Four Years Out

Four Years Out

by | Apr 11, 2017 | Divorce and Separation

Four Years Out

It has been four years since I separated from my husband.

My kids have gone from four and seven to eight and eleven.

I have a pretty fantastic life right now. It has its struggles, but I’m in a new career that still excites me, and I get up every day looking forward to work. My co-parent and I now share the burdens and joys of parenting far better than we ever did together. Most of my days are content. Some are genuinely amazing. The bad ones last a day, sometimes two, and then I’m back to content.

If someone had told me four years ago how long it would take to get here, it would have made things worse. But I’d have been just as surprised to hear how happy I’d end up. Back then, I thought of my life purely in terms of being a mom, and when that job was done, I’d be done too. Except moms are never really done, so I’d never have been done, and I’d have spent the rest of my life in a smaller, sadder version of the one I actually have now.

I was reminded of this recently.

I met someone in an unhappy marriage. She wants out. Her husband doesn’t. They each have their own reasons. In my case, it was the reverse: my ex was the one who wanted out, and I didn’t. I wasn’t happy either, but fear kept me there. He was probably afraid too, but his unhappiness must have outweighed it, because he stepped out first. I’m grateful now, both for the end of that marriage and for the path it put me on.

Before, I lived in fear, and fear drove almost every decision. I took jobs I didn’t want because I was afraid of not finding work. I stayed in a marriage I wasn’t happy in because I was afraid of what divorce would do to my kids. I stayed small and contained because I assumed change would only make things worse.

Change was hard. I had to change nearly everything I thought I knew about being a woman, a mom, an accountant, someone single with children. All of it. And I couldn’t do it alone.

None of it was easy. But every step down that new path opened up a life I never would have believed I’d get to live in.

So if you’re hesitating: reaching out for help is what puts your feet on your own path forward.

Marriage is Easy, Divorce isn’t. Get a Marriage Agreement

by | Dec 14, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

a1fmxesw31g-freestocks-org

Marriage Is Easy. Divorce Isn’t. Get a Marriage Agreement.

It’s pretty easy to get married. All you need is a license, and when I was practicing, it cost about $100. Some people have fancy weddings, which take real planning and money, but that’s a choice. Nobody’s forcing you into a big production.

You don’t get the same choice with divorce. It only takes one person deciding they want out. Marriage needs both people to say “I do.” Divorce just needs one person to file. If the other spouse doesn’t respond, it goes to court, and a judge decides for you. Courts don’t always make good calls for families, so I’d always recommend working things out with your soon-to-be ex before it gets there. Court was expensive too, roughly five thousand dollars a day back when I was seeing clients through it, and that’s before the cost of preparing to get there in the first place.

A desk-order divorce, doing all your own paperwork, was cheaper, around eighty dollars. But it was rarely realistic to actually do it all yourself. The real sticking point was always the Separation Agreement. Mine ran a hundred and forty-nine pages, every one of them describing something contentious, except the two signature pages. A hundred and forty-seven pages of contention took us a year to work through and felt like a full-time job. I used to call ours “the Beast.”

Here’s a start on what has to go into an agreement like that in British Columbia.

You have to agree on the date your relationship started. You’d think that would be simple. It rarely was. I saw clients argue over it constantly, sometimes over surprisingly small technicalities, like whether staying at a partner’s place regularly while keeping a different mailing address still counted as living together. The date matters because it can shift the financial outcome for either person, so it was rarely neutral.

Agreeing when the relationship ended was often even harder. Some people felt it had been over for years. Others still couldn’t quite believe it was ending. Again, the date carried real financial weight.

Then there’s parenting, time and money both, which usually ate up the most time of anything, especially when one parent had been the primary caregiver and the two of them had to rebuild enough trust to share parenting equally going forward. There was a lot to learn too. Most people don’t know, for instance, that a fifty-fifty parenting split doesn’t always mean no child support changes hands.

Then come the assets and debts. People often discovered assets they didn’t know existed, and even more often, debt one spouse hadn’t told the other about. Sorting that out took time and trust that usually wasn’t in great supply by that point.

A Separation Agreement, in the end, is a document that maps out every piece of your future life, negotiated with someone you probably don’t like very much right now. It takes time and enormous emotional energy, and it’s usually built during one of the darker periods of a person’s life.

So.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to build that kind of agreement before the wedding, while everyone’s still happy? It seems a little absurd that our system lets anyone get married on the strength of a hundred-dollar license bought online in a moment of blind optimism, while divorce comes wrapped in rules, requirements, and a court system that’ll make you comply if you won’t agree.

What if the agreement got made in that early, hopeful stage instead?

It might save a marriage, or save someone from marrying the wrong person to begin with. It would almost certainly make the divorce easier, if one ever came. Ask anyone who’s been through it. Divorced people are usually the first to say they wish they’d had one. Which is, of course, preaching to the converted.

How do you reach the people who haven’t gotten there yet? The happy, blissful, about-to-be-married ones?

I don’t know. I only ever saw the aftermath of the people who didn’t have one. Maybe you have a better idea.

