After divorce, holidays are a retreat

This current series is about Lora – she’s been divorced for nine years now. Her two daughters were aged five and nine when Lora and her husband of 18 years divorced. Compared to many ladies I’ve interviewed, Lora’s parenting plan is very open and that includes how the children spend school vacations and the holidays. I asked Lora how they typically work those out …

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We don’t really decide ahead of time. It’s been strange and lucky – somehow, we’ve never both wanted to take the children at the same time. Christmas has been hard for me. He has his entire family come into town every year. They all stay at his place, like 18 relatives and cousins! My family is very segmented and nobody ever comes here, so it’s very quiet for me.

I think now the kids are older and they enjoy their cousins more, they realize I could go away and then we could have Thanksgiving together. I’m still available if they want to come over and get away from the house full of people but there’s not a lot of tugging or pulling. It’s all fallen into place.

I’ve changed the way I perceive holidays. They’re more of a retreat for me these days – a meditative time because it is very silent for me. I was serving wine in the Catholic church up until about seven years ago and I was steeped in Christianity. Now I’m not at all. Zero. I love my roots and I love what Jesus represents but I’ve made a complete break and changed so radically. His family, they’re all going to church so I think it’s more important for my children to celebrate Christmas with their father on Christmas Day.

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I have what I think is a more typical parenting plan – it does spell out which holidays are spent with which parent and what happens during summer vacation and so on. I’ve liked having that spelled out because I think it has saved some disagreements. It’s a fall back, a safety net. I don’t think having an open parenting plan would have worked for me, at least not at first.

Now, after three years, I think we’re getting to where we can be more flexible. We did a little bit of weekend swapping so I could go to the Blissdom conference, for example. Our plan calls for the children to be with one parent for Christmas Eve and with the other for Christmas Day and then the rest of their school vacation is split 50/50. That arrangement makes it challenging to go away and I’m hoping we could be flexible on that in the future.

A friend of mine has a parenting agreement that calls for her children to spend her birthday with her. Birthdays aren’t covered in my agreement. For the children’s birthdays, my ex and I start with asking our children what they’d like to do (remember my kids are now 16 and 14) and then we take it from there, making sure that both he and I get to have a birthday celebration with the child. It doesn’t matter to me if my children aren’t with me for my birthday but it does matter that we celebrate it together at some point. My ex grew up in a house were birthdays were just like any other day so it’s not a big deal for him. Me? I like to make birthdays special.

I think that flexibility my ex and I now have has come as we’ve adjusted to our new roles. We’ve learned to trust that we’re supporting each other in our parenting roles and we recognize that we each have a valuable role to play in our children’s lives. It’s like Holly said, Parenting after divorce gets easier with time. Well .. maybe what I meant by that headline is that partnering with your ex on parenting issues gets easier with time – the parenting itself definitely gets harder as the children get older … but that’s another story.

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