Since My Divorce ...

He isn’t going to change and I deserve better

2010-03-14T23:41:35Z

Today, I’d like to introduce you to LA Single Mama. She’s been divorced now for six years and was 33 at the time. She and her husband were together for seven years and have a son. He’s seven now and yes, that means he was barely a year old when LA Single Mama’s marriage ended. In fact, he was the catalyst for the divorce. Before you get upset about that, I will tell you that LA Single Mama and her ex are another successful co-parenting story and LA Single Mama believes her ex is a better dad now than he would have had they stayed married.

Although LA Single Mama knew her husband wasn’t entirely happy, the divorce came as a surprise. Here’s how she describes it.

***

Once our child was born, he wasn’t sure he could handle everything and he wasn’t sure he loved me any longer. It’s wasn’t like we were head over heels in love. Things had cooled down and I thought our relationship was just more of your everyday relationship. So it wasn’t an entire surprise to me he wasn’t happy but it was a surprise that he was so unhappy that he wanted a divorce.

I think having our son pushed him in that direction. He panicked about the idea of having a wife and a child and being responsible for everything and everyone. So about two months after our son was born, he decided to move out. Then he moved in and out of our house several times for six months and finally, I put my foot down and said,

“Either you’re staying or you’re going.”

He didn’t know what he wanted to do so I decided I was going.

I think I put up with him moving in and out because I was willing to give him a bit of time. It’s so overwhelming to have a child and to all of a sudden be a grown up. But there were a couple of things that helped me see that things needed to change.

The first Christmas after my son was born, we were supposed to be at my family’s house and my ex at first decided he wasn’t going and then he finally did show up. When he was there, he was a jerk to everybody and it really upset me, not only because it was our son’s first Christmas but also because he’d never been as accommodating to my family or to anything I wanted, as I was to him. I don’t know why I was so surprised because he wasn’t much worse than usual. It wasn’t that he went out of his way to be rude but that he was never interested in anything I liked or wanted to do or my family. There was something about that one time, I guess it was having our son, that made me realize he was never going to change and that if I stayed then that was the way it was always going to be.

I wish I had been stronger at that point but it took him moving in and out all those times before I was able to put my foot down. I felt guilt to some extent because I did know what he was like before I married him although I didn’t think he’d be as bad as he was or as selfish as he was.

Having my son also really made me feel that I deserved a lot more than I’d ever thought before. I think giving someone else unconditional love made me see that I deserved that love too. I deserved to be treated well. I guess I thought would I want this for my child? And if not, then why would I want it for myself?

***

I think tolerating her husband moving in and out is very understandable. For starters, having a newborn baby to take care of absorbs most of your energy and those nights of disturbed sleep also impact your decision-making and judgment abilities. In addition, there’s huge societal expectations that the arrival of a new baby is a joyous occasion oozing with love and adoration. I think LA Single Mama was swimming against the tide and I give her more credit than she’s giving herself for confronting her husband and saying enough is enough.

I was married for almost 17 years and the belief that divorce was not an option, kept me from confronting issues between my husband and I. I just thought that since we were married, that was it and somehow I’d muddle through and we’d work it out. Obviously, that wasn’t a recipe for happiness and it wasn’t until I accepted that divorce was an option that I really did confront some of the issues. By then, it was too late to save our marriage.

Photo Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10557486@N04/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Reconstruction Zone

2010-03-12T22:39:51Z

I am doing construction work on my site this weekend. You’re still very welcome to browse but please know, my site doesn’t usually look like this!

And, as always, your comments are welcome.

Photo Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15708236@N07/ / CC BY 2.0

12 Ways to heal a broken heart

2010-03-12T04:01:56Z

Thanks to everyone who entered my giveaway for Susan Piver’s The Wisdom of a Broken Heart. There were lots of great suggestions and tips for healing a broken heart and because I know it’s easy to miss comments on posts, I thought I would capture those comments here.

