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.

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.

How do You Know When to Pull the Plug on Your Marriage?

by | Sep 13, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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The Two Fears That Almost Kept Me Married

When do you decide to give up on a marriage, actually call it quits, and ask for a divorce?

I ask because I honestly don’t know the answer. I never made that decision myself; my ex made it for both of us. Left to my own devices, I probably would have stayed until death do us part. I have a high tolerance for pain, and I’ve always preferred trying to fix things over walking away from them. I still want an answer, even though I’m slowly learning there isn’t a clean one, which is basically why I’m writing this at all. When do you actually call it quits?

Put another way: what’s actually stopping you from initiating a divorce, if part of you wants to?

From what I’ve seen, mostly fear. Two fears in particular tend to do the heaviest lifting: money and the kids.

Let’s take them head-on.

Fear One: You’ll Be Much Worse Off Financially

Being poor was one of my fears too. Combined, my husband and I could live comfortably in an expensive city on one income. Divorced, that math falls apart. I’d need a job, we’d need childcare, we’d need to split assets and fund two households instead of one. Both our standards of living would drop. That was a genuinely depressing thought, enough on its own to keep divorce off the table. I’d rather be unhappy and financially stable than happy and broke, or so I believed at the time.

My divorce happened anyway, and yes, my net worth dropped. My cash flow took a real hit. That brought real anxiety with it. I used to build monthly budgets just to confirm, yet again, that there wasn’t enough coming in to cover what was going out, which only fed the anxiety further, until I finally made the connection that stressing myself into a spiral wasn’t actually accomplishing anything.

Eventually I realized I’d always managed, one way or another. I cut my spending, found ways to bring in more money, made decisions, and kept moving forward in a direction that matched what I wanted for my life. For some people that means earning more. For others, it means spending less. Either way, there’s usually a path through.

Three years out, I can say plainly: being happier on my own is worth far more than what the divorce cost me financially.

Fear Two: The Kids Will Suffer

I’d been the primary caregiver for our two kids, four and six at the time we separated. I genuinely couldn’t picture their dad managing them alone for half their lives. Surely they’d go unfed, unbathed, put to bed late, and laundry would pile up forever. And beyond the logistics: my kids wouldn’t be with me for half their lives. They were four and six. They needed their mother. I needed them. They were, in a lot of ways, my whole purpose.

To be clear, my kids wanted us to stay together. My youngest once cooked up a plan where I’d rent an apartment in the same building as his dad, so we could live down the hall from each other. Adjusting to only having one parent around at a time was hard on them at first. But they adjusted. Honestly, it wasn’t even that different from before; my ex and I had barely occupied the same room together for the two years leading up to our separation anyway. They still have to manage two different sets of house rules, switching gears twice a week, but that’s just life. We all have to manage shifting expectations across different parts of our lives, jobs, family, everything. Kids of divorce just get more practice at it earlier than most.

It was harder on us, the parents, I think. I missed my kids desperately for a full three years after the divorce; I have the blog posts to prove it. It took my mom asking me this past summer, while the kids were away for their two-week stretch with their dad, “Do you miss your kids?” for me to actually notice something had shifted. I said, “No, I don’t miss them,” and then really sat with what I’d just said. The old version of me would have felt like a traitor for saying that out loud, wondering what kind of mother doesn’t miss her kids. Instead, I recognized it for what it actually was: a real milestone, for me, for their dad, and for them.

It took three years to build a life that could actually make me happy while my kids were away, and three years to genuinely trust they’d be fine with their dad. What I’ve come to believe, in that time, is that kids do better with two parents who are both actually capable of caring for them. Yes, it takes more coordination, and the back-and-forth between households is tiring, sometimes a little painful. But now they have two parents who can feed them, get them to school, sign them up for activities, and arrange their own plans. Two parents genuinely involved in their lives. I probably still do more, if I’m honest, but their dad is doing far more than he ever did while we were together. If we’d stayed married, I’d likely still be doing everything, and he’d likely still be on the sidelines. Now I have my own life, and a life as a mom, both. Time for my own things, my own work, my own growth, alongside real trust that my kids are being cared for by someone who loves them. That’s a genuinely good outcome.

