Archive for the ‘divorce’ Category

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Why I hate sharing events with my ex

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Not because they were casually dressed, front and centre and holding a camera, whereas I haven’t showered today (thanks to my hot water tank for exploding last night), arrived just in time, looking harassed and stressed (because I am - work is insane right now), and parked myself in a chair in the corner.

Not because I didn’t have my Buddy there (thanks again to my hot water tank for exploding last night, requiring one member of our household to stay home and wait for nice fixit people), or any other stars-in-alignment rationale.

No, the reason I hate sharing events is because Rosebud always goes to ex and girlfriend first.

The thing is - I know *why* she does it. She doesn’t live with them, and only has one overnight with them a week. Therefore, they are the speshul parents - the ones whose attention she gets more rarely, and therefore, covets more.

They’re also the parents who don’t have to poke the child awake every morning, wrestle her into clothing, and shuffle her occasionally unwilling body off to school. They don’t have to fight with her about what’s appropriate and what isn’t. Or about what she can have and what she can’t. They can afford to indulge her every whim, because we’re there to do all the discipline.

So yeah - I know why I get to be second fiddle at shared events. I understand it, and can even appreciate that, on one level, this means that I’m such a constant in her life she doesn’t even think about it. I know that this means she feels secure and safe with my love.

But in no way does that make it suck less.

All that said - Juniper and I were able to watch the concert together, and appreciate the awesomeness of our youngest family member together. When she finally did run over to us, yelling “Group kiss, group kiss!”, my joy over being with my girls was pretty much complete.

My kids are pretty much awesome all over.

Posted in Being a girl, Juniper, Rant, Rosebud, buddy, divorce, family | 2 Comments »

Blended family life is NOT painful.

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Have you ever gone into Google and typed the phrase “blended family”? If not, you really should. G’on, I’ll wait.

Now that you’ve done this, can you detect the thing that might have engendered my post title? Do you have any theories as to why it feels a lot like typing in “Dear Gawd, help us”? I mean, I think I actually heard Google say, “Bummer, dude” before it executed my search.

Why, for the love of all that is good and sensible in the world, does the phrase “blended family” result in websites offering workshops and classes and newsletters and faith-based guidance and statistics about how it takes seven years for a family to successfully blend?

Am I really the only person on the Internet talking about blended family life as a reality and not as a problem? I mean, hells - I love my girls - both of them. I love my husband, I love my cats and I even love my orange stepcat*. I don’t find our family life to be troubled or challenging. It’s not hard to love the daughter given to me by marriage. It’s not difficult to refer to them as sisters.

But when you look around to discuss it with others, you see that our society seems to hold this awful inherent assumption that somehow, somebody in the new dynamic is going to fail to bond. Or there’s a wicked stepmother who is merely going through the motions of family with a pimply faced and angry teenaged hosebeast, so she can get to the gooey centre of her desire - the eligible father.

Or a stepfather who would be as likely to walk around the stepchild pinned under the fallen bookcase as he would to lift said bookcase from the aforementioned stepchild’s diminutive frame.

I mean, obviously not all blendings are easy or even ultimately successful. But a 50 per cent divorce rate in a population means that there have to be at LEAST a good mittful of families who are blended and blended well. The odds are in favour of this, even with my questionable math skills.

And yet - the message is clear. “Blended? Limit your expectations for your future happiness as a family.”
Someone out there actually says this - LIMIT your expectations for success.

Way to set the bar, Internet. Thanks for making happiness feel like a freak of nature.

*No I don’t honestly call him my stepcat, even if he frequently behaves like he’s aspiring to red-headed stepchild status.

Posted in Being a girl, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, buddy, divorce, family, metablog | 7 Comments »

Don’t call me Speedy.

Monday, October 19th, 2009

I was at a party on Sunday. It wasn’t for candles, foodstuffs, cooking gadgetry, Tupperware, happysexyfuntime or anything else of this sort.

It was a toy party. A CHILDREN’S toy party.

Still and all, with Christmas coming up, I’m not going to miss an opportunity to shop whilst snacking and chatting, instead of shopping in a mall in the dead of pre-Christmas retail or the ‘net and its myriad stores that refuse to ship to Outer Mongolia (a.k.a. Canada).