Why i almost didn’t believe in the collaborative process

by | Sep 26, 2016 | Advocacy

photo-1473772564351-202a22a93101

Why I Almost Didn’t Believe in the Collaborative Process

My own divorce was a Collaborative Divorce, meaning we agreed to stay out of court. That was the pitch at the time: family law in BC was changing, lawyers were newly required to tell clients about alternative dispute resolution, and everyone we talked to called Collaborative the new, better way to do this. New and better were persuasive enough that my husband and I decided to try it.

I hated it.

Divorce is stressful enough on its own, and reaching an agreement with someone you’re in conflict with is hard regardless of the process. But I hated the Collaborative Approach even more than I expected to hate the alternative, an all-out fight.

I’d spent my whole life avoiding conflict, the way a lot of people do. I also believed I was reasonable, someone who could handle almost anything calmly. What that meant was that I let things go, over and over, except I didn’t let them go. I buried them until I couldn’t anymore, and then I exploded. That was exactly where I was standing when I had to sit down and negotiate my own divorce.

The Collaborative Approach is the opposite of the war most of us picture when we think “divorce”: courtrooms, revenge, a clear winner and a clear loser. At our first four-way meeting, with lawyers on both sides in the room with us, I nearly had a coronary. The pace felt glacial. The content felt like kindergarten, here’s why sharing matters, while I sat there thinking about how much two lawyers’ hourly rates were costing us to learn about manners.

I already knew what I wanted the outcome to be, so I sat through eight months of this until we got there. The agreement we landed on was close enough to what I’d wanted that I walked away thinking, well, that worked.

What I didn’t realize until much later was that I’d never actually understood what “Collaborative” meant, even after the whole process was supposedly done.

Looking back now, I know the professionals explained it clearly, at the start, throughout, and at the end. Something in me just wasn’t able to hear it. I’d spent forty years learning one way to handle conflict: avoid it until it became unavoidable, then fight to win. So instead of recognizing that we’d resolved things through an actually different method, I quietly filed the whole experience under my old framework. I avoided the separation as long as I could, then found a solution and forced it through, because underneath it all, I believed I was driving the process. I made the meetings happen. I made sure my ex did his part. I made sure the agreement got signed.

You can’t really learn a new way to handle conflict when you’re at the most emotional point of your life. I wasn’t calm or rational. I swung between sad and angry by the minute, sharing a house with someone I no longer wanted anything to do with, worried sick about my two young kids. I wasn’t in any state to absorb something new.

So while we technically used the Collaborative Approach, it only worked on the surface. We stayed out of court during the divorce. Afterward, once we were released from that structured process, we ended up in court anyway, still in conflict, having reverted fully to our old patterns the moment no one was holding the space for us anymore.

That’s true for a lot of people. Some people come into the Collaborative Process already wired for it, and it clicks immediately. The rest of us, trained our whole lives to do conflict differently, need more. We need to be told, repeatedly, what it actually means and how it works, because it’s a genuinely hard concept to absorb in the middle of emotional upheaval, against forty years of the opposite training.

I only really understood what Collaborative meant about a year after my divorce was finalized, once I’d started training to become a Collaborative professional myself.

Since then, working with people going through their own Collaborative Divorces, I’ve heard the exact words I once said: the meetings feel slow, nothing seems to be getting addressed, the process isn’t moving. Those words are a signal I’ve learned to sit up for. I have to remind myself how long it took me to understand this, and remember that the best thing I can do isn’t swoop in and solve their problem for them; it’s help them reach the same understanding I eventually found so that they can move forward on their own terms.

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

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

photo-1473773386757-42bbe7288351

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.

No Hobbies

by | Jan 27, 2016 | Money

tEREUy1vSfuSu8LzTop3_IMG_2538

No Hobbies

Do you have your own business? Are you thinking about starting one? I’d tell you to put some structures in place for work-life balance.

Or not.

I was conflicted about this for a long time. I loved my work so much that everything else basically fell away. Someone once asked me what my hobbies were. Hobbies? I genuinely didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to admit that Netflix had become the closest thing I had. I felt bad about it for the rest of the day.

Once I couldn’t come up with an answer, I started beating myself up over it. How had I ended up here, when my old tagline used to be something like “the only thing Renée is truly passionate about is her leisure time”?

Part of it was practicing gratitude. Once I started looking at my life through everything I was grateful for, including the work itself, it felt completely different. I wanted to be doing it. I’d chosen all of it. No one was making me.

But there was something else going on too. When you work for yourself from home, there’s no clean line between the workday starting and ending. The moment you’re awake, you’re potentially working.

A friend put it well once: someone with a nine-to-five has clearly defined hours they’re not being paid for. A sole proprietor doesn’t have that boundary built in anywhere, which makes it easy to just default to working whenever nothing else is scheduled, especially when you actually love the work.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I did what needed doing (the kids, the laundry, the shopping), and every remaining hour went to work by default. If nothing else was on the calendar, I worked.

As much as I loved it, I could see where that was headed: burnout, too many hours at a screen, not enough of anything else.

What I eventually landed on was that leisure time has to be scheduled deliberately when you’re self-employed. Just having free time doesn’t actually work. It’s a vacuum, and work rushes straight into it.

So I booked a weekly exercise class and paid for it upfront, since accountants hate wasting money more than almost anything else. I gave myself an actual non-work schedule and held myself to it the same way I’d have held myself to a time card if someone else had been the one setting my hours.