I’m Not (always) Okay …
February 8, 2023Be Kind
March 15, 2023To say that my children’s father is high energy is an understatement, I have never met anyone who is as busy and active as he is. He never, ever slowed down. He would be up at dawn and still going well after dark and he was not allowed coffee under any circumstances!
So I knew we were in trouble when, a few days after we returned home from the hospital with our youngest son, I woke up to find my husband passed out on the floor with the dogs and a baby monitor at his ear. This seven pound baby had him beat, and that freaked me right out.
We struggled as new parents, adjusting to life with a baby but also adjusting to what our roles were. I was working for a bank at the time, so I had a good maternity leave package but I was not used to being a full time mom. My husband was just starting a business, so he worked long hours often from 5am until late. He automatically expected that I would be a “mom” and a “housewife” (a reasonable expectation in the circumstances) but we had never really discussed what that meant. I had also never considered what it would look like staying at home with a new baby while my husband built a business.
We had been so excited about having a baby that we hadn’t discussed what our roles were going to be or what our expectations were for the other person. Conversations around when each person is expected home from work and who will do the night feeds fell far behind discussions around nursery color schemes.
It became even more difficult when we had our second child because at that time we were both building businesses. Now we were juggling a newborn, a toddler, two businesses and a heap of resentments towards each other. No one was surprised when we separated shortly thereafter.
I noticed that we were not unusual in our lack of communication as I expanded my family law practice.
I found that often, at the time of their divorce, parties rarely agreed upon what their own role in the childrearing had been, what the other person’s expectations were and how each parent was going to be a parent to the children. Many couples came to my firm complaining about the other person’s involvement or lack of involvement in their children’s lives. While others wanted to use the perceived lack of involvement as evidence that their soon to be ex-spouse was not fit to parent the children.
When I was representing the stay-at-home parent, I often thought of how much easier their argument for support would be if there was a written agreement between the parties confirming that their role was to stay home with the children for however many years.
I lost track of the number of times the working parent pointed to the stay-at-home parent as “lazy” and “refusing to work”, while the stay-at-home parent furiously argued that the parties had always intended one parent to be home. The sad part for these parents was that this disagreement was usually what had caused the rift that led up to the divorce.
My parents’ generation had conversations around raising children in their pre-marriage counselling. However you hear very few people doing pre-marriage counselling these days.
What we hope to do with our baby steps package is to fill that void. We want to get couples speaking early on about what they expect from each other. We want to facilitate those difficult but essential conversations such as:
- the roles and responsibilities of both parents in the raising of the children;
- who will be responsible for the day to day care of the children;
- if one parent is staying home, how will the family afford that financially and how long is the “stay at home” parent going to remain out of the work force;
- each party’s view on discipline;
- what schools will the children attend;
- what are the roles of extended family;
- will the children be brought up in a specific religion;
- in the event that the parties separate, how would they want to share parenting of the children; and
- any other important topic to the expectant parents.
What we hope to achieve with this process is two fold – get the parties talking and provide a written account of what the parties intended this venture to look like. The written agreement will then form a basis for the parents to refer to when issues come up as well as providing details of what the parties actually wanted when they began this venture.
I am very lucky that my children’s father and I have co-parented well (for the most part) since our divorce. But I do often wonder how things would have been if we had the hard conversations back when we were expecting our first child.