We get together mostly to compare notes on the kids, figure out what needs to get done, and decide who’s gonna do it. In any childcare arrangement between parents, married or otherwise, our culture’s expectation is that “if it’s gonna get done, then Mom’s gonna do it.” That’s a lot of pressure for mothers to carry around, especially when a dad gets to be Father of the Year if he manages to remember his kid’s birthday, within a week or two.

For any 50-50 co-parenting plan to work, two things have to happen: 1) one parent–<cough> usually the dad </cough>—has to want to take an active role and pull 50% of the load, and 2) the other (usually the mom) has to be willing to cede that part of the load without feeling like she’s not living up to some unreachable and unreasonable expectation. It’s a bad enough non-starter when 1) doesn’t happen (and it doesn’t WAY too often), but 1) without 2) can conjure the same level of friction and resentment if one parent, for whatever reason, overclings to the majority of the responsibility.

And that’s a big part of what’s happening (or not happening) with us right now. If I step up and say I’ll take the kids to skating class, or sign them up for a day camp, or whatever, Magda will say, “Sure. Knock yourself out.” Because she’s decided not to buy into the “Mom or Bust” mentality, we can spend our precious energy figuring out the division of labor, and all we care about is whether it’s fair. It isn’t something we consciously set out to do, but it’s a symbiosis that has settled in as part of our routine. And it seems to be working.

Reading that article made me realize how much easier things are for divorced co-parents who share custody.

We’re already set up for one parent to be doing it alone for three days (the situation LOD and I have). Sometimes when I’ve traveled for work (and now that LOD is traveling some for work) the kids forget that we’re going somewhere and are surprised when I reference having been on a plane. To them, it was just their normal three days with their dad.

It also means that we don’t have to scramble to keep in touch by phone or Skype. When the kids are with their dad, I usually don’t make contact. I feel like it’s his time with them, and I shouldn’t be intruding. If they want to contact me, I’m very happy to talk to them, but I don’t want to pull them out of their world with him. If I’m on a trip that fits into his normal time, I don’t contact them while I’m away. Just because I feel far from home doesn’t mean that they are.

I realize that for some women, the idea that their children’s father could be a responsible parent who keeps track of everything and that they don’t have to plan their kids’ lives in detail or manage from afar is bizarre. And, quite honestly, if I had started traveling when LOD and I were still together I would have felt like I needed to be running things even while I was gone. I think that our culture pushes women to be the Great and Powerful Oz (as my AskMoxie.org readers nicknamed that part of you that has a running track in your brain that lets you know when everyone’s supposed to get their teeth cleaned) and encourages men to earn money and play dumb around the kids (see: Huggies ad).

But here’s one great gift divorce has given me (and my kids): when he was given the chance to be the primary parent during his alone time with them, LOD absolutely rose to the task. He’s a zillion times better dad now than he was when we were an intact family. When they’re with him, I never worry about anything (unless I realize I have info that he doesn’t have because I forgot to give it to him).

FWIW, I’ve seen this a lot. Men who really weren’t on top of things with the kids when they were married rise to the challenge to become stellar parents. (Of course, I also see the opposite, that some dads just fade away and use a divorce as an excuse to do less and act helpless. I’d argue that that’s a matter of basic character, though.)

Think about how great it is for our kids to see moms and dads being equally good at parenting. And moms and dads both traveling for work and making it be OK for the kids.

I try not to be all “Eff Yeah, Divorce!!!” here, because I know a lot of readers are in the early, painful stages and it sounds too much like not acknowledging loss. But seriously? There are some massive, massive family dynamic benefits to a) being happy, b) being who you really are, and c) just pulling your share without the power imbalance and psychic debt load of being married.

(I’d also like to give an enormous thank you to my mother, aka Grandma Jellyspoon, who is taking the kids for three straight days in a few weeks when I have school for an entire weekend and LOD will be at a conference for work. I can’t even express the difference it’s made in our lives to have back-up.)

So we’ve been working it out.

I’m hoping we can talk about it at some point, once we’re through it. The irony of all of this is that I think it’s pretty age-typical stuff, and would be helpful to talk about, whereas the co-parenting part of it is negligible. But since we’re out about who we are, there’s no way not to create a big hornet’s nest by blogging it.

So. What’s new with you?

As in any strategy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So in this scenario, I am Churchill, my ex-wife is the Devil, and we’re united in our quest to fend off Nazis.

Wait. No.

I have to say I like equating Moxie with Satan and knowing that, when she reads it, she’ll know I’m kidding. Because that wasn’t always the case. But after a few years of the entire Spectrum of Wretched and a nerve-wracking negotiation to leave New York, Ann Arbor has brought us something of a stasis. Part of this stems from our new, lower-key, decidedly non-urban lifestyle, but we also are bound by a common enemy: The challenges of raising two very different boyz to men.

