Because at that point in my life I didn’t enjoy anything. I was depressed. I repeated this prescription for a couple of years and in fact sometimes I have to go and get a new prescription for it.
This weekend I got a new prescription for it.
It is amazing because even knowing that being alone is OK now I still can’t quite handle it. I still equate being alone with many bad things and it takes me a lot of (wait for it…ALONE) time to realize how important being alone is.
So on Saturday I woke up and stared alone in the face again and started to get antsy.
I texted my friend that I was supposed to go hiking with to see if she was up for a hike even though it was pouring. Nope. So I sat on the couch and started to see the weekend stretch out before me. I RAN to my closet and put on my exercise gear, hopped in my car and drove myself to the Grouse Grind. I did that, drove home and started to work. I did that for a while until I started to beat myself up again for having no life outside of work and exercise and then I started to text all my friends. My dear friend recognized I was sliding a bit and offered me the opportunity to come over and help her prepare some healthy food.
Um. I hate cooking. I can do it and I can do it well and it has taken me many years to admit that I hate cooking. My family are all fabulous cooks and foodies. My sister reads cookbooks for fun. I should like cooking. Shopping for healthy food at the local markets, cooking and healthy eating are all the rage. OK – this is turning into another post but when my friend asked me if I wanted to come over and help her cook I realized I would rather be alone. Heh. She heard me recognize that and told me to just go make lists of everything I have to do (because I do have work I could be doing) and she knew that would give me something to do so I would’t be obsess about being alone AND I would get something done which I still haven’t let go of as being important.
This is turning into a very long blog post. Is anyone still with me? I work out the analytics of things as I write.
So I started to list all the stuff I have to do and then I realized I was losing my alone time. It was vanishing before my eyes. OMG – I have a lot to do and not much time to do it in. I need more alone time!
I decided I had to go to yoga – it is like alone time. It has meditation built in. I went to yoga.
I came out of yoga and my dear friend had asked me over for pizza (that is how first met in life – she randomly asks strangers if they want pizza as they walk by her house).
Of course I wanted pizza (it had bacon and potato on it!) and of course I wanted to hang out with my friend.
Then I came home and it was still Saturday night and I was alone.
It was then that I finally FINALLY recognized how well and truly I have been trained to think that there is something wrong with being alone with nothing to do because I realized I still subconsciously believe this fallacy.
Then I recognized what my alone time that day had brought me.
I had re-learned what is important to me and I got re-charged doing the things I enjoy. I actually got very excited about life again and I was grateful that I had gotten alone time to get reminded of these things. It really was the best day ever. I felt happy when I woke up this morning. Happy.
To bring this post full circle I now recognize what I am doing to my children when I fill up their schedules with extra-curricular activities. I am teaching them that being alone and being bored is bad. I am also not giving my introvert son enough time to figure out what it is he enjoys. He is being told what to do and he does it because he is a rule follower just like me. I am setting him up for a future mid-life crisis. Someday, he will have to learn that being alone is not bad. He will also have to learn what it is that he loves because he will never have had a chance to figure it out for himself.
I subconsciously knew that I was not letting my son be OK with himself and what he wants. I was trying to convince him he is wrong about stopping his dance class. This is the other awareness I had this weekend in my alone time. I realized that though all I’ve ever wanted for my kids is for them to be happy, I’m still following a set of parenting rules that does the opposite. I am still following the rules that I thought I had unlearned.
So, to be clear and because it seems it takes a lot to unlearn 40 years of training, I am reminding myself that alone time is good – not only is it good, it is awesome.
So this is my reminder and I hope it helps you too.
by Renee leNobel | Mar 9, 2016 | Divorce
From my very unofficial polling of people that I come across in life, it seems that money and parenting issues are the major causes of divorce. I had a slightly funny and slightly tragic conversation with a friend the other day. We were commiserating on the fact that we both separated from our spouses because we could just not get along when it came to money or parenting. Then we both looked at each other and said – “yup, and we still have have to deal with our ex’s on those issues even though we are divorced.”
For all you newly separated people, I’m sorry to be the bearer of this bad news.
