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.

Divorce is a Stoplight

Divorce is a Stoplight

by | Feb 6, 2018 | Divorce and Separation, Money

Divorce Is a Stoplight

A few months ago, I was at a presentation about money. It wasn’t about tax rules or investing. It was about how hard it is to talk about money.

I know that; I thought to myself, an A-plus for me.

That night, we were all asked what money meant to each of us. Answers varied, but I knew mine right away.

For me, money is strongly linked to my sense of self-worth. That undercurrent drives a lot of our society, whether we admit it or not.

When I was negotiating my divorce, I felt like I had no voice and no value, because I wasn’t earning any income as a stay-at-home mom. Every meeting with divorce coaches and lawyers was torturous, because I didn’t feel heard. I was lost. I didn’t know why I did the things I did, or what value I brought to the family. I believed everyone was listening to my co-parent. He held the power. After all, he earned the income; therefore, he had more value since he made more money. I believed this for most of my life. Honestly, some part of it still lurks under the surface in me, the same way I think it lurks under the surface of our society.

I felt like I couldn’t live according to my own values. I’d walked away from a well-paying job as a financial analyst to be a stay-at-home parent, and during our legal meetings, the only thing I kept hearing was some version of: when is Renée going to get her high-paying job back?

When, indeed.

Instead of figuring out what I actually needed to move forward, I proposed a plan to do exactly that: get back to that job. It was written into our separation agreement, my plan for getting my career back, laid out clearly on page five. I wanted that agreement. I thought once I had it, I’d be able to move on. The divorce coaches and lawyers, all collaborative, tried to help me figure out what I actually wanted, but I didn’t know myself. Being the type-A person I am, and wanting to save money, I kept driving the process forward while burying the emotions that kept trying to surface. I did the budgets. I figured out how to divide the money. I thought that part was the easy part.

My life since then hasn’t followed the clear path I thought it would. It was never just a matter of making logical choices to reach an end goal.

Underneath it all, I was fighting a battle against my own assumptions about what was expected of me, and it wasn’t until I got a handle on that that decisions started to feel easier.

Since then, working with people navigating their own divorces, I’ve noticed we’re mostly on the same path. I’ve yet to meet someone who can easily choose between financial options when they’re in the middle of separating. I’ve yet to meet someone who can clearly articulate what they’re actually feeling about their financial situation as it happens.

Financial professionals are often the first people newly separated couples contact. Society has driven home the message that divorce is about dividing the money, so it makes sense that people go looking for someone who knows the rules for splitting it. But that’s not actually where to start.

Divorce is a stoplight. Life is telling you that you’re not living according to what actually drives you, and you’ve reached a point where you can’t keep going down the road you were on. You can sit at that intersection a long time before you figure out how to make it turn green.

The truth is, no single professional gets you through that intersection alone. You need a team: a financial professional to help you understand where you stand and what your options actually look like, a mental health professional or coach to help you figure out what you actually want, separate from what everyone around you expects, and a lawyer to handle the legal side and document whatever you decide.

I didn’t have that team working together the way I needed. My separation agreement ended up outlining a life I didn’t actually want, because nobody had helped me figure out what I wanted before we wrote it down.

If there’s one thing worth taking from my own experience, it’s that: don’t let your separation agreement quietly become a document that maps out someone else’s expectations of you.

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

by | Dec 14, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

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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.

The BAD MOTHER tagline

by | Oct 18, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

I wrote the post below back when I was recently separated with two young children, in the thick of grief and anger, most of it aimed at my ex. I felt like I had no control over my own life. photo-1470319149473-af271634cecf

The Bad Mother Tagline

Have you ever thought of yourself as a bad mother? I know I have. “I’m a bad mother” has been the tagline running under nearly every parenting mistake I’ve made since my oldest was born, ten years ago now. Forgot his hat. Bad mother. Yelled at him for being irritating. Bad mother. Forgot to remind him to look both ways when crossing the street. BAD MOTHER. A friend and I once joked about getting matching T-shirts that said “dumb mum.”

We’re wired this way as a species, apparently, quick to forgive everyone except ourselves.

I got a fresh reminder of this a few weekends ago.

My kids’ dad asked if I could take them for the weekend. He asked on Wednesday. I was buried in work and had promised myself I wasn’t working weekends anymore. My answer should have been an easy no. I had plans. I needed the recharge.

No was right there, on the tip of my fingers as I started typing my reply. Then something stopped me.

The thought: I’m a bad mother.

How could I not want to be with my own kids? Their dad needed help. How could I put my own interests ahead of theirs?

So instead of no, I said yes. I cancelled my plans and told myself that wanting that time in the first place had been selfish.

You can probably guess how the weekend went. Not well.

It started going sideways Friday at 2:30, when my youngest called from school with a tummy ache. I knew immediately it wasn’t real, not medically. He hates last-minute changes, and switching up the schedule on short notice was enough to give him an emotional stomachache. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. He needed time to process the change. So did I.

I’d been counting on those hours to get my work done before pickup. Instead, I found myself standing in front of my seven-year-old, and the first words out of my mouth were: “Do you really have a tummy ache?”

I heard myself say it, and right behind it came the tagline, on schedule: I am a bad mother.

I spent the rest of the weekend taking my mood out on my kids in small ways I’m not proud of, and by the time they left, I was cycling through the whole tagline lineup. Bad. Hadn’t learned a thing. Still the same people-pleaser I thought I’d outgrown.

Monday morning, kids gone, I finally had space to think. I cried, partly from the weekend itself, partly because I still had work waiting and no energy left for it.

Then I started writing, and something clicked. I’d just gotten the clearest proof I was ever going to need that the “bad mother” tagline had to go. For good.

Looking back at that weekend now, oddly, I’m grateful for it. Thank you, terrible weekend. You were the thing that finally put that tagline in the ground, along with the others I’d been using to beat myself up for years.

The Blame Game

by | Jun 15, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

Blame and Happiness

I went to a great workshop a few weeks ago put on by Dr. Sue Goldswain and John Boland. If you’re ever in the market for a marriage counsellor, they’re worth looking into.

One thing that stuck with me: it takes two people to build a relationship, and two people to take one down. If a marriage ends in divorce, both people played some part in that.

It was a relief to hear it wasn’t entirely on me.

It got me thinking, though. I hear a lot of different versions of how a marriage failed or is failing, and I’ve noticed something consistent: the person doing more of the blaming tends to be the one hurting more.

I know this because I lived it. I hated my ex when we first separated, and I was miserable. How could I have married someone so horrible? As the blame slowly faded, it actually turned into something closer to gratitude, and I got noticeably happier along the way.

How do you feel about your own relationship right now? If you’re doing a lot of blaming, is it actually fixing anything?