I've had an emotional roller coaster the last few months and kinda went in a pity party direction about social media...etc....bleh... Sorry. Things are really personally very difficult right now financially and otherwise. I've been on shaky ground.
But lurking I came across this and just had to toss in my two cents. Probably because it's relevant to me right now in a prescient way.
And it's gonna be one of those "it depends" posts (and I suppose me being selfish and using this post to do some of my own emotional laundry). Apologies...
My daughters are grown now, but when I got divorced they were 9 and 7. So just barely perhaps old enough to see their parents as people as much as just their parents. As a divorced man with joint custody there was 50% of their lives experiences that I could not protect them from. I knew when I divorced their mother that they were going to end up having to go through a lot of complicated stuff that was unavoidable. And thankfully as bad as some of it was (my ex-wife was and is not the best maker of decisions) it was never as bad as my own childhood.
I decided early on that the only way I could combat that in any meaningful way was to simply be honest and open with my kids rather than fall into the trap of trying to protect them from everything. Because I think that is a trap.
And it wasn't like an immediate idea or a deliberate decision, but it was something I grew into rather quickly over the first few post-divorce years.
With our joint custody it meant sometimes I only had weekends, but with the topsy-turvy nature of my ex-wife's life meant sometimes I had them for long stretches. At first I kept my experiments at figuring out how to have a personal life of my own again completely private from them. But after only a couple of years, I began to realize what a mistake that was. Or at least I began to realize what a mistake it was for us. My relationship with my girls got a whole lot better and a whole lot more personal after I divorced. Some people seem to think you shouldn't become close friends with your children until they become adults but I decided to begin building that relationship with them when they were really young. And things were realistically, financially as well as emotionally tough back then. And the only way I could combat the nonsense that occurred and there was a lot of it was to simply tell the truth, but usually only when asked. I never threw my kids mother under the bus unless they asked me about things. And I always tried to be thoughtful and in a mindful presence when I did that, as well as being thoughtfully candid about my own pain that I experienced when I was married to her. I tried very specifically to not be nasty (even when my ex-wife was and she was all the time) and it helped us develop not only a solid relationship of love but a mutual understanding and respect.
Once we got to that point and I guess the girls were about 11 and 9 at that point, I never kept my forays into having a personal life with the opposite sex from them. In fact at that point I couldn't have if I tried because they were morbidly curious about my personal life. Not just because they were girls who loved their wacky dad, but because they realized they should be as invested in my happiness as I was in theirs.
Even though my ex-wife remarried immediately (she'd had an affair with my ex-best friend) they became estranged rather quickly and just on the sheer numbers my ex-wife had as many successful and failed attempts at relationships as I did over the years.
The difference between us wasn't the ups and downs that you go through when you try and fail. The difference between us was how we let it affect our world. So I never clung to that instinct we have as parents to protect my children or to sacrifice my own life merely for their sake.
And I'm not trying to disparage the struggles of single parenthood, because I do actually know pretty much what that's like. It's just that I feel like you can do a disservice to yourself and those you care about by pulling yourself into a cocoon.
I never felt like I was putting my kids in any sort of emotional danger, because even with all of the ups and downs I had in relationships over those years until my kids were grown, I never felt like I was sacrificing one relationship for the other. Primarily because I wouldn't allow it. About the only thing I ever had to put my foot down about was a few women here and there who would try to talk me out of my time with my kids. You know, get a babysitter let's have some fun tonight. That sort of thing... My time with my kids was a bargaining process at best most of the time so I was always like "nowp!!". I would always leave the option open and I mean always for a woman I was dating to hang out with all of us. I can also tell you it was difficult and usually impossible to convince women that would be okay. That I actually had a cool and legitimate strong relationship with my girls and that we always found a way to have a good time no matter what. I suppose it was a bit intimidating. But I suppose not a lot of people have tried to develop that sort of relationship with their children so it was unusual.
I also had experiences in the opposite direction where women would be overly and unnecessarily protective. I say protective but they weren't actually being protective they were just trying to have their cake and eat it too. It's way more about fear and coping mechanisms than a noble desire to "protect". Trust me it is a little insulting after you dated someone for a while when they won't let you know their children. I mean it comes across like it's perfectly okay for me to put my hand up your skirt, but not okay to play Xbox with your son???? That's actually kind of nasty and dismissive and hurtful if you even think about it for a second. Trust me to entertain you, but not trust me to be a part of your life? That's pretty weak. And the opposite of trust.