Our older son has landed in Tweenertown, in a new school with a new social order to navigate. He’s happiest in one spot, beefing up his knowledge of phalanxes and broadswords and such. Our younger boy once sat still for eight seconds (I timed it) and eagerly flubbers from thing to thing. They’re growing up fast, and they need our guidance. And Moxie and I know that, together or apart, we still have to teach them manners, and stay on top of their homework, and maintain a (mostly) united front when it comes to upholding each other’s punishments.

It’s our life’s greatest and most challenging work, and we need each other to pull it off.

I know we’re very lucky. We’re both able (for the time being, anyway) to work from home and maintain somewhat flexible schedules. We have the time for a Monday morning coffee to handle all that the week has in store for us, and an eager grandmother less than an hour away if we can’t. This the Golden Time—the time to forge a mutual trust that will support us later, when our lives inevitably change again. I hope it’s strong enough to hold, but I’ve lived long enough to know that you never know.

I’m not sure if it’s because we’re divorced, because we each have enough living space now so the party isn’t going to be a cramped thing in one of our NYC apartments or else held in a public space, or just because we have lower expectations now, but this has been no big deal.

Back when we were still married, every detail was up for debate, and it all turned into a big hairy deal. Who we were inviting, what the theme was, what we’d serve, what the cake or cupcakes would look like, blah blah blah. It was endless, and stressful. This time we just divided and conquered: he took location (the tricked out Wii and room to get wild playing the Wii are at his house), I took food and invitation, and we’re splitting the alcohol for any parents who choose to stay instead of drop off.

It does make it far easier that he has plenty of space now for exuberant Wii-playing in his house now, instead of the more restrained playing that would have had to have happened in either of our old apartments. I lent him my vacuum for post-party clean-up.

And it’s a lot easier to do a party for just a few kids and not have a theme (aside from let’s play Wii and eat a bunch of vegan cupcakes!!11!!). Here’s to kids growing older and being easier to please.

Now I just have to figure out where my muffin tins are to bake these vegan cupcakes.

They were the couple that everyone looked at and thought were the benchmark of how Marriage Can Work. Together for years, good parents, pillar of the community. But what it looks like from outside someone else’s relationship isn’t what the truth is.

A few weeks ago LOD and I caught wind that another couple we knew might be splitting up. I was beyond stunned. They’d also been together forever, and they were one of the couples that made me realize that the white-knuckling and thinly-disguised despair that characterized my half of my marriage was not pre-ordained by the act of getting married. It seems impossible that they’d split. But what it looks like from outside someone else’s relationship isn’t what the truth is.

We happened to be together, having a meal with the kids, when it came to light. God bless technology, because we had a text discussion about the whole thing while the kids were oblivious, telling us stories and eating burritos. At one point I asked LOD if it made him feel worse when couples we really thought were meant to be with each other split up than our own split had made him. Our divorce was inevitable–we never should have gotten married in the first place, although I’m glad we did because we have two amazing children–but for people who really truly loved each other and could have been with each other forever? That, to me, is tragic. It hits me hard. And I wondered if it hit him hard, too.

LOD just texted to ask if I’d seen that Dooce and her husband are splitting up. I hadn’t, but hearing the news is sobering. Again, they seemed so happy together. What it looks like from outside, yadda yadda.

I wonder what it feels like to have lost not just your idea of how your life was going to go and the picture you presented, but to have lost something real and strong and true. I am sad for anyone who sees another way things could have gone and wishes things had gone that way. I wish I could tell anyone in this spot that it is going to turn out better than you imagined you life would be. But I can’t. I had nothing solid to hold on to, so letting go was no great trick. I can’t give assurance to anyone who is losing something that lived in their heart.

I hope, hope that for all of you things are better in two years. They won’t be better in six months, in all likelihood. But they can be better in two years. And I hope that they are.

I have just escaped from the busiest semester of my entire life. I cannot recommend taking Corporate Strategy, Operations Management, Financial Management, and Cost Accounting all in the same semester while also working full-time at a job involving a lot of travel.

But other than the enormous timesuck of all that, everything’s good from my end. The honeymoon period of school is over for the kids, so they’re happy about the long winter break, but they like that their two houses are so close to each other and that they have more space and that everyone’s more mellow and has more emotional energy. They’re making friends, and we’ve got playdates scheduled for when they’re back from visiting family this week. They have a lot more space and time just to run, and hang out, and be unstructured. That’s what I wanted for them–space and time and freedom.

LOD seems to have been super-busy these last few months, too, but I assume he’ll dip in and tell what he’s been up to, too.

