Arianna Huffington recently posted about a shared vacation with her ex husband. I admire that.
Divorce, when there are children involved, can be like having a chronic condition. You have to know what it is and manage it but on some level you have to accept it is there and will continue to be.
Even though my ex husband lives over 6,500 miles away we still must find ways to be more than civil to one another. Perhaps it’s post divorce zen of sorts but the fact remains that your children will observe how you chose to act and conduct yourselves.
Ours saw mom move out to her own place and be pretty staunch in the desire to earn her own keep on her own terms. They also saw their father fall in love with and marry a lovely woman who is Japanese. They saw him become more dedicated in wanting to learn the language fluently.
It also made me realize how important it is to extend, and genuinely so, olive branches and reach out to say something more than hello.
After all nothing is gained by having us versus them corners of parents replete with snippy remarks on one another’s lives and relationships.
You all end up having to stand together when someone is sick in the hospital, or graduates, or even gets married. Those moments are not about the parents. Years after the decree has got a few coffee stains and yellowing to it, the staunch glare with the subcontext of “You -insert term-” kind of loses its luster and is like flabby WWF wrestlers who are all schtick for schtick’s sake more than anything.
And you have to be practical too. He has stayed in my home while spending time with the boys. (Okay I was generally out of the country, or at the very least out of the state.) But how else does he have a chance to be in the role of father which means somebody’s got to cook breakfast and do laundry. It feels sort of odd to always do that from a hotel. No one who has children can place a value on what it means to tell a story at bed time, tuck the covers and close the light.
Acknowledging that and in some sense enabling the opportunity matters to the children. Of course there are limits in how much one can do to try to encourage fathers and sons to pick up the phone or ping on the skype, but one can’t in good conscience try to undermine it.
Enough friends have told me about ongoing consults with therapists because there is a hurt that resonates on a visceral level when the only thing children observe is nastiness tempered with subtle requests from each side of the ring to cheer one and not the other. Nobody’s Lord Voldemort here.
As a mother though it hits a different sort of a chord.
Another woman who would know and be a part of my son’s lives. It is my responsibility and some kind of an obligation even to be kind and to give a little insight into who the boys are and what they life to do- which is different from what their father would say. Going out to dinner as group would not be unreasonable at all. And it shows the children that love for them transcends arguments and irreconcilable differences. It sets up a paradigm that yes people can and should be respectful to one another and no life is not a frozen moment of hurt.
But until you are in the middle of this, it is like trying to explain snow- what does it sound like when it falls, what is like to walk through, what are the different kinds- a fresh cover, a sheet of ice, something gray and black with the soot of cars and why would you go to shovel with short sleeves on. The whole context is completely foreign.
In someways it’s like teaching the mechanics of grammar in another language. The verbs don’t conjugate as you would expect and the parts of the sentence- they are assembled differently. This is okay. These sentences though can be precise and clear and they may be able to capture and embody an idea that we could never say in usual English. Call it verbability.