4

The first night without your children

The hideous reality of separation is that you often go from being a full-time parent and spouse in a busy household where you’re so run off your feet you barely have time to pour yourself a glass of wine or grab another beer, to having swathes of alone time stretching ahead of you with no children to look after or spouse to talk to.

On the first night, and thereafter, it’s really important that you have a plan of action to help you cope. Try to organise to have dinner with a close friend on the first night, or even invite your closest friends over for a movie night and watch a truly inappropriate-for-kids movie, along with having chocolate, wine from a box and an extra-pepperoni pizza (we know you spend your life eating margarita and ham and pineapple because that’s what your kids like).

Try really hard not to drink too much, because tipsy people often wind up texting and making late-night phone calls to their exes, and you’re better than that. But if you’re not, and you do, don’t worry. It’s pretty much par for the course, and probably they deserve it. Just remember the texts could end up in an affidavit or application for a protection order. Again, it might be better to send the texts to your best friend or sister instead.

As hard as it is, there are upsides to having time away from your children, and as part of your promise to be really super kind to yourself, it’s a good idea to find those upsides. It’s another one of those things where it gets easier as time passes.

Oftentimes, the end of a relationship can be so soul-destroyingly toxic that you might find some sense of relief in being out of it, and to wake up peacefully on a Saturday morning after a blissful sleep-in. The sheer joy of having the whole bed to yourself also really can’t be discounted.

As long as you know your children are safe with their other parent, try to use the time to do things that are super fun but also tough with kids in the house—like bleaching all your towels in the bathtub. (No? Just us? Really?)

The list below is a bunch of things you can do when you don’t have your kids to help fill in those empty hours, especially in the beginning. You’ve very likely never had a lot of free time, and now is your chance to do the things you haven’t had the opportunity to do before.

These things don’t have to be expensive. We know that funds are probably the tightest they’ve ever been. The list below contains things that are either free or reasonably cheap.

• Going to the supermarket alone (this is bliss).

• Baking—if you’re not much of a cook, start with easy stuff like simple sugar cookies. (Google it—they’re great! And as a bonus, your children will think you’re, like, amazing.)

• Lying in the sun reading the weekend papers.

• Gardening, even if you’re really crap at it (this is also called ‘weeding’).

• Buying Ikea furniture without any in-store meltdowns from little people.

• Putting Ikea furniture together without any little people ‘helping’.

• Going to the hairdressers without your partner calling every twenty minutes to ask, ‘Are you done yet? How long is this taking?! The kids are driving me mental!’

• Getting a pedicure every now and again.

• Appreciating not having to drag your children around with you 24/7.

• Going for a really long walk.

• Getting a dog, and taking the dog for a walk.

• Going for a run.

• Going to parkrun on Saturday morning and meeting fantastic parkrunners (check it out at www.parkrun.com.au/).

• Taking up long-distance running. (Rebekah did this and is now taking on marathons and triathlons.)

• Going back to studying: for example, starting that post-grad degree that you always wanted to do.

• Joining the gym and taking up yoga. (Lucy tried this and she now accepts that she finds yoga really boring. She spent the whole time thinking about what she was going to have for lunch.)

• Being able to occasionally go out for Friday night drinks at work, or going out every second Friday (for example) if you so choose.

• Dating (and this is a whole new world of weird—for those of us who last dated in our twenties some years ago, the whole online dating thing is very strange).

• Talking to your closest friends on the phone without little people instantly demanding attention.

• Cleaning the whole house top to bottom and having it stay that way for at least twenty-four hours (even the Lego).

• Having a kid-free dinner party, even if it’s pot luck.

• Going out to dinner with your siblings and/or your parents.

• Planning and making really great, yay-the-kids-are-home dinners.

• Doing your Christmas or birthday shopping really early and wrapping the presents just like Martha Stewart.

• Watching Netflix at 2 p.m.

• Going to visit your friends on the weekend and taking their kids cupcakes even though it’s nearly dinnertime.

• Becoming active in a cause that you believe in, such as joining a political party or a charity or the parents and citizens group at your kids’ school.

• Finding a new hobby, like bushwalking. (There are loads of bushwalking clubs around, in both the city and the country—google ‘bushwalking club’ and see what pops up.)

• Going to the movies with a girlfriend/old mate and eating all the popcorn.

• Finishing the week’s laundry and then folding it while you watch a show your kids hate.

We found the most important thing has been to develop a plan for your kid-free and spouse-free weekends. Otherwise, it’s very easy to take to aimlessly wandering around, watching all the other ‘happy’ families enjoying their weekends together. (In the early days, you will hate the sight of happy, intact families, with their smug smugness radiating from them.)

We always try to have one or two activities lined up (from the above list—although watching Netflix at 2 p.m. doesn’t really require a huge level of detailed planning) so that we don’t find ourselves crying into a (third) glass of wine on Saturday night, or opening and closing the kids’ bedroom doors. (Tip: keep them closed when they’re not home, at least in the first few months.)

‘I’d kill to have some time away from my kids!’ and other clueless comments

You’ll find that some people will say things to you like ‘Wow, it must be great having every other week/every other weekend without your kids! Mine drive me crazy on the weekends!’ Or, ‘Geez, my partner follows me around all weekend. It must be so blissful to have all that time to yourself!’

This can be really hurtful, because for lots of people, it’s not great to suddenly be a part-time parent,31 or to be single at a later stage of your life.

