by Renee leNobel | Oct 15, 2015 | Divorce
Empathy is an interesting thing. I’ve always felt like I have a bit too much of it. I could easily empathize with someone who was in pain and I would spend a good chunk of my time figuring out how to help that person. If I couldn’t help them, I would feel bad.
I always thought my empathic nature was a benefit to others and just slightly detrimental to me as I spent way too much time trying to solve other people’s problems and then I would feel terrible if I couldn’t help.
Today I had a bit of an epiphany. I realized that my empathic nature has been helping me more than I ever realized. What I discovered is that having empathy for others and having an understanding of how their lives have their own hurdles, helps me reflect on my own challenges…which often seem trivial in comparison.
I start to see how my life is actually pretty wonderful and my mood swings towards being grateful for my life circumstances. I become happier and my life flows better.
Why did I have this thought today?
I was recently helping a couple who are separated have a discussion about money. They are trying to map out their financial future going forward as single parents, co-parenting their two children.
One parent is re-entering the workforce after a hiatus of six years to look after their young children. The other parent is taking on half of the parenting burden as they switch to a week on/week off parenting schedule.
The parent re-entering the workforce is uncertain of the future and how to cope with starting a new career while maintaining a hint of her prior life as a stay-at-home parent. She is afraid her kids will think she is abandoning them and she also knows she will miss being with them when they are at their dad’s home.
The parent taking on more parenting could not get past the fact that he would still be contributing money to the other parent while looking after their children 50% the time. He thinks he just took on 50% more work without seeing any benefit at all.
As they talked they got more and more entrenched in their individual positions and I could tell they had stopped listening to each other.
As I watched their dialogue deteriorate, I thought about how their inability to see each other’s perspective was hurting each of them. I don’t know what they were feeling, but their language indicated that they were both feeling like the victim in their current situation. I do know that feeling like a victim often leads to feelings of anger and depression. Before I stopped them, they had gotten to the point where they were searching their memories for other instances where each perceived that they had been treated unfairly. Their focus became who had it harder in life.
Now – this couple is very angry with each other, but I kept thinking – wouldn’t it be nice if they could each see each other’s perspective?
What if they both recognized that the other person had similar fears and concerns? Both of them are starting something new and both have fear of the future. If they could each put themselves in the other’s shoes, they would each stop focusing on the negative aspects of their own lives. Instead of using all their emotional resources to shore up their own feelings of hurt, they might start thinking about how the other person had it equally bad and then maybe, just maybe, they might start trying to think up solutions to help the other person.
This would be natural collaboration. And where did this natural collaboration come from? It came from empathy and understanding of the other person.
I realize that with this couple, this is too big a challenge at this point, they dislike each other too much. So that is why I suggested taking a breather from the discussion. Perhaps time and distance will allow their natural empathies to grow and we can get back on the subject of their hopeful futures another day.
by Renee leNobel | Oct 10, 2015 | Divorce
Divorce is usually the end result of a typical progression of circumstances.
It usually goes like this:
- You get married
- You begin navigating your married life with your partner
- You and your partner start experiencing challenging life circumstances
- You and your partner begin to realize you approach life’s challenges differently
- You attempt to negotiate with your partner on how to proceed with your marriage
- Your attempts to get along with your partner fail. (This step can take considerable time and energy)
- You, your partner or both of you decide the next step is a divorce (and by this point, you are both likely emotionally exhausted).
Now comes the hard part. Not to minimize steps 1 through 7, but people often get stuck at step 7. They decide they are done with the marriage but have no idea how to proceed to getting a divorce. It seems so daunting that some people decide to stay in the marriage. Others let the lawyers take over and others try mediation or collaboration. Some others just go their separate ways and stay legally married but live apart.
At step 7, my ex and I tried a little bit of everything. We talked to lawyers, we talked to mediators and then we picked the collaborative approach to divorce because we thought the next step after step 7 was: get a separation agreement. Because you need a separation agreement to get a divorce right? So step 8 must clearly be… get a separation agreement. We picked the collaborative approach to divorce because we wanted to stay out of the court system and the collaborative approach seemed like the best choice.
As noted, both partners are likely emotionally exhausted by the time it gets to the discussion on how to proceed with obtaining a separation agreement and both partners probably do not even feel like discussing it with their respective partner. I don’t think I would be underestimating things if I said that if you are this point, you probably really dislike your partner and do not want to have to work with them at all on anything again. After all, you couldn’t reach agreement in marriage – why should you be able to reach agreement when drafting a separation agreement?
