In late 2002, my three eldest kids' father and I separated, followed
by a legal end to our marriage about 18 months or so later. Our kids
were 10, 6.5 and almost 5 years old at the time. So for the past eight
years or so, their father and I have shared legal custody 50/50 - and
for the past two years or so, we've also shared physical custody 50-50.
In a practical sense, this means that every Sunday night, our kids
switch houses for the week. They spend one full week at their father's
house, and then they spend one full week at my house, and so forth and
so on. Their two homes are only a few miles away from each other, and
to the extent we are able, their father and I attempt to keep all other
elements of their lives (aside from the actual switching of houses) the
same whether they are at Dad's house or Mom's house: sports, friends,
time with extended family on both sides of the aisle, etc. We do attend
two different churches, but we really do try to maintain consistency
across the two houses ("try" being the operative word here; we do not
always succeed).
I have a number of friends who are
divorced from their kids' fathers, and each of them handles this
custody sharing thing a little differently. I have one friend who has
100% custody, and her kids rarely ever see their father (his choice). I
have other friends where the kids live primarily with one parent, and
the other parent is more like an "extra" than an actual parent. That
doesn't mean that the kids love that other parent any less, but their
relationship with him (and yes, it's usually a him) just isn't the same
as the one they have with the parent who actually cares for them on a
day in and day out basis. I also have one divorced friend who essentially has a
commuter relationship with her kids. She has a very high-powered job,
primarily located in another city (kids in Nashville, mother traveling
between NYC and ATL for lawyering), so she flies in to see her kids once or
twice a month. She also chats and emails and texts and Skypes with them
nearly every day, and she takes them on fabulous vacations in the
summer and over the winter holidays. She decided that her children's
need for the stability of a single home (and her ability to earn the
money it takes for their father to mostly be a stay at home parent, and
to allow all of them to remain in that stable, comfortable, single
home) was more important than what she believes would have been an
artificial 50-50 time split that would have been more about HER wants
and needs rather than about what would actually be best for her
kids.
When my children's father and I broke up, the idea of one of us moving to another town or another state didn't really even come up for discussion. Neither of us could imagine a scenario in which we wouldn't see our children regularly - daily if possible. Speaking only for myself, I can't imagine creating a situation where the children would have to negotiate two communities or two groups of friends or two majorly different schedules in summer and winter. The changing back and forth between the two houses seems hard enough for them. Since my marriage ended, I have been offered some fantastic job opportunities (New York! Atlanta! Chicago!) that would have required me to either give up significant time with my children, or to attempt to make the case to the family court powers-that-be that the children should move with me, far away from their father. If I had chosen to pursue such a course - something I would never have considered because my kids need their father - it would have meant that the kids would have been unable to have spontaneous extra time with one parent or another on a Wednesday evening, just because they were feeling a random, mid-week longing for some extra dad or mom-time. It would have meant that the idea of both of us easily attending a school play or even an important pediatric appointment would have been impossible. So in many ways, I feel like we have made the best of bad choices with our two houses in the same town set-up. They see both parents regularly. Both parents are equally involved. They have the same friends and coaches and schools and activities, even though they have the hassle of switching back and forth between two houses.
I am absolutely NOT judging divorced parents who make a different choice regarding how to organize parenting time, schedules, careers and geographic locations. A case can certainly be made that the value of children having a truly primary home with one parent, while still getting plenty of summer and holiday visits, along with daily phone/skype/text conversations with the other parent, offers a certain stability and routine that our children's schedule does not. But this is the set-up that seemed to make the most sense to us. And despite some of the obvious shortcomings - such as the fact that the kids do have to do that SUnday night shuffle each week - I still believe that it's the best choice for us overall, giving the realities of our family life.
Over the years, I've written a lot about how hard it is for me to be separated from my three eldest kids half the time - how much I miss them. For the first two or three years, I literally cried myself to sleep many nights when they left for their father's house, just because I missed them so much. It was very hard to go from being a full time, work-from-home (stay at home) parent to suddenly being without my young children 1/3rd of the time. I no longer cry myself to sleep, but I can't really say that I've ever actually adjusted to the whole thing. The bottom line is that when I got divorced, I effectively signed away the right to enjoy half my kids' childhooods. Poof! Half their childhoods lost to me in an instant. It really was (and is) as dramatic as that.
As they have gotten older, though, the emotional difficulties for me as a mama that come with simply missing my children during the weeks when they are with their father have been replaced with a whole new set of more practical and logistical challenges. Even though their father and I try to communicate clearly and often about what's going on with each of them as they move back and forth across both households, and even though schools continue to make it easier for two-household families like ours by providing certain web-based organizational tools, it's still hard to keep up with what's going on with your kids when they are busy and you are busy and you only have them living with you every other week.
The every-other-week absences mean that I lose the organic, easy threads of conversation about things going on at school with this friend or that teacher that should be a normal part of parenting one's child. When E leaves for his father's house on Sunday evening, he may be reading and enjoying Book X, but by the time I see him next, he's on to Book Y, and my moment to chat with him about how much I enjoyed Book X when I was his age has passed. Or J will forget that I wasn't there on Wednesday when some bit of classroom girl drama happened at school, and she'll reference it the next week in the context of some other conversation, and I'll have no idea what she's talking about. Plus, even all these years in, it's just a weird feeling to have your kids tell you about parts of their lives that have absolutely ZERO relation to you - people they know or places they have visited or restaurants they tried out or neighbors they play with or conversations they have had.... It's just an odd way to parent when you are - for all practical purposes - kind of disconnected from large areas of the day to day goings on in your childrens' lives. I'm just not sure I'll ever completely adjust to it.
Do you share custody? How do you arrange your schedule? Do you believe that a primary residence is more important than equal access to both parents? Talk about part-time parenting in the comments below.
