by Renee leNobel | Nov 20, 2023 | Divorce, Parenting
Does salary level determine the worthiness of a job or a person?
Most of us would say “NO WAY!” including myself, yet actions and behaviour speak louder than words.
When I was earning a decent salary (actually, some would have probably considered 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; therefore, my work was worthy, and by default, I was too.
Then I became a stay-at-home mom, and we all know how much we stay-at-home parents get paid, and 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 during the year to guarantee that I would get parental leave benefits when my second child was born.
Now that I think about it, it is 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 are 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 working at a job that benefited anyone other than me.
As time went by and my kids got older (four years old and two years old), my justification for staying at 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 overall household, which I began to obsess over almost daily.
The first question out of my spouse’s mouth, when he got home from work, was, “What did you do today?” although he may not have been looking for proof that I had worked, I had my list at the ready to prove I had not been surfing the web all day. My husband didn’t have to justify his actions because he brought home a paycheque every two weeks that confirmed he was working and contributing.
To make myself feel more justified in what I was doing, I decided I could live with less “fun” funds than my husband. I cut my leisure spending to one-third of my husband’s.
It is funny what my pay cut did to our family dynamic. I didn’t need that extra money, but in a sense, I had just taken a notional pay cut, which further minimized my mental worth. My relationship with my spouse was becoming more unbalanced – we were no longer equal in my eyes or his.
At that point, my husband and I had monetary proof that my job wasn’t as worthy as his.
This concept carried over into our divorce process. There was limited discussion about how I contributed to the household; my contribution was glossed over, and the main discussion 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 had been on a lark, 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 was not.
So, if you are considering becoming a stay-at-home parent, I strongly encourage you to set up your finances as follows:
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 pay half of the joint family expenses, and you each pay for your personal spending from your remaining funds.
If you are about to become a stay-at-home parent, I encourage you to discuss a financial arrangement with your spouse before your baby is born. If you discover that your spouse does not support a proposal like the one I recommend above, you may have some talking to do with each other. It’s better to find this out before you give up your career to focus on a dead-end, unpaid job as a stay-at-home parent.
If your spouse supports this financial treatment, you will know that your spouse considers it a worthy endeavour – its worthiness is supported by the fact that you earn money to do the job. Despite the saying that money does not define the worthiness of jobs or people, actions and behaviour speak louder than words.
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 | 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?
by Renee leNobel | Jan 27, 2016 | Finances
Do you have your own business? Are you contemplating starting your own business? I recommend you think about putting structures into place to maintain work-life balance.
Or not.
Yeah, I’m conflicted about this. I love my job. I love it so much that other things have basically flown out the window. Today someone asked me what my hobbies are. Hobbies? Uh…I guess work does not count? I was too embarrassed to admit that Netflix is a hobby. I felt bad all afternoon as I have no hobbies anymore!
When I couldn’t come up with hobbies, I started to beat myself up more. How did this happen? How did I become a workaholic when in my prior life I had the tag phrase: “Renee, the only thing she is passionate about is her leisure time?”
One of the main things that happened is that I started to practice gratitude. When I look at my life now, I look at everything that I am grateful for. When you spend your day thinking about how grateful you are to have the work that you are doing, it suddenly takes on a different hue. You want to be doing it.
I also feel like I have chosen all my work. No one is making me do it.
But there is something else. A sole proprietor who works from home has no clear divides between when the working day starts and when it ends. As soon as you get up and are awake, you are potentially at work.
A friend put it to me this way:
The difference between someone that works a nine to five job and a sole proprietor is that the person who works nine to five has clearly defined non working hours that they do not get paid for but the sole proprietor can work anytime and anywhere. As there are no clear “personal life hours” it is easy to slide into a pattern where you simply work if you have nothing else going on. Especially if you love it!
I have discovered that I do everything that I need to get done in my life (feed the kids, do laundry, shop) and the time that is not spent taking care of kids and household, I spend on work. If nothing is scheduled, I start working.
So as much as I like my work, I recognize that not having some other interests could potentially lead to burnout and general unhealthiness as I sit in front of my computer all day.
I’ve come to the conclusion that as a sole proprietor or entrepreneur, one has to schedule leisure time. Simply having free time does not work. It is like a vacuum into which work rushes in.
Time to book that weekly exercise class. To ensure I go, I’ll pay up front. Accountants hate wasting money!
I have decided. I need to start scheduling my time off. Just like you have to be sitting at your desk as an employee for certain hours, I will have to create a non-work schedule and punch the old in and out timecard to make sure I adhere to it.
by Renee leNobel | Jan 10, 2016 | Divorce
I have a good friend who is very insightful and she has done it again. She has inspired this week’s post.
We hadn’t talked in awhile and we started talking about how we are each doing in life. She has Lupus – a chronic inflammatory disease that occurs when your body’s immune system attacks your own tissues and organs and I have an ex. Now it wasn’t me that made this connection, she did. She said “Renee, your ex is like a chronic disease you have no control over. Just like a disease that flares up unexpectedly in life, so does your ex.”
He has recently “flared up” as she so succinctly put it.
Another friend noted that ex flare ups tend to happen around stressful times of the year, birthdays, Christmas… yup, right again.
I especially liked the part where she said I have no control over it, just like she has no control over when her Lupus hits.
Now, some people might object to this comparison because after all I made the choice of marrying my ex and it really is only my perception that he is flaring up. It’s simply a matter of opinion that something he has said or done is stressful to me. That is the difference here. It is mostly my reaction to my ex that causes me stress and pain whereas with my friend, her lupus is a concrete disease that she has to deal with.
That said, she has noticed that if she modifies her diet and tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle, it helps decrease the severity of her Lupus flare ups. I too have implemented strategies that prevent severe reactions to ex flare ups.
I have cut back on coffee (sigh), I exercise (well, not lately, but that’s my goal) and I have built my ex flare up response system.
My ex flare ups come on suddenly. Out of nowhere. They are infrequent but severe. I don’t see them coming. They just hit.
Now I don’t know what my friend does when a severe Lupus flare up occurs, but I have learned what to do when an extreme ex flare up hits as even though I don’t know when it is coming, I have lived through enough that I have had to develop a strategy.
The first thing I do is dump my first knee jerk emotional response into an email (making sure I remove his address first). I put in everything that is upsetting me at that very moment. I go for it. Then I hit SEND and send it to my dummy email account. I’m not sure how it works, but it calms me down.
Then I give myself time. I don’t run off to my support network to scream about the latest outrage being perpetrated by the ex (well, not for a few days anyway as I guess this blog post did come out of talking, ahem, ranting, to my network).
I take deep breaths, I meditate and I practice gratitude and remind myself that the future never turns out the way I imagine and certainly not the worst case scenario that I tend to gravitate towards in my thoughts.
Now, all these strategies don’t make the flare up go away but they do alleviate some of the symptoms such as lack of sleep and extreme grumpiness.
These strategies also get me to the best mood for dealing with my ex. Before managing myself, I would tend to fight or avoid my ex, but after time I get back to understanding I need to collaborate with my ex.
Because fighting it just exacerbates the flare up and avoiding it, well, that just puts me in into a waiting and apprehensive state.
So I sent my ex and email and proposed we talk in person with some collaborative ground rules set in place.
After a series of meetings and conversations, the flare up has subsided. We have settled back into a good routine and I will continue to work on strategies to decrease the frequency of ex flare ups in the future.
