you a picnic!”
I also started inviting him over for dinner. The first few times he said no, and then . . . he said yes. Slowly, I was starting to see that treating my ex with kindness was making me feel kinder toward him. And I know it made Luka’s and Matea’s lives just a little less complicated to have two parents who, while they might not have been married any longer, could at least break bread and marvel at the amazing children they’d brought into this world together.
As we were struggling through the emotional turmoil and murkiness of coparenting, we also had to learn how to handle all the postdivorce logistics. That juggling act alone would be enough to overwhelm anybody. Divorce shakes up daily routines in innumerable ways, and it is hard to figure out how best to provide kids with a sense of stability in a sea of changes.
My children spend most weekends with their dad, who sometimes has different rules than I do and runs his home on a different schedule. On Sundays, the kids return to me. For a long time, I expected them to immediately fit right back into my way of running things. If one of them forgot something important, like a school assignment or a sports uniform, at their dad’s house, I’d get annoyed. If they did something that was acceptable at their dad’s house but not at mine, I’d get irritated and proceed to lecture them.
I didn’t even realize how unfair this was to my children. Then one of them pointed out how confusing and complicated it was to live in two different homes. Here I thought I was doing everything I could to shield my kids from the negative effects of divorce, but I needed to focus on more than just the emotional stuff. I needed to spread the empathy to more practical areas as well.
That’s when I came up with “jet lag day.” You know how when you come home after a trip across time zones, you need a little time to acclimate before you feel like yourself again? I decided that my children deserved time to adjust from one home to the other, from one parent to the other. So every Monday became jet lag day, a day of extra, extra mercy and grace. This didn’t mean that my kids could get away with acting like total demons on Mondays, but I would do my best to be extra patient and understanding as they readjusted to life in my house. Jet lag day has made the dynamic shifts in my kids’ days less stressful and much more manageable for all of us.
A few years after the divorce, as I was driving Luka to kindergarten, completely out of the blue he surprised me with, “Mom, I figured out the real reason Daddy and you got divorced.” My heart sank.
“How did you figure out the real reason, Luka?” I asked.
“Oh, just something I heard at Daddy’s house.”
Anger kicked in. As I was trying to figure out how I was going to respond to whatever bomb my son was about to drop on me, my thoughts got interrupted by Luka. “Cheese!” he yelled from the backseat.
“What?”
“Cheese, Mom! Daddy said he hates cheese. He hates all the cheeses in the whole wide world. And you love cheese. A lot! More than is normal. So of course you couldn’t stay married. I couldn’t be married to someone who hated Legos!”
I smiled, flooded with relief. And then I said, “You know, Luka, you’re a really smart guy. And though cheese isn’t the real reason Daddy and I got divorced, it is true that sometimes two people just don’t make a great match. It’s kind of like trying to put two puzzle pieces together that don’t fit. You can wiggle them around, push them together, and try really hard to make them fit, but they just won’t. Daddy and I were kind of like those puzzle pieces. We couldn’t fit. We tried.”
Every time the kids broached the subject of our family’s divorce, it felt so right in my soul to be able to answer their questions without putting their dad down or pointing fingers. One day when Matea was six, a friend of hers came over