Be alive.
One family…
The family is multigenerational and exists over time.
As spouses and parents you may experience different “families,” with different spouses. But your children only have one family, they only have one childhood. What they experience they will carry forward with themselves over time.
This will be their life story, the story they will tell to their children.
How you manage yourself as you go through your divorce and co-parent after divorce, will shape your children’s lives. It shapes their sense of self, the relationship they have with you and their attitude toward parenting in the future.
When your children look back at their childhood as adults, in 10 or 20 years or more, what is it you would like them to remember about these years?
How do you want them to remember you and your parenting?
The major task after separating and moving through your divorce is to make that smooth transition from one household to two homes.
After the smooth transition, it take 6 – 12 months to find emotional equilibrium in terms of you and your kids resolving the grief and loss and establishing a familiar routine. In the midst of all that, the next major task is to master effective co-parenting with the goal being to seek what is in the best interests of your children.
Failing to do this can disrupt your child’s life course, and the life course of your family, for a generation or more.
As a Family Therapist, who also functions as a Parenting Coordinator, a Divorce Coach or Co-Parent Counsellor, my perspective is that divorce is an event, like many significant life events, that a family experiences over the course of time.
The challenge is to manage one’s self as maturely and responsibly as one can through times that are very anxiety provoking and can tend to generate a lot of reactivity.
My task is to help keep you in a thoughtful place.
Your task is to rise to the occasion and be your best self, not only to tip the future in your favour, but to optimize the best outcome for your children.