Facts:

• Divorce requires two houses
• Two houses are not optimal for child-rearing

How do you raise a healthy child in two houses? First you have to want to. Your focus must be on the health of your child, not your own needs and wants. Your job is to be a good co-parent in spite of your frustrations and fears. Trying to be a good parent is hard enough; trying to be a good co-parent is practically self-immolating.   You will never have full control; there will always be competing interests and influences.   How to manage this?

Pray for grace every day. Every day there will be opportunities to signal to the child that the other parent is wrong or lesser or doesn’t know as much about the child as you do, or multiple other ways to fight for the child’s allegiance. Do not succumb to these opportunities…ever.

Support the other parent where you agree AND where you disagree. A simple example: one parent believes in a strict bedtime, the other does not. At the bedtime house you’ll hear “but I get to stay up at Hunter’s house!” and at the no-bedtime house you’ll hear “can I sleep with you tonight?” How should each parent react to these questions? Commonly the response would be something like “No two houses are the same in every way. It’s just different here.”  OR “at Hunter’s house you get to learn some skills that older girls usually learn. Going to bed at the same time is a good idea. Just because there isn’t a strict bedtime doesn’t mean you can’t go to bed at your normal time.”

Neither of these statements say anything bad about the other parent but neither are they supportive. A child wants to know you’re on the same page in every way; that’s what makes them feel safe and secure. Since it’s impossible to be on the same page in every way, how do you help your child still feel safe and secure? Try something like this:

“Your mom/dad and I grew up a little differently. At her/his house they had a strict bedtime and at my house we didn’t. Hunter’s way is a good way, and my way is a good way. You’ll see.”

Give a short and understandable reason for the difference and then embrace both methods. Whatever you do, DO NOT ask the child which way they like better. This is unnerving to a young child, and indulgent for an older child. Even if they appear calm about it, here’s what they are thinking: “Parents are supposed to know this stuff, not expect me to figure it out!” or “got my way again! Yay!” Asking children questions as to what they want or need promotes anxiety and also has other unfortunate side effects – like entitlement – that reveal themselves later.

Do not dredge up the past. What happened before the split is none of the child’s business. Knowing about your past adult lives is highly likely to simply increase anxiety. She has two parents. She needs both parents. To be a healthy adult, a child needs a relationship protected from the adult matters like whether one of you is an alcoholic or had an affair or works so much he/she can’t pay attention to the family. Whatever caused the split is history and should be kept that way. No matter way you say, the child will have his/her own ways to determine the truth over time. If you’ve portrayed a parent he/she loves in a particularly negative way, that will come back against you in ways you may or may not perceive.

What do you do when questions about history arise? A dialogue might go something like this:

Child: “Why did you and Hunter split up?”

Parent: “Those are adult issues, not for talking about now. And when you’re old enough to understand such matters, I won’t tell you then either.”

Child: “What?!?”

Parent: “A relationship between two people has ups and downs. If I’m not going to tell you about every up, I’m not going to tell you about every down. I will say my partner was a great partner and our time came to an end for a lot of reasons.”

Child: “But why did you fall our of love?”

Parent: “We didn’t fall out of love. We feel into a different kind of love. There’s an old saying that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. Hunter is my neighbor and I love him like a neighbor.

Child: “But Hunter says he/she hates you.”

Parent: “Divorce is difficult emotionally. There are questions that sometimes don’t have answers. Just remember I love him/her like a neighbor.”

Create a schedule and stick to it.   There is nothing more disruptive to a child’s sense of security than wondering where he is going to spend the night. If there are new options every day, that only maximizes the anxiety. If the child controls where she lives, the child will learn she is the parent and you are the child.

There is no perfect schedule   Every permutation has been tried and all have flaws. In order to do the best you can, try to evaluate the environment that would best suit your child. An anxious child requires no deviates from a plan that is simple, very easy to understand, and immutable. It never changes. An anxious child needs fewer transitions, not more. A more self-confident child might be able to tolerate transitions better, but they still suffer in external ways. Friends don’t know where to reach them; other parents are put off by worrying if they will embarrass themselves by calling the wrong household.

