The doctor is IN: All divorced moms need to read this, Nordette

Lisa Stone — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:52:22 -0500

Hi Nordette -- I opened the site this morning after a hilarious 12 hours of work travel (two broken planes, a transfer Washington Ronald Reagan to Dulles and lost luggage that had me haunting SFO at 2 a.m.) and little sleep.

But I feel great now. You have NAILED these issues, peeling back the layers of my mommy guilt, that's for sure. This paragraph is genius:

"Being aware of his pain over the family's falling apart, and buckling beneath negative guilt that kept telling me that it was all my fault, that somehow I could've prevented the divorce, I determined that I would do whatever I could to give my son a good life post-divorce. He was my priority, I thought, and I refused to let him become one of the walking wounded. I wanted to save him. Soon, however, I realized that my parenting via guilt would cripple my son. My fear and panic were not the result of love, but of a clawing guilt.

My son is now ten and I can tell you it's taken me much longer than it took you to realize some of the things I've let him (also depressed) get away with. This is the advice I have needed -- and I think every woman who divorces with children must get.

You write about your "own shift of tearfulness". My mother came to live with me the year after the divorce and I became incredibly tense. I finally realized why: Having her around in the evenings once the baby was in bed was cramping my style -- an evening crying jag!

I'm off to read part two...

P.S. Must throw down with you over WW. Think she is deservedly hot as Fault Woman. ;)

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

Parentopia.net/blog you are

Devra Renner — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:24:53 -0500

Parentopia.net/blog you are absolutely correct that there is useful guilt as well as the debilitating guilt that stops us in our tracks and prevents us from enjoying our parenting. We are all muddling thru the motherhood thing, mainly with the very best of intentions. While it is obvious the divorce impacted your family, as well as maxxed out your guilt-o-meter, I can see you took steps to make sure there was love and affection balancing out that guilt! Aviva and I have a goal of absolving guilt...one mommy (or daddy!) at a time. Looking forward to reading part two!

Post-divorce mommy guilt (Part 1)

Nordette — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:54:34 -0500

I read Lisa Stone's piece here at Blogher about The New Adventures of Old Christine television show and her upcoming interview with Julia Louise-Dreyfuss, its star, and writer Kari Lizer, its creator. The New Adventures of Old Christine, a sitcom that follows the life of a divorced, working mother, sometimes tackles the issue of mommy guilt, in particular feeling guilty for working outside the home.

I've seen the show before, but watching funny clips at Youtube prompted me to discuss something I've been struggling with and have avoided writing about since I saw my marriage go down in flames. I'm talking about that mean child of mommy guilt that follows some of us around, the post-divorce mommy guilt-sliming demon.

While I say "mommy" I recognize that this post-divorce devil also follows fathers. You can see it sometimes whipping the backs of divorced dads who bear gifts, too much ice cream at the park, sudden trips to Disney World, the Cyclops Christmas--huge and one-eyed. I think my ex had it once.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that happily-married parents don't have bouts with guilt. I was married for 23/24 years, and some of those years were pleasant, but I still felt plenty guilty about what I perceived to be my failures as a mother. I felt guilty when I worked outside the home. I felt guilty when I stayed home but didn't morph into SuperMom. I felt guilty when I wanted some damned peace and quiet, especially guilty if I uttered the word "damn."

I brought some of this guilt-proneness into my marriage as passed to me from my own mother. My mother, whom I love dearly, used to be a guilt-putter pro. So, the voice of disapproval haunts me. I suspect she also suffered from too much guilt.

Knowing that I am my mother's daughter, I try not to guilt my children. However, the urge to apply guilt's pressure is pretty strong sometimes since I know guilt works. There's nothing wrong with guilt in and of itself. The ability to feel guilt is part of conscience; it's what motivates us to do the right thing. That's called positive guilt.

However, guilt's misuse creates what's called negative guilt, and it does worlds of harm. As this article at Aurura Healthcare quotes Muriel Savikas, PhD to say:

"Negative guilt is the guilt that allows us to beat ourselves up and that drags us down rather than turning things into a positive and moving on.

Savikas is the author of Guilt Is Good: What Working Moms Need to Know.

The dragging down.

Not only did I deal with my own disapproving voice during my marriage, I also dealt with my ex, my children's father, nudging me toward guilt's cliff. I am guilt-prone, and he took advantage of that. (Unlike the Christine character

, I did not have a friendly divorce.)

