Mom's House, Dad's House

Isolina Ricci

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781476747224
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Salute mentale e benessere

Internationally renowned therapist, family expert and mediator Isolina Ricci, Ph.D. presents this definitive and newly updated guide to divorce and making shared custody work for parents and children. The ground-breaking classic, Mom's House, Dad's House, has become the standard for two generations of divorcing parents, and includes examples, self-tests, checklists, tools, and guidelines to help separated moms and dads with the legal, emotional, and financial issues they will encounter as they work to create happy and stable homes.This comprehensive guide looks anew at the needs of all family members with creative options and common-sense advice, including: * The map to a "decent divorce" and two happy homes
* Helping children of divorce with age-specific advice
* Negotiating Parental Agreements and custody arrangements
* Breaking away from "negative intimacy" with a difficult ex-husband or ex-wife
* Sidestepping destructive myths about divorce (and marriage)
* Handling long-distance parenting and parenting alone With Mom's House, Dad's House, parents will learn how to help their children heal and find a sense of continuity, security, and stability throughout the divorce process and in any custody situation.

Part 1

TWO HOMES WITH NO FIGHTING

Chapter 1

Building a New Family Life

The Destination

Building a New Family Life

Two Homes Can Work for You

Managing the Goal of a Decent Divorce or Separation

A New Family Bill of Rights

When Children Do Best

The New Pioneers

How to Use This Book

“WHERE do you live?” the middle-aged businessman asked the nine-year-old girl sitting next to him on the plane.

“I live with my dad in Oregon and my mom in California.”

“I mean, where do you live?” the businessman persisted.

“I live with my dad in the summers and my mom during schooltime.”

“I understand, honey,” he said, “but where is your real home?”

The little girl looked as puzzled as her seatmate. Then she explained: “I have two real homes. My mom’s house and my dad’s house.”

Many children today have had the experience of the child on the plane. She had seen her original family expand into two different homes. Her home wasn’t broken—it had first divided and then multiplied. Her mother and father had developed a working relationship and a way of raising her that may seem unworkable to some outsiders. Each parent believed that he or she was heading a family, even though, as further conversation disclosed, only one had remarried. This expanded family gave the child time with each parent and the security of their commitment to her well-being. She seemed to be loved and happy.

Given any voice in the matter, younger children will almost always choose a two-parent, two-home alternative over a one-home arrangement with the other parent consigned to the sidelines as a visitor or, worse yet, faded away.

Children usually go straight to the heart of the issue, even when parents are struggling. When they “visit” their “noncustodial” parent, they stake out their territory. They leave behind books, shoes, pajamas, toothbrushes, homework. The kids are wisely, perhaps unconsciously, carving out their own place. They are saying, “I am your child. My things belong here, too. Don’t forget me when I’m gone. This is my home, too.” They shy away from words like “visit my dad or my mom.” Instead they say they’re going to “be with my dad” or “live with my mom this summer.” And for good reasons: outsiders visit; families live together. “It’s a bigger family,” say some children. “Both houses belong to me” or “I have two homes and two families.” “Yeah, I live most of the time with my mom, but I live with my dad, too,” say others. Children, after they are convinced that they can’t have both parents living together under one roof, will settle for both parents separated but still functioning as parents and families. One youngster, when asked what he saw as the ideal life for a child of divorced and/or remarried parents, put it simply: “Two homes with no fighting.”

BUILDING A NEW FAMILY LIFE

This book will help you build this new family life, “two homes with no fighting.” When parents ache with feelings of pain, guilt, or betrayal, this can seem out of reach. But in the pages that follow you will see how to transform your negative or hurt experiences into a positive force in your life. Many of the major premises contained here have been used for more than two decades by parents in many parts of the world. They have also been used effectively by attorneys, judges, mental health professionals, mediators, educators, and physicians in their work with parents. Many people have achieved what they want—a release from the pain of the past and a promise for the future—more joy, less conflict, a new life, and children who adjusted well to the separation. Their children have been given what they want—both parents, and an expanded family in two homes, more joy and less conflict and tension. What appears on these pages goes well beyond the concept of child custody, separation, or divorce; it is a redefinition of family life for today—how to organize it, strengthen it, and make it work in Mom’s house and Dad’s house.

In order to use the guidelines suggested here, neither you nor the other parent is asked to take on or give up sole custody. Some children have a fifty-fifty time split between the homes, others an eighty-twenty or even a ninety-ten division. Some have arrangements where they see each parent every day, others wait weeks or even months to see a parent who is thousands of miles away. No one family is exactly like another.

Regardless of their differences, many parents have used the methods described here to learn how to stake out their own territory, set up their own standards, make their own agreements, and stay out of each other’s hair. They have acquired the skills that allow them to wave a slow but definite good-bye to their former intimate relationship and develop a new one, only this time in a businesslike working relationship as parents who are living apart. They have learned how to make a new life and to keep their kids out of the middle of their problems with one another.