Write about it

Realize the divorce is for the better

Stay friends with your spouse

Prayer and reflection

Online support groups and books, reading about other people’s experiences

Cry, daily if necessary

Keep busy with life’s details

The passage of time

Your children

Do activities that you love that perhaps you haven’t had time for

Understand what it was about your spouse you loved so much

Open your heart to your spouse’s new love

Most of these I can identify with. Two that challenge me are staying friends with your spouse and welcoming your spouse’s new love. I think the first would apply where you and your spouse were good friends even at the end of your marriage. Maybe if you weren’t friends it would be possible to become friends afterward and that might help. I don’t know – I wouldn’t have called my spouse my confidante and that was definitely part of the problem.

As to accepting your spouse’s new love – I could see that happening maybe over time but I can imagine that some serious counseling/therapy would help to get to that place.

I want to add one more and that would be to tell people instead of putting on a brave face or keeping that stiff upper lip. I do believe, if you share your pain, you will be surrounded with love and support.

I love this photo – most of the photos on my blog come from flickr.com and I just happened across this one. It’s by Hayley Bouchard and with the photo she has posted a poem. It starts with:

Do not write love poems.

Forgive yourself for the one morning you didn’t kiss him awake while the alarm clock rang.

Let yourself cry when you realise you don’t remember the last time he said “I love you”.

And again, when you know exactly when you said “I love you” last, and it didn’t matter to him anymore.

I’m not a huge poetry fan but this one grabbed my attention and I read it all the way through. The poem is credited to sweet-lyrical.deviantart.com and I don’t know if that is also Hayley but I couldn’t find the poem itself at this website. Anyway, it’s a beautiful poem and if you have just two more minutes click on the photo credit link to Flickr. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Photo Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/questa/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

What is a divorce coach?

2010-03-11T00:20:01Z

This is the last in my series on the Divorce Encouragist and what strikes me about her story, is that divorce for her really has been a new beginning. It’s changing the course of her life. Not only did she start relishing life after divorce , she saw the injustice of divorce and has started on the path to become a divorce coach. In fact, DE was headed off to a training course the weekend after our interview. Since this is, I believe a relatively new profession, I asked DE to explain what a divorce coach does. Here’s how she described it.

***

Divorce coach is about helping people through the process, helping people to set goals and adhere to them. It’s much more motivational and directional than therapy. It’s about moving forward.

I found a site, Emerge Victorious that offers divorce coach training and I contacted the founder, Sandra Dopf and I explained that I don’t have any previous coaching experience – my day job is in marketing. She explained there’s two main tracks people take. One is to help people through the actual process, through the lawyers, the litigation, the therapy, the mediation, all the guts of it. The other part is on the other end, helping people rebuild their lives.

I’m very interested in the guts part of it. I want to help people focus on their goals and not get tied up in their emotions. I’ve blogged about how people get so angry and they go into their lawyers office and say, ‘I’m so angry because he did this‘ and the lawyer says,’That’s terrible. Let me write a letter to his lawyer and send you a bill for $1,000.‘ That doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t help people get through the process any better. It’s counter-productive.

What I’m about is helping people have better divorces. I don’t think divorce is a bad thing. I think it’s a valid option for people who are desperately unhappy. I don’t think it has to be this ugly, messy litigation nightmare.

***

DE is hoping to become a full-time divorce coach and I wish her luck. She so passionate about this and being able to make a difference, I think she’ll be successful. I want to check back with her in a year to see what’s happened. I’m hoping she’ll keep visiting here to share some of her coaching insights

I do think there’s a role for a divorce coach – for example, I had never heard of a collaborative divorce before I interviewed Kathleen Christensen. I think a collaborative divorce would have worked for my ex and I. Maybe if I’d had a divorce coach, she would have been able to tell me that was an option. But that’s a benefit I can see in hindsight. I’m trying to think if I would have been interested in paying for a coach going naively into the process?

If you wanted to work with Sandra Dopf of Emerge Victorious, she charges $400 a month for weekly 45 minute sessions. I think if I had a sense that what I paid a coach would save me legal fees, I’d sign up. What about you – would you have paid for a coach? Is this a service you’d have to cost justify or would it be worth it regardless of potential cost savings? What price can you put on less painful divorce?

A big thank you to the Divorce Encouragist (@dvrncouragist) for sharing her story.