That said, a separation agreement was fixed in my brain and my ex’s as the next step. We started working really hard at getting that agreement. We worked for nine months with our collaborative team to get that agreement. I wanted a separation agreement at all costs because now that I knew we were done, I wanted our divorce all sewed up and sorted. I know my ex did as well. We wanted to know what the rules outlining our lives were going to be so we could start living according to those new sets of rules that would be defined in our separation agreement.
We got our separation agreement. We were done right?
It did not appear that way. We had an agreement but we both had very different understandings of what it said. We spent another three months arguing over what our agreement meant and during that time we made very little progress with implementing any part of our agreement.
Every time we tried to discuss anything in our agreement, I got angry and upset and I know my ex did as well. We often reached deadlock and our conflict levels did not decrease. In fact, we ended up in court because we could not agree over one section of our agreement. What happened? We were supposed to be done once we had our agreement, but here we were in court!
It turns out that just because we had that agreement, that did not mean we were done. We were far from done with each other.
I was not done with my anger and I still could not have a constructive discussion with my ex and judging from some of the emails I was getting from my ex, he was still very angry with me.
This led me to an additional step – step 9: heal myself and let go.
Step 9 took considerable time for me and it involved many different sub-steps.
I am done now with step 9 and the interesting thing about that is that our divorce is finally truly done and over.
Many people had tried to advise me to do step 9 first and I just wasn’t able to at that time but now I wonder if it might have been a better progression. If I had been in a better emotional space (and ditto for my ex) we would have been able to listen to each other and understand each other. Our separation agreement would have been a better representation of what we both understood it to be.
I’m not sure it’s possible for most people to heal themselves before entering the process of getting a separation agreement. I would like to think with hindsight I would choose a different way if I could do it again, but I know at that time, I wanted a separation agreement at all costs.
Where are you in the process and what steps are you deciding to take?
by Renee leNobel | Sep 30, 2015 | Divorce
When I realized my marriage was over, one of the first things I started thinking about was how my life was going to change and not only change, but change for the worse. Everything was going to be harder. I was becoming a single parent for half my waking hours and I was starting that journey with drastically reduced financial circumstances. These thoughts were part of the reason why I had tried to make my marriage work for so long – it just seemed easier to try to hold things together than to start again with an entirely different set of harder circumstances.
I was heading into my divorce when a huge amount of fear and uncertainty. I also felt like everyone else: my ex, my lawyer and the overarching rules of society that define how a divorce must happen, were now controlling my life. I had no say in how my life would be from here on in.
I began to operate on automatic pilot and tried to do everything as quickly as I could to get through the entire divorce process.
I drove myself through our divorce process without every taking a time out to figure out what I wanted. We used the Collaborative Approach to divorce and after five meetings we had a draft separation agreement and were essentially done. The reason it took five months was because we could only have one four way legal meeting per month. We could not go any faster because it is challenging to book three to four hour sessions with four people (me, my ex and our respective lawyers) and their busy schedules. Our lawyers tried to get us to talk about what was important to us but I mostly thought to myself: “let’s get on with it!, can we stop talking about needs and values now?”
Then I entered a six week back to work program designed to help women find work. Again, I thought to myself as we worked through the first part of the program where we had to do endless self-analysis: “Can we get on with it? I need to write my resume.”
And then I was done. My divorce was finalized and I had my resume in hand.
But I was no closer to knowing what I wanted. I was still operating on fear and I still thought the best part of my life was behind me.
And nothing in my life appeared to be working. I was not getting a job. I was sending resumes off into what appeared to be the void as I heard absolutely nothing back from anyone. I was stuck, I was scared and I was unhappy.
Things did not begin working in my life until I took time to figure out what was important to me. Yes, I went on that mid-life crisis soul searching bender because I got to a point where fear would not drive me forward anymore. I had gotten to the point where fear immobilized me.
Figuring out what drives you is a journey and it never stops but about six months into my quest to discover what would get me happy again, I had a list of my seven core values (I’m a type A accountant – I like my lists) that I posted up on my wall.
What I have discovered is that list is very handy in making decisions in my life. It is especially handy for making money decisions. My list of values helped me determine how I am going to earn my money and how I am going to spend it.