Parents have adapted the approach in this book to just about every conceivable circumstance—to former spouses who were friendly, angry, vindictive, possessive, dropouts; to those living down the street or across the continent; to those who were unmarried, who had remarried, who were single, or who were in living-together arrangements. Even solo parents who were completely alone have designed unique shared parenting arrangements with close friends or relatives.

The approach suggested here can function with a minimum of communication between you and the other parent—as long as it is the right type of communication. You do not have to have romantic feelings of love for your former mate any more than you have to have romantic feelings of love for your druggist in order to get a prescription filled. What you do need is a way to relate with one another that works to help you carry out one of the most important jobs anyone ever undertakes—raising their children.

A WORLD OF HURT: DEALING WITH THE SEPARATION

If you are now suffering with the pain of separation, it may be difficult to imagine you and the children in a new life. Separation and divorce are like a hurricane or flood—no matter how much warning there is, you can be hit hard by the impact. Maybe you do not want your life together to end, and you feel numb, betrayed, torn by grief. If the separation was more your idea, you may be surprised at how deeply you feel the end of the relationship or feel an ambivalence you didn’t know existed. If this sounds familiar, remember that you are not the only one in this world of hurt and confusion. Your children are there, too. But the shock will wear off. Then, just as if you and your family had been victimized by a natural disaster, you will have to attend to the work of repairing, cleaning, and rebuilding.

Take heart.

There is a way through this

to a better day.

You, your children, and your family are important. You count. Feelings of powerlessness fool you into inaction—you’re a parent, a powerful force. As time goes on, you may also come to see how essential the other parent is to your child. He or she may help you, too. When your child has problems, in times of illness, and when work schedules change, the other parent can help carry the load. A realistic goal? For many parents, yes. In the pages that follow, you will also find different ways to regain a stronger sense of yourself and your importance. As time goes on, there can be a renewed sense of competence and belonging that blossoms with your new life. This new identity can affect you in many ways—as a parent, in new relationships, in the work world, at your children’s school, in your community.

MAKING DECISIONS: FIND YOUR OWN PACE

“Family life was full of decisions and details before we separated,” said a mother of three teenagers. “Now it’s a swamp of things to decide and redecide.” Separation means decisions, decisions, decisions. And they are usually very important ones. Parents will say things like “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing,” “I’m overwhelmed,” or “It’s just too much at once.” While some feel overwhelmed, others want to tackle all these decisions head-on. They want to settle things now and may not think things through. Neither the very slow nor the very immediate approach works out in the end. Yes, the process can be complicated and difficult—sometimes you will have to move exceptionally quickly, other times it is “hurry up and wait.” But there are opportunities for you to learn, to change in ways that you have always wanted, and to reorganize your life and your family. If you want to use this crisis to your advantage, you can. You are, after all, making exceptionally big decisions, decisions that can affect the rest of your life and those of your children. This book will help you make these decisions and find a pace that you feel you can live with.

TWO HOMES CAN WORK FOR YOU

The approach described in this book has a long history. It began in the early 1970s when, as a therapist and mediator, I began teaching my first seminars and classes for divorcing parents in a Southern California community. As the months went on, my students and clients taught me how complex it could be to pull away from an intimate relationship and reorganize one’s life. They continually asked for practical, concrete information that would help them place their experiences in perspective. Parents have complicated, often stressful lives with little time or energy for theory and polemics. They insisted on easy-to-use information that helped them place their own experience in perspective and give them a sense of direction and purpose. As one father of three young teenagers said, “There has to be some sense to all of this! Where am I going, anyway?”

To answer their requests, step-by-step guidelines and principles evolved. The original guides were published in the first edition of Mom’s House, Dad’s House in 1980. Since then I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with many more people. Some parents were determined, articulate, persistent. They wanted their children, they wanted their life to go back to normal, they wanted to get through the crisis in as good a shape as possible. Others, less assertive, were devastated by events that were out of their control, feeling betrayed, discarded, worthless. They wanted relief, respect, a sense of hope. The professionals I worked with asked for even more information they could pass on to their clients. Each new perspective taught me important lessons about what worked and what didn’t. This second edition has been expanded to include as much of this new information as space allows.

THE OVERALL PICTURE

A good place to begin is with the commonly held truths learned over years of experience.

1. Children love, want, and need both parents. Fathers as well as mothers are the core of their child’s life. Both parents—with and without custody—are important to their children’s well-being and healthy development. Of course there are many stable and loving families where one of the parents is missing. These families have learned how to adjust and make second homes or strong ties with extended families and friends where the children are loved and protected. But there are also “pushed out” or absent parents. How their absence is handled is enormously important to a child. Children do not forget a parent.

2. Each child is unique. What one child can handle, another cannot. One six-year-old child handles a change of residence fairly well, a classmate with the same situation is bewildered and confused. While there are many guidelines parents can use to make decisions about what is best for their child, their decisions must always be guided by a heightened sensitivity to their child’s individual temperament, level of development, experience, and resiliency. Wise parents increase their attention and commitment to their child during these crisis months. They know that what they do heavily influences not only how well their child copes now but also the kind of adult he or she will someday become.

3. A go...