That’s the irony. Just because you get divorced does not mean you no longer have to discuss parenting and money with your ex. In actual fact, you end up having to do more communication around these two subjects. And it will require more effort because you live in separate dwellings. Not to mention the fact that you likely aren’t very motivated to talk to this person that causes you emotional angst. You will probably have to hire lawyers and counsellors too and spend lots of money to figure out how to communicate once you are in the divorce process. Then once you have a separation agreement you will have to spend a couple of years figuring out how to implement that separation agreement. Because you know what? Even when things seem clearly written down and understandable in an agreement, you and your ex will likely interpret it differently.
When we signed our separation agreement I was so relieved. I thought that finally things would be clear and we had a map to resolve all future parenting and money issues. I was so wrong. I was naive to think that we would interpret our agreement the same way when we could never do this before. We continued to fight and argue about what each sentence in our agreement meant. Our kids continued to be caught in the middle of our conflict.
Our agreement could not solve our problems. The only thing that could help us solve our issues was learning to effectively communicate with each other, a thought that I had resisted for a long time but came to adopt after spending a year of being continuously surprised by how my ex interpreted our agreement. I realized that figuring out a way to communicate with my ex was a better option than living on an emotional roller coaster.
So as I see it, eventually you are going to have to learn to communicate with your partner about the big issues like parenting and money. You get to decide, do you want to do it before things start to go horribly awry or do you want to be proactive and figure out if you can live with this person and start a life and family together before you actually do so?
How do you start? Here is one way.
by Renee leNobel | Feb 3, 2016 | Divorce
I think our beliefs and the stories we tell ourselves drive our lives. It is what your head is telling you that determines if you will have a good day or bad day. Yes, I believe we manifest our destiny by our beliefs.
I came to this realization after a lot of self-reflection. What is it that makes one person happier than another? It is basically that the happier person believes that they are happy.
I know this from my own experience.
When I first separated from my husband, I sank into a depression. The only thing that got me out of bed everyday was just my mom strength. I couldn’t crater completely because what would happen to my kids? So I managed to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. I remember wondering how I had ever gotten to that place. I had always considered myself to be a happy person. In fact, that was my persona. I used to love reading depressing books because I wanted to experience that emotion because I did not have it in my life!
Every morning I woke up and felt terrible. The stories started playing in my head and the big one at that time was “what is the point?” I imagined just putting in time until my kids were old enough to look after themselves. This story played in my head for about a year. It sucked in all sorts of evidence to confirm that life sucks and it got bigger and bigger until one day I realized I did not want to go on.
That was not a good thought. What would happen to my kids then? I am so grateful that at that point I had a wonderful coach in my life who came to me through the Minerva Foundation. She understood what was going on and asked me the right questions to get me to the point where I could start shifting the story that I was telling myself.
The amazing thing was after a short time of telling myself a different story I started to feel better. This incremental difference in feeling felt so amazing that it was like a revelation. I started reading again (no, not depressing books). I started reading all those self-help books that I had mocked in the past. You know the ones and if you don’t, here is a list of my favourites:
Are You Ready to Succeed? Unconventional Strategies to Achieving Personal Mastery in Business and Life – Srikumar Rao
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom – Don Miguel Ruiz
The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are – Brene Brown
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life – Byron Katie
Some of my friends noticed the change in me and asked me how I had done it. I said I just decided I was going to make myself better. When I said it that way, it didn’t seem possible and I think a few people raised more than one eyebrow and thought – yeah, right.
It wasn’t easy and it has taken some time; two years in fact, and I still tell myself some stories that are not helpful. That is what is so incredible. I have first hand evidence that the main thing that determines how my day goes is what thought I buy into when I wake up in the morning. Is it going to be a good day or a bad day? It’s as simple as that. What is not simple is letting go of those stories that make us feel terrible. They can get a hold of you and it can sometimes take a while to shake them. I rely on certain things to help me shake those stories, but that is a different blog post.
Why am I writing this post today? I was recently reminded of this by someone who wakes up everyday and says “Life is awesome!”
I had noticed that some of the stories I was starting to tell myself these days were starting to impact my day-to-day living again. I decided to adopt the “life is awesome, I’m going to crush it today” thought and for the last couple of days it has helped me get through the overwhelming thought of “HOW AM I GOING TO GET THROUGH TAX SEASON” that has been playing in my head for the last month. Life is awesome – I just will. That is my story today.
I want this blog to be the start of a series on stories we tell ourselves.
Next week’s topic? Stories we tell ourselves about money and how that affects our spending.
In that vein I would love love to have some feedback on a story that you tell yourself about money. I know mine. Mine is I’m broke, I cannot spend. What’s yours?