If you are finding it challenging to make decisions around money, the way out is to do some good old navel gazing. Because if you know yourself, it’s not hard to know when making a spending choice does not work for you and it becomes a no-brainer when it does.
by Renee leNobel | Sep 15, 2015 | Divorce, Finances, Parenting
When I was growing up, I was always told that I was responsible for paying for my own university education. My parents wanted me to go to university, but they also wanted me to start learning how to be financially independent. Actually, I’m not sure if it was a conscious decision on their part to make me financially independent or just how they did things. Both my parents had to pay for their own postsecondary education (and my dad had to sell his beloved 57 Chevrolet Belair to finance his education). There could have been a touch of martyrdom – “I had to sacrifice certain things – i.e. my beloved car, so so do you.”
I lived at home with my parents when I went to the local university and I paid my tuition out of the summer jobs I held. My parents did help me out. They paid for half a car and the related car insurance every year I went to school and of course I saved considerably by living at home.
So when I tend to think about my kids going to university, I don’t feel like it is my obligation to pay for them. That said, things are considerably more expensive these days. My tuition was $2,000 per year at the local university and these days it is $10,000 per year. I know that the minimum wage that my 17 year old self earned during the summer has not kept pace with this increase in tuition. Also, I always felt like I missed out on some valuable life experience by living at home. So I’m wavering on the idea of making my kids fund their own education and have started to think I would try to support my kids if I could. However, I did think it was my choice to support them at the postsecondary level.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that a friend was still paying child support for a stepdaughter who was 28 years old. I was amazed to learn that parents are financially responsible for children that are pursuing their first university degree and are unmarried – regardless of how old they are!
This information got reinforced when I was going through my own divorce and my lawyer explained that the obligation to pay child support ceases in respect of a child who:
(a) marries,
(b) becomes self-supporting, or
(c) becomes 19 years old, unless the child remains a “child of the marriage” within the meaning of the Divorce Act because of inability to become self-supporting due to illness, disability, the pursuit of education, or other cause.
I find this interesting. By divorcing your partner, you in fact have a greater financial obligation to your children than if you stayed married. If your child decides he or she is going to university, then both parents are obliged to pay under the Child Support Provisions of the Divorce Act.
If parents stay together, they can simply band together to tell their child: “sorry – you’re an adult, fend for yourself.” This is no longer a choice if parents are divorced.
I can see why this law is in place. I have a friend who has two university aged children. Her ex-spouse encouraged her children to go to a university far from their home town and then he refused to pay for it. She has financed her daughter’s (who is in her final year at university) entire education and the only financial help my friend received is help from her daughter. She has been working with the justice system that is in place since her daughter first embarked on her university degree three years ago and so far despite getting decisions in her favour (the judge has repeatedly stated that her children’s father must help fund the children’s education), my friend has not received any money. She is hopeful that by the time her son is ready to graduate university (in three more years), she will get some money from their father.
So despite the fact that the law states both parents are on the hook to support their children during their postsecondary years, it is often a battle to implement this and it has taken considerable work and time on my friend’s part. She is extremely frustrated with the entire process.
To prevent getting into this type of situation, I recommend communication. Communication with your spouse, with your children and with yourself. Discuss what you envision with your spouse regarding your children’s future education. If you are getting divorced, then ensure that there are clear guidelines about financing your children’s postsecondary education in your separation agreement. Ensure the wording is clear and the arrangement for determining amounts to be financed are clear. Much of the time and energy my friend has spent has been in determining what amounts are to be split by the parents and how to track and account for those amounts. If there is nothing regarding postsecondary education in your separation agreement, start thinking about how you can bring this topic up with your ex before your children have their hearts set on going to a university far from home.
If it seems like your co-parent is not on board with sharing costs of a postsecondary education then you need to have a good long talk with yourself about whether you can fund it on your own or whether you need to start helping your children adjust their expectations about what postsecondary education is going to look like for them.
If you decide you are going to fund your children’s education because it is important to you, then you need to look at your financial situation to see if this is a possibility and if it is not, how you can make it one.
by Renee leNobel | Sep 10, 2015 | Divorce, Parenting
I keep a file with half started blog posts and today I was searching around for a post to finalize and I opened this one: “Working From Home with Kids” and surprise surprise, it was blank.
I think that says it all.
It is challenging to work from home when your kids are home with you. I keep thinking I should be able to be more productive as my kids generally have nothing to do with me anymore, they go for long stretches doing their own thing, so why do I not have long productive work stretches?
I realize that I’m on constant alert when the kids are with me and I’m the sole caregiver. When I became a mother, biology kicked in and it suddenly seemed as if danger was everywhere. As my kids got older, some dangers disappeared but others surfaced to take their place. The danger these days is that my kids will kill each other when they get into a fight. Logically, I don’t think this will really happen, but my mom biology will just not let me get immersed in my work.
