Some Free Advice to Moms Getting Divorced

Here’s some free advice to women with children who are getting divorced. Right now, you may be thinking that one of the best ways to punish the bast**rd for robbing you of the best years of your life would be to make sure that he sees his kids as little as possible. You’d be wrong. Remember how little effort he put into fatherhood while you were married? How it was easier to get him to donate a kidney than spend time with his kids? How he called looking after his own children so you could go to the supermarket “babysitting”? When he says now in the middle of the divorce proceedings that he wants to co-parent and be with his kids, he’s conning you. It’s probably a kind of Brer Rabbit “Don’t Throw Me in the Brier Patch” thing. He’s hoping that you will make concessions on economic issues in exchange for giving up his time with the kids. Don’t let spite blind you to what makes sense for you and the kids in the long run.

I can tell you that in my matrimonial practice, a number of women clients came back a year after the divorce and asked if I could get the judge to make their ex-husbands take the kids more. They had begun to remember how thankless and difficult parenting can be and that it is not necessarily a reward to be stuck with 90% or more of the duties. They had come to realize that they had let their exes off easy and that he was happy as a pig in mud that all he had to do was whip out his checkbook every month. Sure, he moaned about I, but deep down he knows that he has it made. All he has to do is pick up the kids every now and then, feed them lots of sugar, show them a good time, and let his ex-wife clean up any disciplinary messes.

So unless your soon to be ex is genuinely a threat to the health and safety of the children, see to it that he gets them at least 50% of the time. Trust me, you’ll be glad of the time away from the kids. And you can be sure that this is a better way of getting back at your ex. Picture him having to do all the kid care crap that he left to you all those years.

Also, even if your ex is a complete chump, your kids will be better off for having more rather than less time with their old man. They won’t resent you later for depriving them of their father who, if absent, may begin to look more and more heroic in their eyes. Your ex will be more likely to pay child support on time and to contribute additionally to the well being of his children if he is a bigger part of their lives.

The down side is that you are going to have contact with your ex on a regular basis for the rest of your life. It can’t be helped. If you have kids together, you are a family, a weird sort of family, but family all the same. The sooner you reconcile yourself to dealing with this issue like an adult, the better off everyone will be.