Step 9

by | Oct 10, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Step 9

Divorce is usually the end result of a fairly typical progression:

  1. You get married.
  2. You begin navigating married life together.
  3. You and your partner start facing real challenges.
  4. You realize you approach those challenges differently.
  5. You try to negotiate a way through it together.
  6. That negotiation fails, sometimes slowly, over a long stretch of time.
  7. One or both of you decide the marriage is over. By now you’re both emotionally exhausted.

Then comes the hard part. People often get stuck right at step 7. They know the marriage is done but have no idea what to actually do next. It can feel so daunting that some people just stay married anyway. Others hand it entirely to lawyers. Some try mediation or the Collaborative Approach. Others simply live apart while staying legally married.

At step 7, my ex and I tried a bit of everything. Lawyers, mediators, and eventually we landed on the Collaborative Approach, because we figured the obvious next step, step 8, had to be getting a separation agreement. You need one to get divorced, after all. We wanted to stay out of court, and Collaborative seemed like the best route there.

By this point in the process, both partners are usually running on empty, and neither one particularly wants to sit down and hash things out with the person they can barely stand at that moment. It’s a fair bet that if you’ve reached this stage, you dislike your spouse enough that working with them on anything feels unbearable. You couldn’t agree inside the marriage. Why would drafting its ending go any better?

Still, the separation agreement had lodged itself in both our heads as the obvious next milestone. We worked hard at it, nine months with our Collaborative team. I wanted that agreement at almost any cost, because once I knew we were done, I needed the whole thing sewn up and settled. My ex wanted the same. We both wanted a rulebook that would define how our new lives would work.

We got our agreement. Done, right?

Not even close. We had a document, but two very different understandings of what it actually said. We spent another three months arguing over its meaning and made almost no progress actually implementing any of it.

Every time we tried to work through a section, I’d get angry, and I know he did too. We kept hitting deadlock, and the conflict never really eased. Eventually we ended up in court over a single disputed section. We were supposed to be finished. Instead, here we were.

Turns out having the agreement didn’t mean we were done. We were far from done with each other.

I wasn’t done with my own anger, and I still couldn’t have a level conversation with him. Judging by his emails, he wasn’t done with his either.

Which brought me to a step nobody had listed: step 9, heal and let go.

That step took a long time, and it had plenty of sub-steps of its own. But now that I’m actually through it, our divorce finally feels done. Truly done.

Plenty of people had told me to do step 9 first, and at the time, I simply wasn’t able to. Looking back, I wonder if that order would have served us better. If we’d both been in a steadier emotional place, we might have actually heard each other, and the agreement we built together might have reflected something we both genuinely understood the same way.

I’m not sure it’s realistic for most people to fully heal before starting the separation agreement process. With hindsight, I’d probably choose a different order if I could do it again. But at the time, I wanted that agreement, whatever it cost me.

Where are you in the process? And what steps are you choosing to take next?

Know Yourself First

by | Sep 30, 2015 | Divorce and Separation

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Know Yourself First

When I realized my marriage was over, one of the first things I started thinking about was how much harder my life was about to get. Everything was going to be harder. I was becoming a single parent for half my waking hours, starting that new chapter with drastically reduced finances. Those thoughts were part of why I’d tried to hold the marriage together for as long as I did; it genuinely seemed easier than starting over with a whole new set of harder circumstances.

I went into my divorce carrying a huge amount of fear and uncertainty. I also felt like everyone else- my ex, my lawyer, the broader machinery of how divorce is “supposed” to happen- was the one actually controlling my life. I didn’t feel like I had any say in what came next.

So I switched to autopilot and tried to get through the entire process as fast as possible.

I drove myself through the divorce without ever pausing to actually figure out what I wanted. We used the Collaborative Approach, and after five months of meetings, we had a draft agreement and were essentially done. It took five months mostly because we could only manage one four-way legal meeting per month; coordinating three- to four-hour sessions across four busy schedules wasn’t fast. Our lawyers kept trying to get us talking about what actually mattered to each of us. Mostly I just thought, can we skip the needs and values part and get on with it?

Then I went through a six-week back-to-work program for women. The same thing happened during the early self-analysis portion: can we get on with it? I need to write my resume.

Eventually I was done. Divorce finalized, resume in hand.

But I was no closer to actually knowing what I wanted. Still running on fear. Still convinced the best part of my life was already behind me.

And nothing was working. No job offers. Resumes disappearing into total silence. I was stuck, scared, and unhappy.