I want to publicly thank LOD for giving up a free night last week and massively rearranging his schedule so I could stay another day on a work trip to attend the wake of my friend’s mother. He didn’t have to do it, and it took some maneuvering on his part to make it work. I am so glad I got to go to the wake, to see my friends and their families and say goodbye to this lovely woman who should have had 20 more years with her grandchildren. All the pinkwashing in the world won’t bring her back.

Some relief, some sadness. All letting go.

We had The Talk right after Thanksgiving 06, and over the next several months I felt I was the one fighting for the marriage, while she was merely trying to dissolve it as expediently as possible. If you refuse to fight for something, it’s easy to be a revisionist historian and argue that it was never anything in the first place. And to seem so uninterested in reconciliation when we had our boys to think about was beyond my comprehension.

When Moxie first told me that our entire relationship was basically a lie, I lashed out, calling her all sorts of things: cowardly, deceptive, lazy, parasitic. I also resorted to emotional cheap shots, like throwing that Kali story back in her face. (Besides, CREATION is only as good as what you’re creating. Since when is creating a divided household a good thing?)

The reason for this reaction is pretty obvious: I was scared to death. I’d had almost no experience with divorce, and what little I knew seemed very mother-centric. And the idea of losing my sons left me with an unrelenting dread that gripped my throat until her signature on our divorce agreement assured me otherwise.

And that’s the key point: When I say I was fighting to stay married, I was really fighting not to be divorced. Because I had a lot more interest in being my kids’ father than remaining my wife’s husband.

When I read that article, and Moxie’s reaction to it, I felt waves of comfort and recognition. And I hope the author follows up with an article that includes the social pressures that push men into marriage. Because even though I’ll always remember my wedding day as a happy one, I also admit that part of me got married because I thought It Was Time. That marriage would make me A Grownup. And anyone who makes a life decision based on a Seinfeld sketch (or two) deserves what he gets.

Ultimately, our marriage happened because each of us thought the other loved us enough to make it work, and she was the one who was brave and aware enough to realize it was doomed.

So, in a way, she called horseshit first.

The other day when our nine-year-old came to my place after school, I happened to see that Moxie had left this in his math book:

As it turns out, you can pull a Kali on a marriage and create something that is, though not ideal, eminently livable: the situation when you’re glad she’s no longer your wife, but you’re also glad she’ll always be their mom.

I was in that 30%.

I knew, all along as we were dating, that there was something not really amazing about us together. And it all came together for me two days before the wedding when I just had the stark realization that he wasn’t the right person for me, and that I would never be able to trust him with who I really was.

Before you say, “What kind of cold-hearted bitch would marry someone knowing he was wrong?” Well, I wasn’t cold-hearted. I just put all my faith in culture instead of in myself. I thought that getting married would give me security, especially to someone who looked good on paper, very solid. On paper we came from the same background (all middle-class white people from two-parent homes are alike, right?) and the age difference (8 years) was actually good because it meant he would be more stable. And I thought that security meant safety, that he would keep me safe from myself.

I was scared of the energy in me that I’d never learned to process as a Good Girl. I was scared of my desires, sexual and otherwise. I was scared that I really was Kali, Goddess of Destruction, as my dad had teased me when I was a teenager. (It was only during the divorce process, when I was taking a burlesque workshop with Victoria Libertore, that I found out that Kali is the goddess of destruction and creation. AND CREATION.)

So getting married was about Settling Down and starting the rest of my life. I had this idea that I was going to be a good wife. And be a food writer (very genteel profession) and have children and raise them carefully and then. I don’t know what, then. Just fade away, I guess.

And LOD was a nice guy. An Eagle Scout. He called when he said he’d call. He assembled Ikea furniture for me. We pretended we thought the same things were funny. It was nice, after having my heart broken repeatedly in Mexico, to have someone steady, who got my Electric Company references. And I believed that stupid, stupid aphorism that you should marry someone who loved you more than you loved them. I knew I could surely love him enough, enough to make him happy.

So I didn’t, for even a millisecond, entertain the thought of not marrying him. I couldn’t not marry him, because then what would I do? And I don’t mean what would I do on that day instead of getting married. I mean, what would become of me? Of the rest of my life?

I was in shock the day of our wedding. I got my hair done, put on my own makeup, drove myself to the church. Put on the gorgeous dress my mother had made for me. Sucked it up and sucked it in, said the vows even though I was screaming inside and when the pastor pronounced us married my heart sank and I realized what I’d done. So I Made The Best Of It.

Until I couldn’t anymore. The road from our wedding to the day I told him I couldn’t do it anymore was long and painful and bruising. But along that way I was being compressed and hardened without even knowing it. I thought I was weak, and am still, sometimes, shocked at how strong I am.

I am not proud of how small I was back when I got married. I wish I had had the strength and honor to trust myself and trust that God had something better for me. But here I am, now, and I’m ready. That’s all I can offer.