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.
by Renee leNobel | Aug 18, 2015 | Divorce
I often wonder if there are other parents out there like me. I start wondering it about five minutes after dropping my kids off at school. Day one of five days they are with their dad on our 2255 parenting schedule. Are there other parents out there that know what a 2255 parenting schedule means? I have yet to meet them and when I explain it to intact families, their eyes glaze over and say “how do you keep track of that? Oh, we have a shared Google Calendar, but I don’t need it. I know when my kids are coming back and I know when they are going to be leaving. I wish I didn’t know as both the anticipation of their return and the dread of their leaving wreaks havoc on my day. I call the days that lie on either side of the day my kids come and go “Transition Days” and it seems like every other day is a Transition Day.
I am always surprised by the waves of sadness that overtake me. Just thirty minutes earlier as I hustled the kids into the car I was feeling annoyed because they weren’t getting their school bags or putting their shoes on. The night before I was exhausted after a day spent as an accountant in the final days of tax season and as a single parent whose two rambunctious sons would not get ready for bed. My six year old son had stayed up until 10 pm and wanted me to sleep with him, likely because he sensed the emotions running high in the house but I needed some alone time to recharge after a long day. Oh the irony. I would be having five days of alone time starting in twelve hours. So he fell asleep on the couch in the room next to where I was watching TV and I carried his sweet sleeping person up to bed and tried to hold onto the feeling of having my son in my arms because I knew it would be gone the next day.
I have learned to schedule things for the time that my kids are gone, but I can’t schedule all of it. After all, I am single now and when the kids are gone I put myself to bed and wake up alone. Today I’m meeting a friend fairly early. She is going to text me just after 8 am, but I wake up at 6 am and the silence of the house reminds me that my kids are not here. It seems small, crowded and messy when the kids are here but when they are gone, I basically live in one room and even that seems too big.
So it is impossible to not be alone when my kids are gone. I try to think of many of my friends who tell me that they would kill to have the chance to sleep in and do what they wanted for the day. I try to remind myself of how just yesterday I was trying to fade into the background at home so my kids would forget I was there and not demand that I play Crazy Eights with them. I also know that my kids are happy with their dad and taken care of, not to my standard of course, but then, they are getting a different experience of how to live with their dad and more ways of seeing how the world works can only help them.
But my waking and going to sleep thoughts always bring me back to how I have my children in my life for a short time which has been shortened again by half and then the sadness overtakes me. I wonder if it will ever go away. Perhaps I will simply have to manage my grief until that time my kids are older and would be leaving the nest anyway. Maybe by then, the sadness will leave me.
by Renee leNobel | Aug 7, 2015 | Divorce
When you think of your life up until this point does it make you happy or do you focus on the negative aspects of your past and use it as an excuse to stop moving forward?
How we view the past often depends on how we perceive our present life. If you are living with challenging circumstances, it is hard not to let your current situation influence your thoughts about the past, present and future.
When I was going through my divorce I was looking for proof of how I had gotten to that point. In the thick of my divorce process, every memory of shared moments with my ex took on a negative hue. I would mine my memories for proof that I was never meant to marry that person. Then I would beat myself up for having been so stupid. Clearly, every memory indicated that we were not supposed to be together – how could it have taken me 20 years to realise this? So I decided to try not to think about it at all.
As I had shared 20 years of my life with this person, I wiped out a good chunk of happy memories. In addition, I reasoned that childhood had led me to my partner of 20 years and so I wrote my childhood memories off as well. My life path had led me to one big point of failure – divorce. Failure kept going through my brain. All I had left was one failed marriage, no career and unhappy kids.
People and self-help books advised me to remember the good moments I had shared with my ex, to hopefully prevent me from what I was doing which was allowing my past to overshadow my present and future. Because that is what I was doing; I was projecting my past into my future and that was stopping me in my tracks. What was the point of having a future that looked like my very unhappy past?
My coach helped me find a way out of these circular and self-defeating thoughts and she did this by helping me change my thoughts about the present.
My coach first told me that it wasn’t my life that had failed. It was simply my relationship with one person. Then she helped me define what success means to me and helped me find proof that I had succeeded according to my own terms of success.
After that, my past started to take on a different hue. I was now focussing on how I had succeeded in life according to my own definition of success. Once I started to see how I had in fact succeeded, my coach pointed out that my past had gotten me to where I was. All those things I perceived as mistakes were actually lessons designed specifically for me to get me closer to what I wanted out of life.
This was by no means a quick fix. It took time and practice.
But the recipe is clear. Look for success in your present life and the positive evidence you find will carry back to your past memories and forward into your hopeful future.
by Renee leNobel | Aug 6, 2015 | Finances
Step 1 – Identify Your Financial Personality and Spending Habits
What is the dream you have that money will serve?
Answering this question for yourself will go a long way to self-awareness about your values and beliefs around money.
Everyone is unique and has different values and beliefs concerning money. In addition, we are all brought up with different levels of financial literacy. The interaction between personality and the environment we are brought up in leads to specific financial personalities. It is important to know yourself and understand what issues around money you bring to the relationship.
Our personal beliefs and values drive our spending. To understand your spending habits, you therefore need to know your values. There are a number of free online personality tests out there that can help us get to know ourselves. Meditation also leads to a greater level of self-awareness.