It took three years to get here, though. Three years to understand that their dad does love them, and that doing things differently than I would isn’t the same as doing them worse. It’s just different. How do you even judge what good parenting looks like? The best I’ve landed on: a good parent is someone who loves their kids and is genuinely trying to do right by them.

Three years out, the fears that kept me in my marriage turned out to be mostly unfounded. I’m grateful my ex worked through his own version of those same fears and finally ended things. The marriage had run its course. We were done. We’re better for being divorced.

Divorced and Still on the Hook

by | Sep 15, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Divorced and still on the hook

Growing up, I was always told I’d be responsible for paying my own way through university. My parents wanted me to go, but they also wanted me to learn financial independence early. I’m honestly not sure if that was a deliberate philosophy or just how things had always been done in the family; both of my parents had paid their own way through school too, and my dad had sold his beloved ’57 Chevy Bel Air to cover his tuition. There might have been a little martyrdom baked in: I sacrificed my car, so you can sacrifice too.

I lived at home during university and paid tuition out of my summer job earnings. My parents helped some, covering half a car and its insurance for the years I was in school, and living at home saved me a considerable amount on its own.

So when I think about my own kids and university, I don’t automatically feel obligated to fund it. That said, things cost a lot more now. My tuition ran about $2,000 a year. Today it’s closer to ten thousand, and minimum wage hasn’t come close to keeping pace with that jump. I’ve also always felt like I missed out on something by staying home for school. So I’ve been going back and forth, leaning more toward wanting to help fund my kids’ education if I can, while still believing that support at that stage is a choice, not an obligation.

Then I learned something that reframed the whole question. A friend of mine was still paying child support for a stepdaughter in her late twenties. It turns out parents remain financially responsible for a child pursuing their first university degree, unmarried, essentially regardless of age.

That got confirmed again during my own divorce, when my lawyer walked me through it directly: under the Divorce Act, child support obligations end when a child marries, becomes self-supporting, or turns nineteen, unless that child remains a “child of the marriage” because they’re unable to become self-supporting due to illness, disability, pursuing an education, or another qualifying reason.

Here’s the interesting part: divorcing your spouse can actually leave you with a greater ongoing financial obligation to your kids than staying married would have. Married parents can simply agree together that their adult child is on their own now. Divorced parents, if a child chooses university, generally can’t make that same call unilaterally.

I understand why the law exists. I’ve seen how badly things can go without it: a parent encourages the kids toward a school far from home, then refuses to help pay once they’re there, leaving the other parent to fund the bulk of it alone, occasionally with some help from the kids themselves. I’ve watched a situation like this play out over several years, court decisions repeatedly siding with the parent seeking support, and payment still not materializing. The frustration of getting a ruling in your favour and still not seeing the money is its own particular kind of exhausting.

Even with the law clearly on your side, enforcing it can turn into a long, draining process. Much of the difficulty lies in the details: figuring out exactly what amounts should be split and tracking and accounting for them over years.

The way to avoid landing there yourself is communication, early and often. Talk to your spouse about what you both envision for your kids’ education. If you’re separating, get clear, specific language about postsecondary funding written directly into your agreement, not vague gestures at “supporting education,” but actual clarity on amounts and how they’ll be calculated and tracked. If your current agreement is silent on this, start that conversation with your co-parent now, ideally before your kids have already set their hearts on a school far from home.

If your co-parent genuinely isn’t on board with sharing the cost, that’s worth a hard, honest conversation with yourself: can you fund it alone, or do you need to start helping your kids adjust their expectations of what this stage of their life is actually going to look like?

And if you do decide funding their education matters enough to you to do it regardless, take a real look at your financial situation to see whether it’s actually possible, and if it’s not yet, what would need to change to get there.