If a child cannot put his/her head on the same pillow every night, the child has to have the second best thing: the same pillow on some nights and a second same pillow on others. Consistency at bedtime is one of the most important acts that can reduce anxiety. It one parent sings a certain song to the child, the other parent should learn that song. If one parent reads the same two or three books, so should the other parent. If one parent has a prayer handed down from her grandmother, the other parent needs to adopt it. Bedtime is already a time of heightened separation anxiety. To reduce that anxiety, focus on making your routines as much the same as possible.

Take the other parents’ side or say nothing.   Children learn the manipulation game early. They know how to get something they want when one parent has denied it; they know how to hurt a parent when they want to. The tools in their arsenal are far more potent than in the child of an intact family’s.

When a child is trying to manipulate you into getting something to which the other parent has said no, you must agree to the no even though it may be a request or an object to which you would have agreed.   The first time manipulation works – and it will – you’ve got to regroup and try again. It’s the best game divorced children can play and its consequences are serious: let that process work for a few years and before you notice you’ll have created a manipulative, self-absorbed, entitled person.

It’s a tough ballgame when a child says something that hurts you, especially using the other parent as a tool: “I love Hunter more! You’re awful!” These statements are usually said as a manipulative tool of some kind or in reaction to some piece of good parenting that the child objects to.   In any and all cases, the only response is to ignore their statements and continue what you are doing. To ask them a bunch of questions about their feelings is the worst thing you can do. The second worse thing you can do is get mad and react.   This is where you pray for grace and let it all go.

A child can also hurt you in total innocence. “Hunter makes better cookies than you do.” “Hunter’s house is bigger than yours.” Hunter sings bedtime songs better than you do.”  Best not to engage but don’t ignore either. All such statements should be answered with that wonderful universal parental non-communication communication: “hmmm…”

You may start a game that was a special tradition in your family, and the child will say “I don’t want to play this game. We play UNO at Hunter’s and it’s a lot more fun.” Since an action is required you can’t ignore it. Here, it’s important to agree with the child and then you can choose whether to play your game or go with UNO. Saying “I love UNO too, let’s play that” can open up opportunities to play your game another day. Or you can say “I love UNO too. Today let’s play this and then our next game can be UNO.” If the child balks, play UNO. It’s not the end of the world. Insisting on playing your game can ruin the day for everyone.

If you think this list is too demanding or asks too much of you, if you’re too hurt, if you’re too angry, if you think the other parent is a slut or a liar or a cheat or mean or just plain wrong – too bad. Go suck your thumb somewhere other than in your child-rearing.   Raising children is not for children or for being childish.

PS: of course there are the basics. These recommendations have been written with the assumption that the reader is a relatively evolved person. But in case you’re still evolving:

• Do not sue each other under any circumstances. Never! Ever! For any reason! The courts don’t solve anything; they make it worse. If you are sued, do your best to maintain the normalcy of your child’s life.
• Do not criticize, condemn, or complain about the other parent to or around your child. Your child needs to be able to love both parents; why are you creating a hateful picture of someone who will be in his/her life forever?
• Make sure all of your “venting to friends” occurs outside the house when the child has no chance, no matter how remote, of hearing your vitriol.   (But the best thing you can do is to stop venting. Venting only reinforces your anger. Anger only makes you a poor parent. Accept the reality of your situation; don’t fight it.)
• Do not expect your spouse to be any different than he/she was when you were married to him/her.  All of the good , the bad, and the ugly will still be there except you will perceive the bad and the ugly as worse than when you were married. That’s a change in you, not a change in your former spouse. Get over it.

“Fatal Attraction” is the editor’s titillating title for an article (link below) that puts an analytic spin on something we’ve all seen: getting tired of a significant trait in your partner, a trait that once attracted you. A little story: You went to the store, you searched through all the steaks. You found one better than the others in every way. Even though this was not the usual steak you buy – it had a bone in it – you liked the bone because you know it will give the meat a richer flavor. Later pulling it out of the refrigerator, you’re surprised by the bone. You never bought a steak before with a bone in it. What were you thinking? You’re tempted to take the steak back to the store. But then you think of the conversation with the clerk and realize it will be difficult, probably impossible, to take the steak back. You’re going to have to say all sorts of bad things about the steak that you know aren’t true. Like “this steak is rotten.” But the steak isn’t rotten, it just has a bone in it. So the steak and the bone are staying. And the bone is always going to be in the steak. How do you deal with it? The article contains some pretty good advice. My contribution: ask yourself, are you going to accept the bone or try to change it? Try to change the bone? Good luck to you. The bone’s not gonna change. No, no, the only way to go: accept the bone! Love the bone! Work around the bone. Learn to cherish the bone! And most of all, when you find yourself disappointed or irritated or furious at the bone, lighten up a bit. The bone hasn’t done anything to you, the bone is just the bone you bought.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/how-to-cope-when-you-and-your-partner-are-falling-out-of-love-1406588472?KEYWORDS=fatal+attraction

Advice from my grandmother: “Never let him know you can mow.” 

