Unforced Errors in Co-Parenting

 

I resisted the urge to look up and scan the audience, but the temptation was just too great.  At least it didn’t take long to find her.  She was sitting alone and motionless in the stands about 30 rows above the high school gymnasium court.  For someone who I was accustomed to only seeing and hearing in action, usually barking orders at my kids or their father, this moment was surreal.  As I walked my daughter across the floor on “Senior Night” of her final home volleyball game, I couldn’t believe the emotion I was feeling for the woman – their stepmother – who over the course of the past eight years had done a formidable job of keeping as much distance between my children and me as possible.  That emotion?  Pity.

Only a few days earlier, Claire had called me in tears.


“Dad said he won’t walk me out onto the court for my last home volleyball game since I told him I didn’t want her out there with me.  Mom, I want you to do it.  Not her.”


To put it in volleyball terms, this was more than a side-out.


“Co-parenting” is just a slick new word for an old idea.  Cooperation (a word that even looks like a thinly veiled word scramble of “co-parenting”) is a concept most kids are introduced to at an early age.  From warming a sibling-to-be up to the idea that soon there will be a newborn in the house blindly expecting a share of limited resources, to songs on Sesame Street singing the praises of working together and getting along, cooperation and sharing are highly esteemed virtues in our society.


But in my situation (and from what I can tell, in far too many other divorced families), co-parenting has not really meant cooperation or a willingness to freely share the children.  As a non-custodial parent, my ex and his wife treat me as if I’m lucky to be involved at all in the lives of my children.  They’re constantly looking to spike the ball in my face.  In a word, they are bullies.  But instead of fighting with them, I tread lightly and try to complicate things as little as possible so as to avoid conflict for the benefit of my children.  My strength is in keeping the ball in the air, and when it comes to the situation with my children and my ex, it means I co-parent alone.


My daughter recently went on a little rant about this exact thing to my husband and me.


“It doesn’t have to be this way!  It doesn’t have to be this difficult!”


She was referring to the barriers that her father and stepmother are constantly building that gum up the machinery of a cooperative co-parenting relationship.


“I have a lot of other friends whose parents are now divorced and none of their situations are like this!”


She had a full head of steam that had been building, and she wasn’t going to stop until she got it all out.  In the early years, I told myself that this day would come if I was patient.  I wouldn’t fight, but I wouldn’t give up, either.  I’d just keep digging out spiked balls and lofting them back over the net.


My daughter was right about one thing – it didn’t have to be that difficult.  Yes, the dynamics of divorced and re-blended families are complex to say the least, and rarely perfect.  But common sense and calm heads must prevail in order for the game of parenting to not become playground chaos.  I urge divorced parents to observe just a few basic guidelines:


1. Don’t speak badly about your child/stepchild’s other parent, step parents or extended family.
2. Communicate with the other parent about important information on a regular basis without hostility.
3. Respect your child’s need to have equal contact with the other parent.


At my daughter’s volleyball game last week, as I sat on the bleachers waiting for her to signal me to join her, I saw her stepmother walk into the gym with her father.  I didn’t feel victorious watching stepmom start up the steps into the stands.  I didn’t feel like I’d “won” anything, even though for years she had acted like our relationship with each other was some kind of parenting contest.  I’ve never treated my relationship with my daughter like a contest, and in fact I tried for years to have a cooperative and sharing relationship with this woman.  As the evening unfolded, though, I only felt sorry for her.  She’d spent the last nine years of her life paying for my daughter’s volleyball uniforms, camps, weekend tournaments, and club team memberships.  She drove my daughter to her practices and watched almost every game.  I hadn’t.  In order to keep my job so that I could pay child support, I was only able to make the occasional game.  One could certainly make the argument that she deserved to stand on that court with my daughter that night, but she had undermined herself in the end.  When I had asked my 17-year-old daughter why she didn’t want her stepmother on the court with her that night, she responded,  “Because she’s been such an ass**** all these years.  I am not going to reward her.”  17-year-old girls can be mean and reactive, but this reaction was a long time coming.


I would openly discourage divorced parents from treating their children as pawns in an ongoing battle.  That will only do harm to the children.  But if there are divorced parents out there who just can’t see their situation in any other light, then maybe the story of the tortoise and the hare will help.   In the end of that story, the tortoise ends up winning the race because of his persistence, unwavering dedication, and most importantly, his patience.  The much speedier hare’s arrogance caused him to lose, even though he had all the qualities needed to win.  I missed out on a lot of memories with my children.  There’s no sugar-coating that fact.  But I am more confident than ever that the foundation for my relationships with my children, now 17, 13, and 11 years of age, will prove strong and enduring.  I can’t help but wonder if their father and stepmother feel very confident about the future of their relationships with the kids.

Kill shots can be effective in volleyball, but they don’t always land in the court, and if you’re not very good, unforced errors can prove your own undoing.

~This piece first appeared on Fathers and Families

Better, Not Bitter

This piece originally appeared in the Non Custodial Mom Chronicles on Post Divorce Chronicles.