Things only started moving once I actually took the time to figure out what mattered to me. Yes, I went on the full mid-life soul-searching bender, because I finally hit the point where fear stopped pushing me forward and started freezing me in place entirely.

Figuring out what actually drives you is an ongoing thing; it never really stops, but about six months into that search, I had a list of my seven core values, because I’m a type-A accountant and I like my lists, and I put it up on my wall.

That list turned out to be genuinely useful for decision-making, especially around money. It helped me figure out both how I wanted to earn it and how I wanted to spend it.

If you’re finding money decisions hard, the way through is some good old-fashioned self-reflection. Once you actually know yourself, it stops being hard to tell when a spending choice is wrong for you, and it becomes obvious when one is right.

Believing in the Plan

by | Sep 23, 2015 | Money

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Believing in the Plan

I hate spending money. Some genetic combination of Scottish, Dutch, and a Depression-era family upbringing turned me into someone who gets anxious just walking up to a cash register. Some people call shopping retail therapy. It’s never once been that for me. Every purchase kicks off an internal debate about whether I actually need it, and that internal chatter slows my decisions down, skews relentlessly negative, and keeps me up at night.

Eventually I got tired of feeling guilty and anxious about something that happens almost every single day. It was exhausting, and I couldn’t keep doing it to myself.

What actually changed things wasn’t much. I just made a decision: start believing in my own spending plan.

I’d always been something of a spending-plan fanatic. Every month, for years, I tracked everything I spent in a spreadsheet. A couple of times a year I’d review it and adjust the plan for the year ahead. It only took about two hours a month, less onerous than it sounds.

But despite years of tracking, I’d never actually bought into the process. I never went back and checked whether a prior year’s plan bore any resemblance to what I’d actually spent. I never looked critically at whether the plan reflected what I genuinely wanted to spend on. I rarely came close to spending what the plan projected anyway. I did it because a financially responsible person was supposed to. I still agonized over every purchase and still felt terrible making them. The plan wasn’t doing anything for me except eating up my time to build it.

So I decided I wanted two things: to stop feeling guilty, and to actually get some use out of the plan I’d already built. To get there, I sat down and really looked at what the plan actually said.

It turned out my spending plan was a fairly accurate reflection of my own values, built up over years of the choices I’d actually made. I don’t spend easily, so if something showed up in my tracking spreadsheet, it meant I’d believed in it enough to spend on it in the first place. My spending stayed remarkably consistent year over year, and I’d built in a cushion for the unexpected. And critically, I always had enough coming in to cover what was going out.

Once I saw that clearly, the logic followed: if something’s in the plan, it’s fine to spend on it. Even the unexpected stuff, because the cushion exists precisely for that. All of it, allowed, without the guilt attached.

This shift has taken time, and I’m not fully cured of the guilt even now. I still don’t love spending money, but it no longer stalls my decisions or eats up days of anxiety, most of the time. September used to be brutal for me, business expenses landing all at once, plus the usual pile of kid-related costs, after-school activities, hot lunches, school fees. Before I trusted the plan, I would have spiralled over all of it for days, second-guessed the whole decision to run my own business, maybe even considered shutting it down. All my energy would’ve gone into stopping the bleeding instead of actually moving forward.

This time, when the bills landed, I felt a little icky, grumbled about the cost of running a business, same as always, but then reminded myself: this is in the plan. It’s allowed. I’m not going to make myself feel bad about paying for professional liability insurance.

If you carry your own money anxiety, tracking your spending and building an actual plan is still the best remedy I know. Without one, every purchase becomes its own little interrogation. With one, you get to move through your spending with something closer to clarity.

Strategies for Dealing with Transition Days

by | Aug 27, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Strategies for Dealing with Transition Days

Are you in the middle of a transition day?

There are two types of transition days: the ones where the kids leave to go stay with their other parent, and the ones where they come back to you. Let’s deal with the leaving days first.

The first thing to do is make sure your remaining minutes before saying goodbye are good ones. Minutes, yes. This is your first real challenge, and it is one. Getting kids packed and ready to leave is stressful on its own, and in my experience, kids rarely cooperate. It’s hard to stay calm when your child won’t stop what they’re doing long enough to put their shoes on, and it’s doubly hard when part of you doesn’t want them to leave at all.

So how do you stay calm instead of spending those last minutes yelling? Practice. Practice reminding yourself this is genuinely a hard situation. Practice giving yourself a break if you do end up yelling anyway. Apologize to your child if it happens, and tell them why. Then remember to say you love them and that you’ll see them soon. Remind yourself you’ll get plenty more chances to practice this, and that it does get easier with time.