The injustice of divorce

2010-03-10T20:48:26Z

Divorce for anyone is a time of upheaval and change. How much change varies from person to person. My divorce happened at the same time I was going through a career change – I can’t say that one was caused by the other but the two were definitely connected. I was approaching 50 and on a quest to find happiness.

The Divorce Encouragist was 27 when she got divorced. She started relishing life after divorce from her husband of 20 months (they’d been together for five years). She also started her blog – The Divorce Encouragist. DE’s parents were divorced and she says her experience of divorce as a child and then her own divorce left her noticing the injustice that happens with divorce. She’s on a mission to change that …

***

When I was 13-years-old, I overheard my parents talking about their separation. I heard my dad say,

“I know you’re the woman and I know you’re automatically going to get everything, so I’m not going to bother fighting you and going to court. You can just have the house and the kids. I’ll go away and take them every other weekend.”

At that point I thought, that really sucks. It shouldn’t be like that.

For a long time I toyed with the idea of becoming a divorce attorney. Then I got a bit closer to divorce attorneys through my process and through my boyfriend’s divorce and I decided I didn’t want to be one anymore. Then I started looking into being a mediator or a family therapist or a divorce coach.

This passion has been in me for a long time. A couple of years ago I started collecting books on the topic. When I realized I was happy about getting divorced, I went looking for books about divorce being a good thing. I loved The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart by Constance Ahrons. She has a really good outlook on the whole process and talks about how different couples handled things and the difference outcomes.

I read her follow-up book, We’re Still Family: What Grown Children Have to Say about Divorce and her subjects said they were still a family years later, that their parents were divorced but they still came to weddings and birthday parties for the kids and that they still felt they had a family.

Well, that’s how I feel too. So then I started looking at bad divorces and parental alienation syndrome and co-parents fighting and bad things happen to kids in those situations.

A friend of mine was going to court one day and invited me to join him because he knew how passionate I was and he knew I would value the experience of being there. It was very educational.

Then I started listening to motivational CDs in my car and I was listening to Better Than Good: Creating a Life You Can’t Wait to Live by Zig Ziglar. He said, if you’re really passionate about something, you should move towards it and immerse yourself in it. That’s why I started the blog.

I’m enjoying it. A lot of doors have opened up and I’ve met a lot of people. It’s been a great experience. I didn’t really have any expectations for the blog and I’m still learning. But I’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback from people and that means a lot to me. People have enjoyed what I’m writing. People have found it helpful and that makes me feel so good.

***

The Divorce Encouragist is now working on becoming a divorce coach and in my last post in this series, she’ll tell us what a divorce coach does.

I love the passion DE has for working to make divorce a better experience. While all the women I’ve interviewed have said they’ve come away from divorce with some valuable lessons about themselves and life, no one says it’s easy. Divorce is always painful but it isn’t the end of the world and if we can make the process less traumatic, then I’m certain that will make the years that follow better.

BTW … if you’ve had the news on the last few days you will have heard about Amazon summarily firing all it’s affiliates in Colorado because of a change in Colorado’s sales tax law. Not that I was making any money from Amazon, but I was an affiliate and as of now I won’t be linking to them an more. The links above go directly to the author’s site and that’s what I’ll be doing from now on. I probably won’t be buying from Amazon anymore either. I’d love to remove all the old links but that’s some housekeeping to do unless someone has a nifty little plugin to do that.

Relishing life after divorce

2010-03-10T00:45:06Z

Yesterday, the Divorce Encouragist (@dvrcncouragist) shared how adjusting to less money after divorce was a challenge. I think having less money after divorce is the one universal truth about divorce – is there ANYONE who has more money after divorce?

I think it’s an easy assumption that if you have less money, it means doing less. For the Divorce Encouragist though this wasn’t the case. Looking back on the three years since her divorce, she says her most significant accomplishment was to rebuild her life into something she wanted to participate in. As I listened to her, I could hear how she was relishing her life now. Here’s DE…

***

When I was married, I was depressed and I was tired all the time. I got up and went to work in the morning and I got home from work, slept on the couch and watched 90210 reruns on the soap opera channel. I didn’t do much. I guess I was trying to sleep it off. I was getting through the days by sleeping and throughout the days I was thinking the sooner I go to sleep, the sooner this day will be over.