Throughout my grandmother’s life and marriage, gender roles were well defined and generally understood.  To the extent she let her partner know that she could take on his roles as well as her own was to increase her workload and resentment and decrease his sense of responsibility and pride of accomplishment.   

Today’s aversion to gender-based roles with none to take their place means we are constantly letting him/her “know [we] can mow.”   When one person stops doing what he/she thought had been his/her role because the other started doing it, both wonder about the seemingly invisible source of the tension.  To the extent the old gender-based roles no longer hold, whether by virtue of a change in expectations, income production, same sex relationship, or multitudinous other reasons, the uncertainty breeds friction and lop-sided responsibilities.   

As in so many other aspects of marriage, happiness lies in communication.    Should you keep lists of who does what?  A weekly rotation of irksome chores?   Tally up the tasks at the end of the week and decide who buys whom dinner?   Any of these methods can be effective.  But I will admit, now in my third marriage where gender-based roles are mostly adopted and assumed, dare I say this politically incorrect thought: it works really well. 

Great wedding advice: can you ever have too much?  This column from the June 13^th’s Boston Globe is well worth reading…the comments too.  

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/06/13/advice-from-years-marriage/GBJoTrEesk3gYsqG4n72DL/story.html?s_campaign=8315

My favorite among the several good ones is this: “You know when you’re lying in bed and there’s a line down the middle, and you’ve had a massive fight?  I put my toe over the line.”   Yes choosing to overlook the irritants is important, as is practically a saintly level of forgiveness.  Some people think it stops there: “Well, I forgave him/her, isn’t that what matters?”   Yes and no.  It does matter.  But more than forgiveness is reconciliation.  You could make the case that forgiveness with distance isn’t forgiveness.  I find forgiveness with distance simply ineffective in the relationship.  If you have too much pride to be the one who sticks his/her toe across the middle, then you’re putting your pride before the relationship.  Thus starts the simmering pot that will boil over again.  Forgiveness requires the complete act of reconciliation, either by bravely initiating it or by gracefully accepting it.

Also, in the comments section, there is one piece of “good advice” on which I blogged the opposite on June 3.   There are several great bits of advice in the column and a couple not-so-good bits.  Any on that page, or from this blog, that would make a difference in your relationship? 

After reading the first entries in this blog, a friend of mine remarked that they primarily reflect pain.  While I hadn’t felt that as I wrote, there is no question her observation is true.  My parents didn’t get along for 56 years; I’m in my third marriage.  So, this blog may not resonate with those of you raised in happy families spawned by a good marriage.   Or perhaps you married/are marrying a person from very different background, a mixture of a dysfunctional family and happy one: read on.

It is worth contemplating the notion that we all marry our parents in some way or another (although this usually isn’t evident until years later).  If you grew up with a good model, chances are you’ll have a good marriage.  I grew up with one alcoholic parent and one angry one.   There were legitimate reasons for both, but a kid couldn’t see that.  Had counseling and introspection been fashionable at the time, maybe they could have averted the tragedy they lived.  They modeled poor relationship skills and embodied little notion of respect and affection for each other. Yet I’ve married characteristics of both of my parents in all three marriages.  The good news is I finally picked their best attributes instead of their most injurious.

So this blog is about my painful road to a good marriage, what I’ve learned from understanding my parent’s marriage and all three of mine.  My disfigured marital history is a part of me, and I am thankful for the wisdom thus gained.  It has equipped me for the deeply satisfying and contented marriage I have today.