Shortly after my ex husband and I separated, I plummeted into a darkness that I could not have imagined.   It wasn’t just the fact that I’d experienced the sucker punch of betrayal, but I was grieving for the life I knew I was losing.  I was strong on the outside during the day.  I went about my usual chores and daily rigmarole that was familiar and calming to my three children and tried to act normal.  But at night, the darkness swallowed me.  I couldn’t sleep.  I worried and felt angry and lost.  In those early days, I clung to my religion for dear life.  Sleeping alone in our king sized bed for the first time in 17 years, I used God like a dying person uses morphine to snuff out the pain.  I prayed.  I wept.  I read passages in the Bible, searching for wisdom and signs to tell me what to do.

In the mornings, I woke up early, before the kids even began to stir.  My ritual was to light a fire in the fireplace, wrap myself in a blanket and simply sit and stare at the flames.  Sometimes I cried.  Sometimes I prayed.  Mostly, I absorbed the silence.  It was in those hours I pulled myself together so I wouldn’t fall apart in front of my children.  Once the initial spells of weeping and grieving began to subside, I prayed less and listened to the quiet around me more.  It was in those hours that I made decisions about the life in front of me — the new life I was starting to let myself imagine…

What if life is a series of events and happenings that God (or Destiny) puts in front of us for our own good?  What if our purpose in life is to see the path in front of us and go along with it, even if it’s not what we planned for ourselves?

What if we are supposed to be quiet enough to pay attention to the signs along the way, and have the guts – and the faith — to follow the signs, no matter where they might lead us?

These sacred mornings allowed me that time and space I needed to start thinking about what I hadn’t thought of before — options.

At first, I never thought I would entertain the idea of letting my kids live with their dad, not even for half the time.  I kept thinking about how content I was with our old life — how comfortable, predictable, and cozy it was for our children.  How dare my husband do what he did!  It dismantled our family, and I didn’t want to share my kids with him.  I didn’t think he deserved them.  I just couldn’t imagine not being the same kind of mom as I had always been.  I had been raised by a traditional, baked-cookies-after-school type of homemaker mother, and this was the model that I knew and was comfortable with.

So when the idea to enter into a joint custody arrangement with my ex began to emerge as a real possibility, I thought there must be something wrong with me.  I really thought that maybe I’d flipped a switch or was going a little bit crazy from the pit of sorrow that I had been stuck in for so long.  I had doubts.  I felt guilt.  I knew I would miss my kids and they would miss me.  Even though it went against my upbringing, I asked myself — what if being a responsible and good mother now means that I need to work outside the home instead of flipping pancakes and shuttling the kids to school and practice every day? Ultimately, I decided that it was my turn to bring home the bacon, and their father’s turn to be the caregiver.  I decided that I would have to let go of what everyone else would think and pay attention to what my children’s practical needs were instead.

In all epic dramas, there is always a darkness that threatens to overwhelm the characters we identify with.   In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion are on the run from the Wicked Witch.  In the end, they learn that the reality they were seeking, the salvation, was right in front of them all along.  My life was changing abruptly – that was a fact.  But instead of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to take advantage of what, at first glance, looked a lot like a bad situation.  Instead, I looked at it like an engraved invitation to do something new while showing my children a stronger and more self-sufficient version of the Mom they knew.

I wasn’t sure at first how to go about designing this new version of our family.  I had no blueprint.  What I was sure of was that, even though, I was entering into uncharted territory, I was terrified and excited at the same time.  I began to realize this sure beat being bitter and paralyzed by the past.

From Sweatpants to High Heels

After the terrific response from A Non Custodial Mother Article in the Huffington Post and the latest news about mothers who are redefining traditional roles (such as the recent piece by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto on Salon.com), I thought I’d put a face on one non custodial mother – me.  This is the beginning of my story, and an unexpected new life:

From Sweatpants to High Heels

For a long time, I considered myself a proud member of The Mommy Sorority.

When it came to raising my children, I did everything “right,” and I held other moms to the same expectations I had for myself.  I stayed home with my children, first when they were babies, then as toddlers.  I bought the latest Baby Einstein crib mobiles and educational toys.  I never forgot to pack an extra hat and kept an ample supply of organic graham crackers in the diaper bag.  I would spend hours researching what kind of diapers or sunscreen to buy.  I made baby food and froze it in convenient serving sizes in the ice cube tray.  I subscribed to Family Fun magazine.  I felt confident in my role of Super Mama for over eight years. 

I was even smug about it.

When working mothers dropped their children off at my house for daycare, I didn’t envy them at all.  I contentedly breathed in the aroma of homemade play dough that wafted through my house and co-mingled with the familiar and comforting scents of homemade pancakes and maple syrup.  I felt superior to those mothers.  After all, I knew all the words to Kenny Login’s “Return to Pooh Corner” soundtrack and I was free to spend uninterrupted hours of the weekday at home with my kids.  I thought I was doing the noblest job of all, that of stay-at-home mom.  I decided I didn’t need to worry about make-up, stylish clothes (Hanes sweat pants did the trick!) and a career at an office.  I’d given up my dreams of writing and photography.  I figured that by being there 24/7 for my three children, writing about them in my journal, and photographing them at every stage, my dreams were being fulfilled in a more down-to-earth, practical way.