Then, when I was moving into my place, I had this epiphany. My dad helped me move in a new stereo and we put on this old Pink Floyd record. I sat down on the floor, I didn’t have any furniture yet, and I just laid back and realized I was in this space that was MINE. It was an a-ha moment. I was going to fill it with whatever I wanted and I was going to do what I wanted. I had my life back! I was very happy and I started laughing until I was crying. My dad didn’t know what to do.

I don’t sleep on the couch anymore and now I’m staying up till one o’clock in the morning every night.

I’ve done so many things since I left. I went back to school and finished my Bachelor’s degree. I took a yoga class, I took a photography class, I took a parenting class and I’ve made new friends.I moved closer to my job so I don’t have to commute so far. I have a boyfriend now and we go out, we go snowboarding or out to dinner. I roller-skate. I didn’t do anything at all before.

I have more energy now and I’m much happier. People tell me I seem much happier and that I seem like a different person now.

***

Do you remember that feeling of being drained of energy? I do. It almost didn’t matter what it was, it always seemed like work and I certainly wasn’t enjoying it. Then, when we separated, I felt taller, and could literally feel the energy rushing through my limbs.

DE’s divorce has changed the path of her life – obviously. She wouldn’t be going by “the Divorce Encouragist” otherwise. More than just a twitter identity, DE has the Divorce Encouragist blog and is working on becoming a divorce coach. She’ll be sharing more about both of these topics in the last two posts of this series so I hope you’ll be back to visit.

Photo Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gomisan/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Making do with less money after divorce

2010-03-07T18:36:51Z

Hi everyone! Happy Monday morning! Hope you’ve all had a wonderful weekend. I’ve had kind of a lazy but social one – been out for spur of the moment coffee three different times, saw Alice in Wonderland with my son (loved it!) and enjoyed a blissfully quiet Sunday morning while my kids snoozed late.

One of the friends I’d called for coffee explained she’d been feeling depressed and would otherwise have curled up for a nap. My call was serendipity and sometimes there’s serendipity in blogging. Like right now … this weekend I saw a tweet from @TsQuest and @Runpippirun about getting together to help Single Mom Says celebrate her fortieth birthday. I’m also at the point in the Divorce Encouragist’s story where I asked her what was particularly hard for her after her divorce. The two might seem unconnected but DE answered my question with “adjusting to having less money.” Before I tell you more about the send Single Mom Says to Vegas movement, here’s what DE said living with fewer dollars after divorce.

***

I don’t want to say it was difficult but it was definitely a change. It was something I wasn’t used to, not that I’m a big spender or irresponsible with money. However, my budget was suddenly cut and I had to downsize everything. So where I used to be able to go to Target and spend $150 and it wasn’t a big deal, suddenly it was a big deal. I can’t just go do that.

My husband and I had a used car business. I had been driving a Volvo and then an Audi and then I had a supercharged Grand Prix. Now I have a 2003 Saturn Ion. I really like cars so that was a bit of an adjustment but that was the car I asked for because I knew it was practical and something I could put my dogs in.

My house is half the size of the house I left. That wasn’t really difficult but it was a noticeable adjustment. I picked out new furniture that I could afford and it was this nice, big cushy couch and loveseat but it barely fits in my tiny little living room. I hadn’t thought about that!

It’s definitely an adjustment that I’m conscious of but it’s not making me miserable. I left so much misery behind. I’m so much happier now. Every sacrifice I made has been worth it.

***

I like DE’s perspective on this – the material possessions matter less, the functionality of items matter more because what matters most is being happy and if that means less money then it means less money.

My post-divorce life was an adjustment for me too but I can’t say it was solely because of the divorce. I was also in the middle of a career change and had decided I would do whatever I could to be at home in the afternoon for when my kids finished school. I am fortunate that I have a chunk of savings to live off and I’m working part-time to stretch those further. The job also gives me health insurance which is a huge relief. But I’ve trimmed back discretionary purchases significantly, and have become quite the comparison shopper.