Let’s say you’ve hit a rough patch.  This could be a divorce-threatening rough patch or just any old rough patch.   So you talk to your friends about it, right?  About the inadequacies of your spouse, the injustices you have to carry every day.  You ask your friends, “Why doesn’t s/he clearly see how wrong s/he is?”   Your friends are likely to be nodding in agreement, “you poor baby,” and “you’re so right,” or they simply join in the criticism of your partner.  Says your friend “I never thought he/she was your type” or “he/she has never put you first.”  That’s the kind of support you can expect from most “friends”. 

Here’s the first big problem: your behavior.  Do you talk about your other friends that way?  Why, in adulthood, is the last person you stop being catty about is your best friend, your partner, your wife/husband?   You’ve matured to the point you don’t talk about other friends to friends, yet you still believe it’s OK to talk about your spouse.  What if your beloved (supposedly) actually heard what you were saying?  Would you be embarrassed?  Would you be sorry?  Would your relationship suffer?

A second big problem: venting to your friends tends to reinforce your view of the world instead of thinking about your partner’s view of the world. Spoken words intensify your beliefs.  The more often you cite the same complaint, the deeper you hold it.  Whereas before you thought you might be right, now you know you are right.  And the more friends you talk to the more right you get.  Well, that’s sure helpful, isn’t it?   Nope.  It’s not.   What do you learn from listening only to people who agree with you?

If you are lucky enough to have a friend who will be truthful with you, who will tell you that you are wrong, who will tell you that being right isn’t as important as being in the relationship, that’s a friend worth talking to.   A good and true and thoughtful friend will search for your partner’s viewpoint.  This friend will help you see where you might be wrong, to help you go home committed to smoothing out the rough patch instead of knowing how right you are.  This friend is worth listening to.

Stress is the enemy of the businessman.  It’s also the enemy of a good marriage. When you’re facing significant stressors – a marathon of overwork is behind you and another one is in front of you.  Or you’ve just had your second child.  Or you’ve had to move and your first house isn’t selling for what you bought it.  Or one or both of you is miserable in your job/s, feeling trapped.  These are the times you start snapping at each other, often without even noticing.  However, one of you will notice: the emotion may fade away for the snap-er, less likely so for the snap-ee.  As your spouse becomes the sponge for your stress, he or she will begin to protect him/herself emotionally.  Distance in a couple usually starts here.  That distance can grow faster than you think.  To keep this from happening: apologize, better with hug than without, but even the bare apology works wonders.  The apology is essential, no matter how small the snap.  

Even more important than the apology, though, is snap prevention.  Work with your partner to intentionally disrupt the cycle of stress.  “Date night” is one strategy but only if it’s used right.  Going out to dinner so exhausted you only bore each other will increase stress.  Disrupting the stress cycle requires knowledge of who you are as individuals and as a couple, and what gives you pleasure and relief.   Two proven stress releasers: laughter and exercise.  Go to a funny movie, race each other, do something silly with friends.  Figure out what works for you.  Do this often.  Do this when you are least likely to feel like doing it, that’s when you’ll need it the most. 

I wish I’d found this quote before I wrote about the Mutual Non-irritation Pact.  William James summed it up nicely:  “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”  Generally speaking, the more irritants you overlook, the happier the marriage.

Sometimes he/she drives you crazy!  And it’s more than just the toothpaste tube cap.  It’s leaving all the kitchen cabinet doors open.   It’s clothes strewn all over the floor.  It’s never picking up the mail.  It’s never – ever – picking the restaurant.  It’s answering the phone every time it rings no matter what the two of you are engaged in.  It’s asking you questions while you are obviously in the middle of something important.  It’s yelling at you from another room.  But you don’t say anything because “these are small things,” right?  Oh, you seething mass you!  Or you do say something.  Every time, all the time, you can’t help yourself.  You exasperated nag, what a joy to be around you!  How to stop the madness?  What you need to recognize is that there are two parties to irritation, the irritator and the irritatee.  The irritatee can do very little to change the irritator, but the irritatee does have one extremely powerful tool: he/she can choose not to get irritated. The cabinet door is open.  Look at it.  Close it, gently.  Smile at the thought of your darling spouse’s eccentricities.   It is a choice to be or not to be … irritated.  This tool is most powerfully executed in the Mutual Non-Irritation Pact.  Both of you choose to accept the annoying habits of the other without irritation.  It’s surprisingly easy to do and it’s a nice way to live.