Phone calls or even FaceTime with toddlers are no substitute for tucking them in, mainly because toddlers and younger children have a very disconcerting habit of putting the phone down and wandering away, and don’t otherwise grasp good phone manners.

Teenagers don’t much want to talk on the phone either to their mum or dad, and so it’s possible to go days where the most in-depth conversation you’ve had with your children consists of:

‘How are you, honey?’

‘Good.’

‘How was school?’

‘Good.’

‘What are you up to today?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘Okay, honey, have a great day!’

‘’K, bye.’

If you have a toddler, the calls go like this:

‘Hi, baby!’

‘Hi, Mummy/Daddy!’

‘How are you?’

‘Good! Today I wented to the movies and then I … BEEP BEEP BEEP.’

This is upsetting, and people who are happily married and have their children full time can’t possibly understand the deep well of hurt that exists in the pit of your stomach when you haven’t seen your kids in five days and there’s still two more to go. We can’t promise that it gets better, but with careful planning, it gets more manageable.

Case study—Jonathan and Seema

Jonathan and Seema separated after ten years of marriage. They had three children, aged six, four and two. Jonathan worked long hours but was a very good and hands-on father when he was home. Money was tight in the family and this had contributed to the end of the marriage, although they were still quite amicable.

Jonathan and Seema agreed that, as the children were so small and his hours were so long, the children would move with Seema into her parents’ place, and that Jonathan would rent a nearby three-bedroom unit, in order to care for the children for two nights every second weekend. He would also see the children every Wednesday night for dinner at a local restaurant and care for them for half of school holidays.

Seema appeared to Jonathan to be thriving in her new life, and always had a lot of people around her, including her parents, and her sisters, nieces and nephews, while Jonathan felt very alone, and bereft without his children. It seemed to him that he was alone in his flat after work an awful lot.

Jonathon had always been very interested in politics, and so he joined the local branch of a political party, and took up indoor soccer. He also talked to Seema about what he could do to be more involved in the children’s lives outside of their set time with him, and together he and Seema agreed he would take their two- and four-year-old to daycare three mornings a week, and go to school assembly with his oldest on Fridays.

In time, Jonathan felt much happier with his new circumstances.

One thing we have found, and that many of our friends have found, is that in a strange way, not having your children around 100 per cent of the time can actually make you an even better, more engaged parent when you do have them.

This is a bit of a taboo thing to admit in our society, especially for mothers, but having down time while your kids are being cared for by their other loving parent can become a real blessing. In our view, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that—what could be wrong with having two engaged, rested and loving separated parents instead of two angry, shouty parents who loathe each other but still live together?

The difficulties of being single after a long marriage

It’s not always the case that a marriage ends when you have small children at home—in fact, as we’ve discussed, more and more marriages are ending around the twenty- and thirty-year mark, when the children have left home or are just about to. This carries with it unique and difficult issues all of their own, when you have to deal with the harsh reality of life as a single person after a long marriage.

One woman we know separated after a 28-year marriage when her three children were adults. We can assure you that the trauma is just as real at that time. After all, when you’ve been married for so long, you will have had very few weekends free of your children or a partner in that whole time. To find yourself in this situation can be quite devastating. It can be hard to know what to do with all that spare time.

The key to surviving these long and empty days is to fill them up again. The ideas above apply equally to you, and the worksheet below is just as important. Our friend who divorced after twenty-eight years says that somehow each day got just a little bit better. It did for her and it will for you.

Case study—Jan

Jan divorced her husband after thirty-three years of marriage. She was fifty-six and had never lived by herself. It had been a relatively good marriage but once her children left home she realised they had absolutely nothing to talk about and, frankly, every single thing he did annoyed the living daylights out of her.

The family home was sold, and Jan moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a master-built community. Her adult daughter lived nearby but Jan didn’t see her, or her grandchildren, quite as much as she had expected.

Jan hadn’t worked outside of her family’s business throughout her marriage (she ran the books for her husband) but decided, after yet another lonely night when she drank too much pinot grigio by herself, that she would get a job.

The next day she saw a sign in the local newsagency advertising for a part-time office manager. Jan applied and to her surprise she got the job. She also spoke with her daughter and asked when it would be helpful for her to pick her granddaughters up from school, and was very happy when her daughter said that Fridays would be a lifesaver. This meant that on Fridays she picked up the kids, and then took them to flute lessons, and went back to her daughter’s place, where she usually ended up staying for dinner.

Jan also joined the local swim group and boxercise class at the country club in her community, and made two good friends, and also an enemy, which was very interesting too.

She was still lonely from time to time but every day brought new challenges, especially as she learnt the world of work, and she felt herself growing as a person.

In Jan’s case, what worked was finding new meaning in her life, and in order to do this she reached out to her community and her loved ones. We know you can do the same, and rediscover your own spark and joy.

 

WORKSHEET 3

THINGS I CAN DO WHEN I DON’T HAVE MY CHILDREN OR I’M BY MYSELF

As we’ve mentioned before, part of sticking to plans is to write them down and commit to them. In the worksheet below, you can list activities that you’d like to do during your childfree time, and make a plan to do them. It might seem silly but it can really help.

By doing this, you can hopefully avoid binge-watching Netflix while getting completely drunk on very cheap and nasty wine you found at the back of the cupboard after you’d finished all the good stuff.

Date	Activity	Did I do it? Was it fun?

31 You’re not but sometimes it feels that way.