To gain an understanding of your spending habits, you will need to start tracking your spending. This is where a number of people get stuck. You can first try yourself to do this but if you continue to put it off, then it might be a good idea to find someone to help you with this. There are a number of free websites and phone apps that will help you track your spending. Note that tracking your spending is not a quick project. To get a good understanding of what you spend your money, it is good to track your spending for at least six months. With time you come to understand the link between your spending habits and your personal values.
Step 2 – Talk with Your Partner
Once you have self-awareness around your financial personality and spending habits, you will want to talk about it with your partner. It is important that you both go into the meeting truly believing that neither one of you is controlling the agenda. Therefore, when you schedule the meeting, you will need to give your partner an idea of what you want to talk about and you will want to keep the topic as neutral sounding as possible. Better yet, your partner will already know because they have been tracking their own spending as you have.
If this is something you’ve taken on on your own, then here is a potential conversation starter:
“I would like to talk to you about household finances. I want to find out what is important to you and share what is important for me so our relationship can move forward successfully.”
Now don’t expect this to go over completely smoothly with your partner. We are trained from infant-hood and are biologically wired to see danger and conflict in even the most innocent sounding statements. Reassure your partner that you truly want the conversation to be collaborative and neutral.
You want to share what you are like with your partner and you want them to be open and share as well. This needs to be a non-judgmental process. If you are already knee deep in relationship woes because you are a different financial personality from your partner, you can still rescue your relationship by taking this step and it is really important that this discussion takes place on neutral ground at a an agreed upon time that is booked in advance. If this discussion at any point starts to get heated, then stop and make an appointment for another day. I also suggest you limit your talk to 45 minutes. Sometimes if you go too long you can go off track. If you don’t finish discussing everything within 45 minutes, schedule another meeting. In fact, it is a good idea to have regularly scheduled meetings. You can decide together the frequency of meetings that works best for your relationship.
Topics to talk about:
What you spend money on
What you absolutely must spend money on in order to feel life is worthwhile
How much money you need in the bank to feel safe
What you are willing to forgo spending money on to keep your relationship positive.
Do not state what you think is dumb to spend money on – this is not being non-judgmental and will shut down communication in about two seconds flat.
That should about cover it. Now you can see how easy it is to discuss and plan as opposed to having a relationship meltdown because you didn’t take these easy steps!
by Renee leNobel | Jul 31, 2015 | Divorce
I had an uncomfortable conversation with a friend last night. She is in the middle of a very bitter divorce and she is feeling fearful of the outcome which will be decided by a judge.
A brief history of her situation.
Let’s call her Sara. Sara is getting divorced from her husband. They have two young children and she has been the main breadwinner in their family although her husband has been working in a less lucrative career.
I had always assumed that Sara loved her job. She is outwardly successful, very outgoing and has a good group of friends that she both works with and socialises with. Last night I found out that I had made a wrong assumption. Sara does not love her job and has really only stayed in it to support her family. Her dream is to start up her own company but she now feels like she can’t because the court will perceive that she is simply attempting to get out of her obligation to pay spousal support and child support.
Then she went further and talked about how her ex has been purposely underemployed for years (he stepped away from a well paying job to start his own business just before the kids were born) and it is his obligation to go back to a job that he is perfectly capable of doing and that pays more than his current situation.
Essentially, what she was saying is that it is naive to think we can all follow our dreams. Our discussion got a little bit heated and she stated at one point “everyone has to work, it’s just a rule of society.” The other thought behind her comment was that everyone has to take the best paying job they can get even if they are not happy. Sara’s ex is currently choosing to be underemployed and she has to bear the brunt of his choice. She has to stay in a job she doesn’t like because the rules of society say so.
After my discussion with Sara I thought about everything she had said. I was rather upset about a number of things which I will refer to as Sara’s rules:
The first rule: everyone has to suck it up and take the highest paying job they are capable of if they have kids and responsibilities. To do otherwise is flaky and selfish.
The second rule: work generally sucks. Everyone would rather retire if they could. Within this rule is a sub-rule. If you like what you’re doing, it’s not work.
The third rule: life is inherently unfair. Simply because Sara held the higher paying job at the time of her separation from her husband, she would forever have to pay child support and spousal support based on that situation.
I must say our conversation kept me up last night. I immediately got defensive and I lay there in bed coming up with arguments against the rules. Thank goodness that when I finally fell asleep my brain let those arguments go and gave me some better thoughts for when I woke up.
The first thing that my brain reminded me was that defensiveness keeps us locked into buying into made up rules and opinions. Because I was putting up opposing arguments to Sara’s rules, I was turning them into facts instead of just one person’s opinions. I was holding Sara’s arguments out as truth and was trying to pick holes in them. Instead, I now recognize that her rules are just one person’s opinion (and yes, I would say her rules are the prevalent opinions in society). They are opinions based in fear and the worst case scenario. They are not the default outcome for Sara’s life. They are outcomes that likely have a higher probability of occurring. Especially if Sara resigns herself to the fact that these rules are true and that life is unfair.
This led me to the second thought which was that Sara’s ideas are keeping her trapped.
It appears to me that Sara has given up on her dreams. She is hiding behind these rules she has created for herself; she has turned her rules into hard and fast facts of the world that she has no control over.
So I’m going to call Sara back. I want to hold out her rules for her to see and I’m going to ask her if they are the ones she wants to live by.
Instead, I hope Sara agrees to letting me help her find out what drives her and what gives her hope. I will help her get clarity about where she is in life from a financial perspective and from a personal values perspective. Then I’m hoping Sara will see that she does have choice in her life and it is not these rules that she has created for herself and bought into that are controlling the outcome of her life.