Now that my girls are grown I actually feel proud of how I handled all that, because I think by example they got to witness both the f*****-up ness that divorce can be, and that everything can still be okay. That the world is a real place with real consequences and not a fairy tale. Kids know the difference. They may indulge their imaginations all the time but believe me they really do know the difference. It gave them the idea that relationships are complex and that you never have to settle nor should you for things that make you unhappy.
Right now I'm also dealing with that "it depends" aspect of things with my girlfriend Laura. Because I'm an empty nester and she has a 4 year old. And as a result I have had to be extremely patient with her overprotectiveness and her desire to be a helicopter mom. And that's not a criticism of her at all. He's only 4, so his ability to be aware of things beyond mom and dad (his actual dad disappoints him pretty much every minute of every day) and veggie tales and chicken nuggets is limited. He's not quite old enough to understand the emotions he's already having to deal with, so there's no need to make that more complicated than it is. But it is foolish to deny that does emotions exist even in a 4 year old. And you can never protect a child or shield a child no matter what you do from reality...... Unless you're too afraid to teach your child about reality. I'm not saying it's easy but its necessary.
Right now to him I'm just some fun weirdo that his mother knows, and he has no understanding beyond that because he's too young to be equipped understand anything beyond that. So when kids are too young it might be too much, or it might be something you need to take very slowly. But once they get just a few years older than that, just a few, in my experience it's really not that big of a deal. And it's not that big of a deal because pretty early on, and I can remember this from my own childhood, your children begin to see your life and try to grasp what it is beyond your role as a mother or father. They have no choice but to do that because they're present in your life. Children from a very early age have excellent bullshit detectors. And at least for me I decided that it was a disservice to mine to pretend to them that that wasn't the truth.
There were many reasons why my marriage failed, but I can tell you the main one.
When two people fall in love and decide to get married they're deciding that we are two people who want to build and existence. And so at least that contract requires two people putting each other above everything else in their lives. Even their children. Whether a couple has zero children or 10,000 children that still has to be true. Children are desirable amazing and precious things that will really teach you the true nature of love in a way you won't ever grasp until you do perhaps, but love and a relationship is not required to make them and bring them in this world. There are things that are both poetic and profound when you make the conscious decision to have children I'm not trying to lessen the beauty of that. But making babies is strictly biology. Anyone can do that and there is no instruction manual required.
My marriage failed because we forgot why we got married. We forgot that children weren't the goal, but merely an addition to what we chose to have with each other. Being parents to our kids and dividing into the roles that Parenthood sort of forces you into, made us lose sight of why we got married in the first place. Being married is complicated. Being married and having kids is even more so. But it is a mistake, a critical and dreadful mistake, to put your kids ahead of everything else.
A lot of people I've talked to strongly disagree with me about that. And the only thing I have to add as a counter is if you put your kids first, you have now turned raising kids into a contest, a war with yourself with your kids and with your significant other over your capacity to have a relationship with all of them. I've seen that sort of thing break up pretty much every marriage including my own that I have ever witnessed. Love is kind of like peanut butter. It spreads. But if you lose the foundation of that love there's no peanut butter to put on the sandwich. I tried to reverse the course of this in the last few years of my marriage, because I finally woke up to the mistake we had made. I reinvested myself heavily into the idea that my relationship with my wife was something worth salvaging above everything else. The reason why that didn't work it's because she couldn't stop playing "mom" long enough to be a wife. And that sounds harsh but it's nonetheless true.
It took me a long time to understand this, and and my current situation I still struggle to get this point across to my girlfriend.
I don't know whether she and I will be together another month another year or together for the rest of our lives. not because I don't want to be together with her for the rest of my life. It's rather that I don't know what our future holds. you have to be in the moment at all times in order to have any kind of meaningful relationship, and when you add a child into the mix that means you have to be even more in the moment and that can be overwhelming.
All I keep trying to tell her is that I love you and because you love him I have to love him too it's really that simple. And maybe it's too simple because she still struggles with letting go and being overprotective. But, I hope at least, it shows her that love isn't a contest. That there isn't a ranking system.
I'm a firm believer that having children will teach you a valuable lesson about love. It simply opens a door that doesn't get opened any other way in your life. But it can also lead to you shutting other doors that you shouldn't allow to happen....unless that first love with your spouse or significant other that got you the children in the first place wasn't that kind of love.
So I think denying yourself the opportunity of succeeding or failing, even failing multiple times, at forming a relationship that you need for yourself intellectually emotionally intimately and sexually, just because you're afraid of what might happen to the other people you love is a colossal mistake. My children taught me this lesson.