After all, sacrifice is the soul of parenting.

But in 2002, my suburban June Cleaver world turned upside down.   Little did I know, while I was nursing babies, flipping pancakes, planting bulbs in the backyard, folding mountains of laundry, and tending to our home, my husband was tending to other women.  On our 14^th wedding anniversary, I learned in the most shocking of ways that he had been having an affair.   I was so caught up in my idealized suburban slice of heaven that I this possibility never dawned on me.   After all, he was a church-going man — a Promise Keeper and part of a “Men’s Accountability Prayer Group” on Thursdays.  Over the course of our 17 years together, he’d told me many times that he was “the Captain of our family’s ship.”  He was, he said, in charge of making sure we were taken care of, and I trusted him to navigate us through any choppy waters.  It never seemed possible that our marriage would become a shipwreck.

But when I found out what my husband had done, I immediately made the decision to make him leave.   He was not at all the husband I thought he was.  Maybe some couples survive the heartbreaking devastation of infidelity, but my husband’s version of it was too much for me to work through.  I would have put my health in jeopardy if I’d stayed with him.  To put it bluntly, not only had he been unfaithful, but he’d been extremely promiscuous with a high-risk person, and did not use protection.  That additional bit of information mattered to me a lot.  I wouldn’t risk my health by staying with him, and although I could eventually forgive him, I knew I would never be able to be intimate with him again.  I couldn’t stay married to a person I did not want to ever make love to again.  Not only had he betrayed me emotionally, but the physical repercussions of what he did were more than I was willing to overlook.  My logic was, if I stayed with him, and eventually became sick or contracted a disease because of his infidelity, what good would I be to my kids then?  In the end, I traded in my marriage and relationship.  I valued my long term health, and didn’t trust that he ever would.   It is my belief that a woman shouldn’t stay with a man who endangers her health and doesn’t cherish her enough to protect at least that part of her.

I also found myself deciding, out of necessity, to take over as “the Captain of our family’s ship” by going back to work (my husband also lost his job because of his indiscretions).  We couldn’t pay our bills or our mortgage.  In the aftermath, we even lost our health insurance.  Someone had to take over, and that someone, however unconventional it felt in the world I was familiar with, was me.

So I joined the ranks of the working mothers that I’d looked down my nose at.  Not only would I become a mother who worked full-time outside the home, but I would be a single mother.   The women from my church didn’t understand how I could make my husband leave and not work things out with him.  But they didn’t know the whole story.  My own family and friends thought I was crazy not to take my estranged husband to court for alimony and child support to “make him pay” for what he did.  I struggled with my own idea of how a mother should be.  I was in very new territory, and I privately wondered if I was making the right choices.   But I did know that my children missed their daddy.  They spent more time with him since he was not working much.  He became the parent that would take them to their soccer practice, doctor appointments, and help them with their homework after school before making them dinner.  I became the frazzled busy parent who would pick them up late at night at his apartment, then shuttle them to daycare early in the morning, hurriedly strapping them half asleep into their car seats with limp toaster waffles wrapped in napkins and warm juice boxes for breakfast.   It was a harrowing adjustment for all of us, and I wasn’t happy with what kind of mother I was turning into.  It seemed like I was exhausted, cranky, and in a hurry all the time.  My kids were tired and their performances at school were suffering.  I wasn’t giving them the kind of parenting they deserved, and it began to haunt me.  I felt guilty, angry, and sad.  Mostly, I felt overwhelmed.

Once my ex husband met the woman who would become his new wife, I found myself fantasizing about how nice it would be to share with them the responsibility of parenting.  She was a hard-working woman with an office at home.  She seemed to really like my children and volunteered to pick them up from school several times a week.  She stepped right in.  She packed their lunches and made cupcakes to take to baseball games when they were with their dad.  Their home environment was more of a traditional family existence than it was with me.  She seemed to be the perfect partner, not only for my ex husband, but for me.  I could finally rely on another woman to help me “mother” my children, since I didn’t have enough time to do it by myself.   Eventually, my ex and I came to a verbal agreement over a couple beers in a restaurant.  The kids would be with me on the weekends, then with their dad and his new girlfriend during the week.  My ex husband was more than happy to have our kids during the weekdays since he was working on the weekends, and I was willing to let go — just enough to give myself a little workweek breathing room.

Unfortunately, I failed to see the repercussions of what amounted to a handshake deal.  Our new set up would come to tear at the very fabric of my concept of motherhood and my identity.  I also hadn’t thought ahead about how other people would view me as a woman and mother.  Worst of all, I didn’t anticipate the legal repercussions of letting my children go to live with their dad without having a lawyer draw up an official parenting plan.

There are specific things I wish I would have planned for and thought about before making the crucial decision that I did.  Being a non custodial mother has been challenging and surprisingly rewarding as well, (which has been quite a pleasant surprise actually), so stay tuned!

My next blog article will feature off the cuff advice to other women and mothers who may be going through the difficult decision making process of how to divvy up time and finances with an ex, as well as some rather unexpected positive side-effects of divorce.