Now the connection with Single Mom Says. I don’t know much about Mindy Mom of Single Mom Says - I do know she’s mom to four daughters and Bank of America (shame on you) has been giving her quite the run around with a rate modification on her mortgage. All the time, she’s paying her mortgage in full and on time. I know how frustrating that is – for a while I was carrying two mortgages and the bank on one of the mortgages refused to modify my loan rate because I had too much debt. Duh! Does it ever occur to these people by lowering the monthly payments, it lessens the chance of default?

Now it’s Mindy’s fortieth birthday coming up and she’d love to celebrate it with a getaway but that’s not really in her budget. Two bloggers, T and Pippi (read T’s Quest here; Pippi’s story is coming soon) have started a movement to send Mindy to Vegas ‘coz we know that being a single mom is hard.

I’m supporting Mindy for a couple of reasons – if a lot of us get together, it’s a small amount from each of us and I can certainly forgo a few of lattes to do my part. The other reason I’m in is truthfully, I’m really curious to see if the power of social media can make this happen. Are you curious? Can you empathize with Mindy? Could you support Mindy? Pippi’s post, Vegas or Bust for Single Mom Says has all the details about how YOU can help.

Not disappointed with divorce

2010-03-05T03:40:28Z

Did you visit The Divorce Encouragist’s (@dvrcncouragist) blog ? In one of her recent posts, she shares that she’s Cultivating Capabilities and recently attended a training course on becoming a divorce coach. That will give you some idea of the possibilities DE started to see once she was out of her marriage.

Her marriage was a short one – just 20 months although she and her ex had been together for about five years. I know when my marriage ended, I was disappointed – I had always envisioned this long-term marriage with a partner for life so I asked DE if she was disappointed when her marriage ended. Here’s what she said…

***

I wasn’t disappointed. It’s funny because when I was in the marriage and I thought about leaving, I imagined it was going to be a disappointment. I thought it was going to be a disappointment for everybody. But it wasn’t.

My parents were divorced and when it happened, I hated the idea of it for the first few years. I thought I would never get divorced, even though my parents had a good divorce. I got a little bit older and I relaxed a little and thought, ‘Maybe I will get divorced. Who knows?’

I don’t know why I felt I couldn’t back out of the wedding. We didn’t have this big day planned, we didn’t have all these guests that would be disappointed. It was really that I felt I didn’t have a good excuse not to. It was the typical thing - he makes good money, we’re starting this business, it’s going to be successful, he doesn’t beat me … It was what I was supposed to do. I’d been living with him for so many years, there was just no good reason to say no at that point.

Then when I actually went through the divorce, I wasn’t disappointed in myself, I wasn’t disappointed in us. I was just very happy because I knew it was the healthiest thing for me in particular and really for both of us. We were both in the marriage and we were both unhappy. I knew it was best to end it and start over.

My parents were fine with it. My mom had just moved 500 miles away and I called her to tell her. She said,

“You’re stronger than I am, and if I can do it, I know you’ll be just fine.”

That really propelled me through the whole time. Even now, I look back and remember what mom said to me and means so much.

***

The message in this part of DE’s story for me, is the importance of listening to our inner voice and not doing things because they are expected of us. OK … there are times when I think it is important and correct to follow social expectations. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking that you should attend funeral services for friends and I believe in dress codes, for example. But I don’t believe people should get married because it seems like the next step or your parents were expecting you to.

That lesson also applies to marriage – why do we stay in relationships that aren’t working because we think that’s how marriage is? It also applies to life after divorce – it’s such a time of change and upheaval and even though it is difficult, it is a prime opportunity to create the life YOU want.

The second lesson in here is the importance of parental support – even when we’re fully grown adults, a few words of belief and encouragement from mom are so powerful. So moms, don’t wait for your child to have a crisis before you tell/show her you believe in her

I’m a Grown Up left a comment on yesterday’s post that she also fell into her marriage – she’s writing her story on her blog currently – I’ve only just started following her so I’m not sure how it all turns out. For the better I hope :0

Photo Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pikaluk/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

An unhappy marriage is not the end

2010-03-04T00:04:33Z

Today, I’m excited to start another series. Let me introduce you to The Divorce Encouragist – I’m going to abbreviate that to DE for convenience. DE is a fellow blogger, blogging at, you guessed it, The Divorce Encouragist. Don’t jump to conclusions … she’s not advocating divorce over marriage. She is however, advocating divorce over slogging it out in an unhappy, loveless marriage.

