There Are Two Ways To Coparent. Only One Is Right.

I had to pull my car over. I was crying so hard I was shaking, and I couldn’t see where I was going or control my steering wheel. It was Thanksgiving Day 2009. My wife and I had separated, for good, about two months prior, and Thanksgiving Day was the first day where we were doing a custody exchange with our 1.5-year-old daughter.

Until then, our daughter was with me whenever I wasn’t at work. My wife watched her during the days while I was at work. I took our daughter during evenings and weekends. This wasn’t for malicious reasons or because my wife was dangerous to our daughter. We just hadn’t gotten to where custody had been addressed.

That changed a few weeks before Thanksgiving when my wife asked if she could take our daughter for Thanksgiving weekend. Of course, I said yes, and thus I began my journey as a co-parent that had me pulled over on the side of the road, a sobbing mess with a twice-broken heart, once from a failed marriage and a new family arrangement that I had just realized meant that I wouldn’t be a part of at least half of my daughter’s life.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth — Mike Tyson

When we’re younger, we’re all sold on this plan of you grow up, meet someone, get married, have children, get the white picket fences, and the rest of your life is all sunshine and rainbows until it’s not.

If you read any information on divorce online and divorce rates are usually put at fifty percent for first marriages. Get married multiple times, and the odds of divorce increase even more.

When you share children, things in this process are made immensely more difficult because now you’re trying to navigate yourself through these troubled waters of divorce and navigating your children through them.

One of the hardest things you could ever have to face is having someone break your heart and then having to see them and talk to them every day with no chance of getting any space for yourself to take a breath.

Somehow, you still must do it, but how?

Regardless of your stage, whether you have a court-ordered agreement or just something you have agreed to outside of the courts with your former partner, those custody exchanges will be sad days for you, especially in the beginning when you are adjusting to your child not being around constantly. It does get better, I promise.

No matter how you feel, it would be best to put aside your feelings toward your former partner and what happened between you. They have nothing to do with your child. Yes, they hurt you, and maybe you think they deserve revenge. You’re human; we all feel that way on some level. But what does that solve?

It shows your child you are emotionally unstable and models bad relationship behavior to them. It shows them when they are older that, they should do whatever they can to get back at their partner if they are wronged in a relationship. Even fight dirty if necessary.

Having your child go through a divorce with you is tough enough for them, but it’s not right to drag them through toxic after-effects just because you’d feel better getting revenge instead of moving on.

Your child will pick up on everything you do, whether you realize it or not. It will influence them in one way or another. So, take your feelings about what transpired between you and your ex and how you feel out of the equation. Make your relationship with your ex into a business relationship, if you must, and focus much of your effort on healing yourself and moving on.

You Get Two Choices. Only One Is Right.

Turning it into a competition — The wrong choice

I started right here. I was still in much pain from how my marriage ended when we began custody sharing. At first, I thought I could be more valuable and loved by my child if I did better than my ex. It was a competition against nobody but my ego and insecurity.

If you’re still hurting from the demise of your relationship, you’ll feel compelled to turn co-parenting into a competition. You will try to outdo the other parent. You want to be the better parent and for your child to love you more than the other parent. It will even hurt a little when your child is excited about something fun they are looking forward to with the other parent.

You might not even realize this is happening at first. This doesn’t have much to do with your child. Sure, part of you might be sad you are “missing out” on a fun experience with your child, but it has more to do with your ego than anything else. You just would rather they have that fun with you.

Think about it. Don’t you want your child to have fun and rewarding experiences? Does it matter if they are with you or your ex? What sense does it make to hope that your child is secretly miserable with the other parent? That isn’t good for them and you.

Share their excitement with them and encourage them to be excited. Ask them to send you pictures of them having fun doing that activity. Perhaps you can’t share the experience, but having the memory of them at a happy time is worth hanging on to.

What’s Best For Your Child — The Right Choice

If you’ve ever met a single parent or co-parent or someone about to go through a custody proceeding, you’ve most likely heard the phrase “I’m going to do what’s best for my child…” or some variation. As parents, we all mean it, but we also have different definitions of what that phrase means. We aren’t aware we don’t mean it verbatim.

“What’s best for my child” often means “what’s fair to me” to the parent saying it. The problem is that we’re all emotionally attached to what we want, so what we see as fair to ourselves probably isn’t appropriate to the other parties involved. And once things become about “fairness,” what’s “better” for the child usually gets thrown out the window.

Most people assume a 50/50 split is fair, but more than 50/50 splits are required to achieve. There is an uneven number of days in a week and a year. How are you dividing holidays and summer vacation time? Are your kids getting time with grandparents? Is one parent paying alimony and child support? I’m not saying these things should not take place, just that an actual 50/50 split is impossible.

It took me a little while to understand that what was best for the child and what was fair to me didn’t go hand in hand. Once I understood the difference, it changed the game. Luckily, I was smart enough to keep our child out of the middle of our issues.

What’s best for your child is access to two loving, involved parents who nurture their growth. Parents who can keep them (the child) out of the middle of their drama and show them that even though the marriage or relationship didn’t work out, they could still ensure their child had what they needed and were loved.

That should be the essential backbone of everything.

Anything additional that includes what you think your former partner owes you, how they treated you, your emotional state around how things ended with your ex, etc., is your responsibility to get worked out with support groups, therapy, friends, and family, or whatever means you can find to heal yourself and move on from being hurt.

Adjusting to co-parenting is hard. It’s even more complicated when recovering from a broken heart caused by a failed relationship. Sadly, you aren’t the first or the last that will take on this difficult situation.

The most important thing to remember is to keep your broken heart from the relationship separate from your co-parenting. Decisions you make about parenting that come from a place of hurt and anger will make things way more complex than they need to be. You will feel the impacts on your former partner and your child for what could potentially be years.