However, while my mother tended to guilt me, she also taught me to think critically. When my ex tried to make me feel guilty during the divorce process by implying I wasn't a good mother, logic shielded me, and I said, "Hmm, if I'm not a good mother, then why did you decide the children should be with me?" And when I said with me, I mean "with me." He now lives on the opposite side of the country, calls our son infrequently, his daughter never, and makes no serious attempt to see either of his children. He hasn't questioned my mothering since I asked him that question.

The Road that Guilt Built

Okay, that's just a little background. What I want to talk about is the guilt we sometimes feel following divorce. You know, that thorn that constantly pricks our sides because the family's "broken up," and we see our children's doleful eyes. I'm the one around to see how an unfriendly divorce with a missing father affects my children, and so I'm the one who always wants to fix it all. But one thing I've learned is letting guilt cause me to make bad parenting decisions doesn't fix anything.

My daughter is now 26, and my son is 16. They were ages 21 and 11, respectively, when the marriage started obviously falling apart. I say obviously because I knew the marriage paddled in dangerous water before its visible demise.

My daughter's recovering, but I don't feel post-divorce guilt watching her as I do with my son. She's an adult who grew up during the best parts of the marriage. What I feel when dealing with my daughter is concern that her issues with her father will spill over into her relationships with men. He stopped speaking to her for a long time, and she's felt his rejection intensely. Consequently, those two have a hard road ahead.

My son is recovering, but the divorce ripped us all emotionally, especially my son. However, he was having problems with his father even before the divorce. At age 10, he resented his father's disappearing for hours without explanation or returning with explanations that did not compute. The disappearing was change in his father's behavior that seemed to bug him more than it did me. (I figured it was middle-age restlessness and silently hoped it was not an affair.)

My son spoke the truth at 10: "Dad's avoiding us." He's the kind of child who used to say "Let's all go to the movies as a family." He was always really big on us being "a family," in all that we did, and he'd say the word "family" with so much emphasis that he was the first person that popped into my mind when I realized our family of four wasn't going to make it.

The folly of Fault Woman
You know her. It's always her fault.

Being aware of his pain over the family's falling apart, and buckling beneath negative guilt that kept telling me that it was all my fault, that somehow I could've prevented the divorce, I determined that I would do whatever I could to give my son a good life post-divorce. He was my priority, I thought, and I refused to let him become one of the walking wounded. I wanted to save him. Soon, however, I realized that my parenting via guilt would cripple my son. My fear and panic were not the result of love, but of a clawing guilt.

For the first 18 months after his father moved out and we subsequently moved to a new town, I was more lenient on my son. Not only was he in middle school, a rough period for many preteens, he also faced when we moved the drama of making new friends while grieving the loss of old ones. Watching him struggle, I did not pressure him too much about school work, did not chide him if he didn't do chores. I couldn't bring myself to add more weight to what I saw as his slumping shoulders.

He clearly suffered from depression, sometimes unable to go to school due to tearful shifts. Yes, we had professional help, but other than that, I had no friends or family around for support. Furthermore, I had to handle rides on my own emotional roller coaster. While I knew in my heart that the divorce was the best thing for me, knowing did not make the healing a ride down the lazy river. Through this I was determined not to let my son or daughter see me collapse into my own shift of tearfulness.

The Move Forward

Observing my son, I saw patterns developing in him that I did not like. Not only was he asking for too much time away from school, but he was also making excuses for not meeting goals, and expecting my daughter and I to do more for him than he should. It became obvious that my leniency and parenting via guilt would not do.

I didn't want him to grow up thinking he could stay home because he was feeling "blue." Neither did I want him to start seeing himself as a wounded victim. So, I had a talk with him in which I gave fair warning that a change was gonna come. Life was about to get more challenging for him, and Mom wasn't playing games with his life.

Here is the link to Part 2.

Links

Part 2 of this post

Lisa's upcoming "Old Christine" adventure.

Head in hands photo from Inmagine.com

Blogger Note: Fault Woman is an altered picture of Wonder Woman created a long time ago. I need to find a superhero who looks more run down. :-)

Nordette Adams' personal blog, Confessions of a Jersey Goddess is at this link.

BlogHer - Post-divorce mommy guilt (Part 1) - Comments

The doctor is IN: All divorced moms need to read this, Nordette

Parentopia.net/blog you are

Post-divorce mommy guilt (Part 1)