DE was with her husband for almost five years, married for just 20 months. They were divorced three years ago when DE was 27. It was one of those marriages that was wrong from the beginning. I asked DE what she’d learned about life since her divorce. Here’s what she said…

***

I’ve learned there are options. If I’m really not happy, then I CAN change my circumstances. I CAN find something better.

I had been very unhappy since before I got married but I didn’t see a way out. I thought this is what people do, they live together and then they get married.

Things had been very bad between us, I had been sleeping on the couch. He came home one night and said he thought we should separate. At first, I was livid. I was yelling at him and I was so angry. He told me he’d discussed it with his parents and I said,

“How could you talk to your parents about it before you talked to me?”

“Isn’t this what you want? Don’t you hate me anyway?” he said.

Then, the light bulb went on in my head and I thought, yeah, this is what I want. I don’t want to be here. So I said,

“OK, let’s separate!”

That wasn’t really what he wanted to hear from me. He spent the next two weeks trying to change my mind, telling me he really wanted to work on things and maybe he’d spoken too soon. But I kept pushing for it.

Conveniently, we owned two houses and one of them was vacant so I moved in there. We drew up a separation agreement and we were signing it at the business we owned. I was just saying to him, “Let’s go out and celebrate, I feel really good about this,” when a woman walked in. I could tell just by the way they looked at each other that she was his girlfriend. She introduced herself to me and said she was sorry things didn’t work out. I asked her if it hadn’t worked out because of her and at first she said no but then said they’d been seeing each other for about a month.

That meant my husband was seeing her when he suggested we should separate. When I realized that, I was extremely devastated for about 20 minutes. I was driving and crying and pulled over. Later, one of my friends said that the girlfriend was not a replacement for me but a toy. She thought my husband wanted me back. I said,

“Well, I don’t want to come back and I’m really not upset about it. I’m glad he has another toy to play with because it will give me enough face to get away.”

They say that when God shuts a door, he opens a window. My husband’s affair was the closed door and the open window I so desperately wanted to jump out of. I jumped out the window and I’m so much happier. At the moment my husband said “isn’t this what you want?” I finally felt very free. I felt there were all these possibilities for me. I had been unhappy for a long time and I realized, I don’t have to be here. I’m going.

***

I’m always sad to hear about people who fall into marriage because it seemed like the next step or because they felt there was no way out of it. Perhaps the silver lining is there are often no children involved and there’s still plenty of time to start afresh.

I’m sure we’ve all known a married couple who’ve you’ve wondered why she stays with him? The Divorce Encouragist’s situation reminds of this and makes me realize that sometimes we’re immobilized simply because we don’t see the opportunities or can’t see a graceful way out.

Hope you’ll be back to read more about The Divorce Encouragist’s story. You can follow her at her blog and also on Twitter – @dvrcncouragist.

The Wisdom of a Broken Heart – review and giveaway

2010-03-09T03:36:33Z

One of the perks of this blog is that I get to review books. When a book catches my eye and seems like it would be a good resource for people dealing with divorce or if one of my interviewees mentions it, I contact the publisher for a review copy.

The book I’ve just finished reading is The Wisdom of a Broken Heart by Susan Piver. The title immediately grabbed me – I think I’d just interviewed Carolyn (see Leap and the Net Will Appear series) and the heartache of her story of losing your husband to your best friend just kept playing in my head.

What Susan describes here is counter-intuitive for me but I totally buy into it and will be keeping her book on my bookshelf for future use

You can read the rest of my review in my review section.

Now for the fun part! I have two copies of this book to giveaway. All you have to do to be entered to win your own copy is to leave a comment on THIS post about what helped you mend your broken heart. It could be something that helped you then or even something you’ve learned since then.

- You get one entry for each comment you leave.

- You’ll also get an entry for each tweet you send about this giveaway. Be sure to leave a comment here to tell me you’ve tweeted.

- The giveaway will run through midnight (MT) Monday March 8.

- You must be a U.S. resident to win.

- I’ll be using random.org to select the winner.

Looking forward to reading the comments