My divorce years were rough. ROUGH, friends. It took 4 years from start to finish and we were in and out of mediations, court rooms, lawyer’s offices, and negotiations. You’d think we had a lot of assets to divide up or something, but we had almost none. The truth is my ex husband has a lot of learned narcissistic traits and he was repeating divorce in a way that was familiar to him: mimicking his own parent’s divorce. I don’t intend this to sound like I was the victim of our marriage or like I didn’t play a part in what was dysfunctional. I certainly did. But when it came to divorce I found myself dragged into a playbook I had witnessed once before and had no way of escaping. The only way out was through, so that’s the path I took: the one that went all the way through every minute of those 4 years.
A few years in my attorney told me it seemed like my ex husband wanted to drag it out, wanted to keep me engaged in a battle, wanted to punish me for leaving. He didn’t seem interested in negotiating. When I would agree to a compromise he would turn and ask for more. So we went round and round and round. All the while his new live-in girlfriend insisted on being cc’d on every coparenting email, wanted my kids to call her mom, stalked my social media from fake accounts, left icky comments, showed up to our court cases to sit in the back where I could see her, and left all 3 of our kids with the kind of trauma that led them to the refuge of therapy (bless child therapists). Those 4 years were an apocalyptic world that changed me, that changed us all.
This summer my divorce will have been finalized for 4 years and I’ve been doing some reflecting on what it took to not just survive that experience, but to intentionally choose the way I moved along a path I was forced to walk. Early on I made a conscious choice that would end up influencing every other decision I made: I chose to behave and respond based on who I am, not based on how he was treating me. I didn’t want to get to the end of my self liberation and discover I had become someone I didn’t like. I wanted to reach the end knowing I had operated from the kind of inner strength that comes from kindness, honesty, and boundaries set and held with compassion. In a nutshell: I chose the kind of karma I was cultivating and I stuck to it as best I could. Which means, I stumbled around a lot. I would wake up some days and think “today all I have for him is sheer hatred” and I let myself feel that, but I didn’t let myself act from it. Because, here’s the thing, the two of us chose this divorce but our kids didn’t. And my hatred for him, his hatred for me, would only end up poisoning 3 little people. Our kids were the ones who would suffer from that toxin and I refused to participate in that.
So here’s where we get to the one piece of advice that steadied me all the way through the divorce and continues to steady me even now. It’s so simple, but it’s so vital.
In a truly fair divorce no one wins. If one person leaves the divorce feeling like they got everything they wanted, it wasn’t a fair divorce. So first things first we can accept that we’re going to have to bend, stay fluid, decide what we’re willing to give up. And it will be harder than hard at times – you might lose something you were determined to hang onto. In fact, in one way or another, you will. You’ll lose the family system you once had, friends you thought you’d keep forever, the ability to be a part of every inch of parenting your kids, etc. You are going to lose some things in divorce, but you are adaptable and capable and something new will start to unfold in the place of that loss. I promise it will.
Here’s the gold though: the goal has to be that the kids win. You aren’t going to win. Your ex isn’t going to win. But the kids can win. If the mutual goal from the start is to prioritize what will keep the ground steady and clear for the kids, you’re all going to get through this far more intact than you would in an all out war. It doesn’t mean you won’t be angry or he won’t be making assumptions and running with them. It doesn’t mean you won’t close the bathroom door on Thanksgiving and weep where no one can hear you. It doesn’t mean it’ll be any easier at all. It’s just a single gift you can give your kids and might end up being the most meaningful gift they’ll ever receive.
I walked through my divorce with this goal in mind. My ex husband didn’t. So I guess you could say we were at an ongoing, looping impasse. He wanted to win. I wanted to get out and keep our kids from being harmed. And that’s where I truly learned that I couldn’t protect my kids from finding out who he was. It went against all the good girl training I had been indoctrinated into but I had to stop covering for him. I had to let him be exactly who he was, but that didn’t mean I had to leave my kids at his mercy. Instead I had to make sure they never heard me say a bad thing about him, never felt me handing over adult burdens, never involved them in the painful fracturing of a long marriage. There was an unfamiliar middle ground to walk in my divorce and it was the most complicated, painful road I’ve ever navigated.
Now, with 6 years left to go in coparenting, I realize that that early decision to live and act based on who I am, not on how someone else treats me, has changed the terrain of my life. Prioritizing our kids winning, deciding that me winning wasn’t the goal, brought me to the other side of divorce with a strong sense of being proud of who I’ve been. I did that ridiculously hard thing and I kept my heart soft while I did it. I set and held boundaries no matter how furiously he raged. I bit my tongue so hard it bled when my kids told me thing he said about me. I let go of things I felt like I needed, but were valuable trades for something my kids needed. I opened my hands and released people who couldn’t hold such hard ground with me. I faced the fractured, leaking parts of my own self and loved them back into being. I was angry and bitter and devastated at times, but I didn’t abandon myself or seek revenge. I did that and I’m so proud that I did.
If you’re in the throes of divorce right now I hope you feel my hands steady at your back. You can do this, friend. Choose your own path even if you have to walk in a direction you didn’t want to go. All of this is temporary and, at the end of it, I hope you’re so proud of who you were and who you’ve become.