So I went over to my friend’s place. The hostess, as it happens, is someone I’ve been acquainted with over the years. (Hey, we’re a reasonably small generation in a reasonably small city. It’s not like there are that many degrees of separation between any of us. Happily, we’re on the right side of Not Inbred, though I think it might be by a narrow margin in some cases).

Last time she saw me was pre-baby, pre-Buddy. Naturally, being the toy rep, the saleslady extraordinaire, she was immediately interested in ascertaining how big a mark I could be many kids I was shopping for.

Me: Two - Rosebud and Juniper.

Her: Oh, you have two kids?

Me: Yes - one I made and one I inherited, through marriage.

Her: So you’re already remarried?

Me: Yes.

Her: Well, that was fast.

In case anyone is wondering, “Well, that was fast” is not listed anywhere on the Miss Manners Spectrum of Congratulatory Phrases.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the time that Buddy and I have been together - those scant and measly not-quite-two years - people sure do like to have an opinion about how a relationship ought to proceed, particularly post-divorce.

According to the timeline written in the sky, I should’ve painted my skin with ash and shaved my head and mourned the demise of my marriage for a lot longer. Sex and the City informs us that the shelf-life for relationship grief is half the length of the relationship, which means that I should have been torturing myself for four years before I even considered dating another man.

Fortunately, as much as I’ve always enjoyed the TV show, Sex and the City is not my bible, so I don’t feel compelled to hang onto anger and/or grief for any circumscribed period of time.

But honestly, I’ve confronted this attitude (both subtly and directly) more times than I’d care to count. And it pisses me off.

Here’s the thing that I’d like everyone to *get*. I didn’t marry the next man who came along. It’s just that the next man who came along happened to be my soulmate. I didn’t marry him so that I didn’t have to be a single parent. I didn’t marry him on the rebound. I didn’t marry him because I didn’t think I could hack dating. (For the record, I’m a very good dater. I meet people easily and can usually find common ground with anyone.)

Here’s the flat truth: If anyone says to you ‘I’m really into you, but the timing sucks’, guess what? They’re not really all that into you. You know how I know this? I know this because if you happen to meet *your* person, the one single solitary soul in all the world who speaks to every part of who you are, well . . . the timing of that meeting won’t make a damn bit of difference to either party. You will move heaven and earth to be with your person and if you’re smart, you will do so immediately.

In the end, as much as it ticks me off to have people presume things about my life based on their own sense of appropriate timelines, (even though they have little to no frame of reference for how my first marriage ended, the fact that Buddy and I were already friends AND that when I was still married, I thought he was awesome enough to want to set him up with a girlfriend* of mine), I also know that it doesn’t make a difference. People will have to figure out, in time, that we are together because we belong together.

(And the sex is pretty great, too.)

*Dodged a bullet there, didn’t I?

Posted in Being a girl, Happiness, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Rant, buddy, divorce | 5 Comments »

There are days.

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

There are days when I get tired. Tired of watching my children suffer transitions, and grief and uncertainty. Tired of watching Juniper try to maintain a vigilant eye on her chaotic visitation schedule, alternately convinced that she’s going to forget a visit with her mother, and troubled about spending time away from us.

Tired of Rosebud’s finely tuned awareness of her very orderly visitation schedule when things aren’t as reliable as they normally would be. She seems to know, to the very hour, when she’s supposed to be with her father, and when she’s supposed to be with us. When he goes out of town, she knows. And so, we know. I can handle the tantrums and the acting out, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to handle quiet sniffles of sadness emanating from the back of the car when she finds out that we’ll be picking her up from Our Lady of Daycare. Tired because I’m not enough, and because I have to be.

I get tired of being heartsore, watching them struggle. I get tired of putting band-aids on emotional boo-boos with reassurances and false cheer - both of which, I’m sure, are about as believable as a promise of ice cream for dinner.

I’m tired of not being able to plan our lives more than a few days in advance and I’m equally tired of having to plan our lives months in advance, always with the understanding that someone else, who has no goodwill for our relationship or our family, can pull the plug on plans at any given moment.

Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll stand back up and start trying again. But for this moment, I’m going to sit down on this here road of life and stare moodily off into nowhere.

Posted in Being a girl, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Rant, divorce, family | 2 Comments »

Didja

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Didja ever have one of those weeks where, after it’s all said and done, every single member of your partner’s ex-in-laws have dropped by your house - unannounced?

No? Just me?