While you’re getting your child ready, pay attention to the feeling rising in you that tends to lead to yelling. This is a good moment to remind yourself the kids are leaving soon regardless, and it genuinely doesn’t matter if they forget something or run a few minutes late. It’s also a good moment to remember your kids are capable, and this is exactly the kind of situation where natural consequences can do some of the teaching for you. Help them remember what they need, help them pack, then wait for them outside once they’re ready. Sit down. Take a few deep breaths while you wait.

Set a rule with your kids that they always look you in the eye to say goodbye. There’s nothing worse than watching your child sprint off without a backward glance, whether they’re leaving straight from your home or somewhere you’ve driven them. You don’t want your last memory before two days, four days, or a full week apart to be the back of your child’s head running away from you, thinking, I didn’t even get to say goodbye. What if something happens to one of us?

Then they’re gone. You might have somewhere to be, or you might not. You might fill the time deliberately so you don’t sit with the absence, or you might find yourself with more open time than you know what to do with. If it’s the latter, grief tends to creep in. Let it. Sit with it for a while. Powering through a feeling, or burying it, just means you never actually learn how to move through it. Face it directly, give yourself grace for being sad, and over time, these grief stretches tend to get shorter.

Then remind yourself that none of it will go exactly to plan. Things happen. Don’t beat yourself up if whatever plan you made for “how the next transition will go” doesn’t play out the way you pictured. You made that plan while the kids weren’t even there, and the actual push and pull of parenting rarely follows the version you designed in their absence.

That said, don’t stop making the plans. Pieces of them do eventually find their way into your real transition days, in a good way, even if the whole plan never survives contact with reality.

Transition Days

by | Aug 18, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Transition Days

I often wonder if there are other parents out there like me. I start wondering about five minutes after dropping my kids off at school. Day one of five days they’re with their dad, on our 2255 parenting schedule.

Are there other parents out there who know what a 2255 parenting schedule even means? I haven’t met one yet. When I try to explain it to friends in intact families, their eyes glaze over. “How do you keep track of that?” Oh, we have a shared Google calendar, but honestly, I don’t need it. I always know exactly when my kids are coming back, and exactly when they’re leaving. I sometimes wish I didn’t, since both the anticipation of their return and the dread of their leaving tend to wreck my whole day either way.

I call the days on either side of a handoff Transition Days. Some weeks it feels like every other day qualifies.

I’m always caught off guard by the waves of sadness that show up. Just thirty minutes earlier, hustling the kids into the car, I was mostly annoyed; nobody could find their school bag, nobody would put their shoes on. The night before had been exhausting too: a full day as an accountant in the final stretch of tax season, then home as a single parent to two wound-up sons who wouldn’t settle down for bed. My six-year-old stayed up until ten, wanting me to sleep next to him, probably picking up on the tension in the house even if he couldn’t name it. I needed some time alone to recharge after the day I’d had. The irony wasn’t lost on me; five full days of alone time were about to start in twelve hours. He eventually fell asleep on the couch in the next room while I was watching TV, and I carried his warm, sleeping weight up to bed, trying to hold onto the feeling of it, because I knew by morning it would already be gone.

I’ve learned to schedule things for the stretches when the kids are gone, but I can’t schedule all of it. I’m single now, and when they leave, I put myself to bed alone and wake up alone too. This particular morning, I was meeting a friend; she’d text around eight, but I was up at six, and the silence of the house made it impossible not to notice they weren’t there. The house feels small, crowded, and messy when they’re home. The moment they leave, I basically live in one room, and even that room feels too big.

There’s no getting around being alone when they’re gone. I try to think of the friends who tell me they’d kill for a chance to sleep in and have a day entirely to themselves. I try to remember that just yesterday I was trying to fade into the background at home so nobody would notice me and demand a round of Crazy Eights. I know my kids are happy with their dad, well taken care of, not to my exact standard, sure, but getting a different version of how to live and see the world, which probably isn’t a bad thing for them in the long run.

But my first thought waking up and my last thought falling asleep both circle back to the same place: the time I get with my kids is already short, and it’s just been cut in half again. Then the sadness moves in. I wonder sometimes if it ever fully goes away, or if I’ll just be managing this particular grief until they’re old enough to be leaving the nest for good anyway. Maybe by then it’ll finally let go of me too.