Complicated Families
One of my ex-husbands refers to himself as “the Australian Mickey Rooney”, referring wryly to the three marriages under his belt, but friends, I have one-upped him, sort of.
I qualify that flex because while the relationship that brought me to Sydney spanned nearly a decade, produced a child, was legally binding (via same-sex interdependency immigration laws in 1993), and was exorbitantly expensive to dissolve, we couldn’t be married because the laws weren’t in place back then.
I’ve birthed four children and raised six; those kids have, between them, four different paternities. More than once I’ve been asked to diagram this on a whiteboard, and I’ve lost count of the raised eyebrows that conveyed a judgment that Australians are far too British to speak aloud.
But one person’s impetuous is another’s optimistic, and I refuse to be anything but proud of my family. All this means is I know a lot about marriage, divorce, and raising kids, which is not to say I haven’t made egregious errors along the way. This was one of the primary motivations for launching Learning Curve. Is there any truer chiche than “we learn from our mistakes”? I think not.
A few months ago my friend and practice manager Kate invited me to partner with her in a joint venture. I suspect she got bored of me whining for literally years about how I wanted to shake up my career, write a book and either run away or run seminars, so she took this bull by the horns and offered true, equal collaboration. I jumped at her offer.
How is it that I’ve lived this fucking long and didn’t know that was exactly what I needed to get unstuck?
Anyway, I haven’t posted here in three weeks and this is the reason. My vision has long been to share what I’ve learned about relationships, from personal experience, errors, and clinical practice, on a wider platform. Specifically, I’m interested in how best to manage relationship transitions, and I’ve found that resources for people navigating these are few and far between.
Untangle Seminars is the outcome of this collaboration, and Kate and I are beyond excited to launch our inaugural program, The Complicated Families Project, late next month. I’ve got so much to share with parents (and step-parents) managing family transitions like separation, divorce, single-parenting, dating, repartnering, all while trying to adult the best they can. I know, because I’ve lived it, how difficult it can be to show up for children while nursing a heartbreak or falling in love, and if someone had offered me experienced guidance I would’ve grabbed it with both hands.
Here are, at random, a few of the tips I’ve gathered for Complicated Families workbook:
If you’re going through a big personal change that will affect the rest of your family, find a confidant - a friend, a therapist, a volunteer at Lifeline - to discuss it with. Just don’t workshop it with your kids. The ins and outs of adults’ intimate relationships are not for their consumption; doing so puts children under pressure to ignore their own experience in order to hold space for their parents’, and creates a sense of responsibility that is way beyond their pay-grade. This is one of the most common and damaging issues I hear about from adult clients whose parents divorced when they were kids. 1/5 do not recommend.
When talking to kids about a change in the family, parents should keep the messaging age appropriate, simple, and concise. Focus on how it impacts them, what they can expect, that they will be loved and looked after, and acknowledge that their feelings about this may develop and change as the information sinks in. Expect to need to repeat this more than once.
Refuse to denigrate your ex in front of your children. Maybe you’re hurting because you’ve been dumped, or you want to justify your decision to leave. That’s your problem, not your kids’. If there has been abusive behaviour, by all means offer acknowledgement and support, but bad-mouthing another’s character is just not going to be helpful even if it feels true in every fibre of your being.
If you’re living with or participating in raising someone else’s kids, get clear with the parents about your role, responsibilities, and boundaries. What I wish I’d known: my stepkids had two loving parents who together made the decision to bring them into the world and were happily responsible for them. They didn’t need another adult inserting herself into the decision-making, the disciplining, the finances – but here was Super Mum racing to save a day that didn’t need saving! In that superhero cape, I sometimes found myself feeling self-righteous, judgemental, resentful, and exhausted, all due to my own inability to stay in my lane. Having said that, there was no one around that was adept as yours truly at nit extermination or lining up a dozen slices of bread for vegemite sandwich school lunches; those were jobs I could do with a song in my heart and not a bit of resentment. My advice to you: find those jobs and do them. Leave the rest to the people actually responsible for them, because less resentment equals more harmony, and that benefits the whole family.
I could go on, and on - in fact, I’m having a ball doing exactly that in seminar and book form. I’m not sure what the moral of the story is today, though. Maybe it’s that if you get stuck, find a collaborator. Or that families can be constructed in all kinds of ways but they are also living organisms, and there are always common principles and perils that emerge as they change over time. Or perhaps it’s that lots of joy and growth comes from sharing what we learn along the way.