Tags:
Posted in In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Odds and Sods, divorce, family | 11 Comments »

If you ever wondered.

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Last weekend, Juniper and Rosebud had 17 minutes of time together. In total.

That’s the reality of blended family life. Constant changing of sibling dynamics (or absence of them). Rosebud goes to her father’s house, where she’s an only child. Juniper goes to her mother’s home, where she’s the older sibling of a small toddler boy.

Sometimes, Rosebud is an only child at our house.

Sometimes, Juniper is an only child at our house.

And sometimes, they’re together for seventeen minutes.

This generation is looking to be like a bunch of guinea pigs. I guess we all were, to some degree or another. We have no real idea of how these constantly shifting sands are going to impact children. Will they be healthier for it? Will they be confused? What happens to the psychological theory of sibling order and its impact on personal development?

All I can really tell you is that the 17 minute weekends make me sad for them. Juniper may enjoy her time as a reinstated only child, but she’s also the person who put a banner and streamer up in Rosebud’s room after her weekend away. Rosebud lives and breathes by Juniper’s attention, and is frequently crushed when she doesn’t have time with her big sis.

And inevitably, after some time away, they have a transition process. They have to transition back to our rules, our expectations and our household rhythm. They also have to adjust to each other. Transitioning back to us usually involves some level of temper tantrum/attitude. Usually takes about an hour, depending on the duration of the absence.

Their transition time with each other usually goes something like this:

Rosebud to Juniper: Play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me.

Juniper to Rosebud: I’m tired. I don’t want to play.

Rosebud to Juniper: Play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me, play with me.

Me to Rosebud: Leave Juniper be!

Rosebud leaves Juniper alone.

Minutes elapse.

Juniper to Rosebud: Wanna play?

Rosebud: Okay!

They disappear for hours, emerging only to demand snacks and occasional attendance for restaurant openings, tea parties and fashion shows.

It’s tiring to get them through these transitions. They happen every week. I hope that they’re as adaptable as they seem to be. I hope that they remember growing up as a joyous thing.

I hope.

Posted in In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Juniper, Rosebud, Thunks, divorce, family | 4 Comments »

Happy yay-you-haven’t-killed-each-other!

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

I make no secret of the fact that I am the product of a marriage that didn’t last. Heck, both of my parents have been married and subsequently divorced twice over.

I didn’t want to get a divorce. But I did. And now that’s done.

However, due to my own experiences in the matter, or perhaps some native curiosity in my system, I’m a bit of a student of long-term relationships. I’ve been known to ask acquaintances about their relationships, if they happen to be in long-term ones.

Do you know what I ask?

I ask if their partner is their best friend.

Too often, this produces an utterly flummoxed look.

Too often, I’m surprised by this fact. It’s as though they’ve never considered it, or hadn’t considered it in so long that it’s like a brand new thought.

Since I didn’t have a model for what constitutes a good long-term relationship as I was growing up, I used to ask the question based on my own original premise (fabricated in my own little nugget-brain) that friendship is what makes people stick together in the long run.

I kept believing this, despite the fact that many people I asked over the years didn’t really know if their partner of 20 years or more was their best friend. I kept believing this despite the fact that my first marriage didn’t last, though I based a lot of my faith in it on the idea that we were friends.

Now, after having lost that love and finding a deeper, richer love, I think my ideas about what makes a good relationship have changed. I’ve incorporated more of the scary bits of what makes a new relationship good into my goals for the long-term, including discovery, need and attraction. I think of these as the scary bits because these are the things can change, evolve or die over time. I’d always thought the friendship part was eternal.

I no longer believe that the friendship aspect of a relationship is eternal. But I do still believe that there has to be a core of friendship in order for it to survive.

So I keep looking for that core in other relationships. Admittedly, less often than I used to. When what you’re already doing with your partner feels solid and right, the reference points matter less.

For example,  almost immediately after I met Buddy’s parents, CH and Bobby, I wanted to dust off the old question. I wanted to ask it because they seemed like they had the friendship thing down pat. When they come over for dinner, they’ll often arrive at different times, having come from two different places. And then they’ll immediately launch into conversation with each other about their days, who they saw and what they did. It’s nice to see.

It’s more than nice. It’s . . . relieving. It’s good to know that, even after many years of marriage (35 or so, methinks), they still want to talk to each other. They still want to share stories about their days. They still like each other’s company.