So even though the kids are up in their room, my mind is focussed half on my immediate circumstances and half on being “on guard.” My eyes in the back of my head are in the switched on position. In fact, there is also a touch of anxiety in my stomach that makes me even less productive than normal.
What I have discovered is that I can do low level mental acuity work. I can do things that I’ve done before and could do with my eyes closed. Bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, data entry, yup – can do that.
Talking to a new client about what I do and what they need? I tried that, it was like texting while driving.
Writing a new blog post from scratch? My brain needs more time and space to be creative.
But hey wait a minute. I seem to have just done it.
Where are the kids? It’s awfully quiet in here.
Time to go check on them.
—
The kids were fine – and I’m finally finishing this post two weeks later when I have time on my own (the kids are back in school). It’s true that I have to have uninterrupted time to do anything new and challenging. Unfortunately, this was driven home to me this past few weeks while the kids were on summer holidays.
So how do I get that uninterrupted time? I could stick them in front of the TV and I could lock them in their respective rooms, but those solutions are less than ideal and seem to lead to increased anxiety in the pit of my stomach. They got a lot of screen time this past week and I still got low level work done.
What I need to do is plan better and adjust my expectations. At the beginning of the summer, I was concerned that I would only have the kids for half a summer because they were spending the other half with their dad. I thought I would have so much time without them to get work done and I wanted to hoard the time I did have with them by not committing to day camps for the kids that would take them away from me. What I do need to realise is that I cannot truly work effectively while the kids are at home with me and if I try do so, it just leads to anxiety for me (and my kids).
The added bonus of my new understanding is that it will now be much easier for me to be grateful when the kids are with their dad. I never thought it would happen, I thought I would be sad forever, but I am slowly adjusting to having the kids with me for half their lives.
by Renee leNobel | Aug 27, 2015 | Divorce
Are you in the middle of a Transition Day?. Perhaps you feel like ?
There are two types of transition days. The ones where the kids leave to go stay with their other parent and the ones where the kids come back to you.
Let’s deal with the leaving days first…
The first thing to do is ensure your remaining minutes before saying goodbye to your kids are positive. Minutes? Yes, minutes. This is your first challenge, and it is a challenge. Getting your kids packed up and ready to go to the other parent’s house is stressful and added to that, kids rarely (in my experience) cooperate when getting ready. It is hard to remain calm when your kid won’t stop what they are doing to put their shoes on and it is made doubly hard when you would rather they weren’t leaving at all.
So how do you stay calm and not have your remaining minutes with the kids be ones that are filled with yelling? Practice. Practice telling yourself that this a hard situation you are in and practice giving yourself a break if you do yell. Apologise to your child if you yell and tell them why. Then remember to say you love them and that you will see them soon. Then remind yourself that you will get many more times to practice this skill and with time it will get better.
As you are getting your child ready to go to the other parent’s house, be aware of that feeling that may be rising in you that is going to lead to yelling. This is an opportunity to remind yourself that the kids are leaving soon and it doesn’t matter if they forget stuff or are late. It’s also a good time to remember that your kids are smart and this is a perfect opportunity for them to learn about natural consequences. You can help remind them about what they will need, you can help them pack and you can be waiting for them outside for when they are ready to go. Sit down and take deep breaths while you wait.
Establish a rule with your children that they must always look you in the eye to say goodbye. There is nothing worse than having your child run off without looking back when you get to the destination, whether they leave right from your home or a place you drive them to. You do not want your last memory before a 2, 4 day or even a week long stretch without your kids to be the back of your child’s head sprinting away from you as you think to yourself – “I didn’t even get to say goodbye! What if something happens to one of us!”
Then your kids are gone – you may have to be somewhere or not. You may have decided to fill up your time so you don’t think about your missing child or you may have excess time on your hands now that they are gone. If you have excess time, you may find grief starts to seep in. Allow the grief in and sit with it for a while. Powering through an emotion or burying it will mean you never learn to deal with it. Instead, if you face it head on and give yourself a break for being sad, you will find that eventually, with time, these grief periods will get shorter in duration.
Then remind yourself that it will never go according to plan. Things happen, so don’t beat yourself up if the plan you made for “how things are now going to be next time the kids leave” does not go the way you envisioned. After all, you made that plan when the kids weren’t with you and the push and pull of a relationship with kids never goes according to your plans.
That said, don’t give up on making those plans because eventually over time parts of them will begin to creep in (in a good way), to your transition days.