It’s their anniversary tomorrow. Usually, that merits congratulations, doesn’t it? Sort of a “hey, you survived! You haven’t murdered each other!” deal.

The thought I have for their anniversary is somewhat different. My urge is to say thank you. Thank you for sticking together through the challenges of raising kids and being in each other’s space for decades. Thank you for working at it. Thank you for trying.

Most importantly (and perhaps, most selfishly) thank you for showing me, and Buddy, that it can be done, and done well. I may not find myself needing the reference point as much as I did before, but it certainly doesn’t hurt matters.

Posted in Getting older, Happiness, buddy, divorce, family | 10 Comments »

Do’s and Do not’s of Divorce on Facebook.

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

I’ve been meaning to write about this.  It’s been in mid-draft in my head for a while. However, now that I’ve seen this . . .

Well, let’s just say that I learned about Divorce on Facebook etiquette  during the demise of my eight-year-long relationship. Some of these tidbits of mannerly guidance are in the above-noted charming little video.

However, there are others I’d add that may or may not have any relation to my own personal experience. Maybe they’ll be useful to someone else along the way.

1) Do not send e- flowers to the person you’re fooling around with while you’re still living in the family home.

2) Do not, in a fit of rage, e-mail every mutual acquaintance of your former partner’s and yours and tell them that they must make a decision as to who they will be friends with. A codicil to this rule - do not make libelous accusations in the same e-mail. While Canada is by no means the most litigious society in the world, giving someone that kind of fuel in the midst of a heated custody suit will not serve you in good stead.

3) Do not post any notes that may be taken as suicidal. They may or may not result in multiple panicked phone calls from total strangers  in the middle of the night, leading to calls to police, other friends and family.

4) Do not e-make out with your new girlfriend in a Facebook setting.

5) Do not post nominally cryptic messages in your status update about how awful you think your ex is.

6) Do consider that most of the people you have friended on Facebook aren’t interested in your drama. And if they are, it’s purely for the entertainment value.

Just sayin’

Posted in Rant, divorce | 2 Comments »

Oh, the fewmanity.

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Dear Fates,

I do like a good day. I even like an interesting day. I do not, however, seem to fully appreciate the intricacies of a day bracketed by temper tantrums. Particularly when one originates from my boss, and the other originates from Rosebud - and both seem to be surpassingly cranky, irrational and altogether impossible to please.

I am not Dada, He Who Shall Remain In Palm Springs For The Remainder Of The Week Whist My Child Becomes Increasingly Nasty To Compensate.

I am not my boss reincarnate, She Who Knows All And Changes The Rules As Regularly As Most People Change Underwear And Perhaps More Often Than Some.

And neither of these things are things I can help. That I’m asked (nay, expected) to bear the brunt of these two realities seems a wee tad on the cruel side.

Just sayin’.

Posted in Being a girl, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Rant, Rosebud, divorce, family, work | 7 Comments »

Why children should rule the world.

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

On our way home after picking Rosebud up from Our Lady of Daycare, we were conversing (Conversating? Someone actually used that in a public speaking moment last week. Conversate? Really?) about one of the other children, and the fact that this little one was picked up by someone we didn’t recognize. Another man, not the child’s father. We were idly puzzling over this when Rosebud piped up from the back.

“Maybe she has two dads!”

My mind immediately went to the concept of same-sex marriage, and I marveled at how advanced the simple view of a child is. Two dads? Well, why the frog not?

While I mused, Buddy responded with, “Lucky girl!”

Quick as a flash, Rosebud offered her own retort, “I have two dads!”

Whoa.

There I was, eyes welling up, love in my heart and amazement in my brain. My little 3-and-a-half year old daughter had arrived at this realization - utterly unprompted and much earlier than I imagined possible. Another one of her crystalline moments - those moments that remind me that what I see as complicated and challenging, she sees as natural and normal. What I imagine as fraught with emotional difficulty, she takes in stride.

Such a simple statement, and such a sweet one. Rosebud has two dads. Sha. Doesn’t everyone?

I’m welling and fluttering, but Buddy is more cautious. He needs to ask. “Who is your other dad, Rosebud?”

“Well, you are, Buddy.”

And if there was a suspicious moisture around his eyeballs at this juncture, he could be forgiven, right?

Posted in Happiness, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Rosebud, buddy, divorce, family | 3 Comments »

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