Kate Hayes is a professional writer, former news anchor, and aspiring children’s book author who blogs (for fun) about her family’s ongoing adventures at www.adventuresinparenting.me.
When you decide to have children, you certainly don’t intend for them to end up flying across the country for custody visits after a divorce. But life doesn’t always turn out as planned.
My daughter was eighteen months old when her father, my husband of six years, announced that he was leaving. I married my current husband when Anna was two. Kyle is the only Daddy that Anna can ever remember living with…and he is a wonderful one. The three of us, plus little brother Kellen, are a tight-knit family. For me, Kyle, and Kellen, it is our only family. For six-year-old Anna, it is one of two.
Three or four times a year, either Kyle or I fly Anna from Boston to St. Louis to visit my ex-husband. For up to two weeks at a time, Anna spends time with her dad and his entire extended family. These are trips that Anna usually looks forward to; while she hasn’t spent a lot of time with my ex-husband, the bond between them is strong. I know he showers her with non-stop attention and tries to ensure that she sees as many relatives as possible while she is there, so the visits are as physically exhausting for her as they are emotionally. When Anna returns home, she is always “out of sorts” for several days afterward: whiny, slightly rebellious, and extremely sensitive. We can only assume that no rules are enforced while Anna is away, because her sudden aversion to our house rules is always dramatic.
From a parental perspective, it is tough for me and Kyle to miss Anna so much when she is gone, only to be greeted with non-stop struggle for days after her return. We don’t enjoy being made to feel like “the mean parents.” On the other hand, we cannot imagine what it would be like to be in Anna’s shoes and have to live this “double” life at such a young age. Neither Kyle nor I have divorced parents. We have no idea what family-related stresses our daughter feels at the tender age of six.
So how do divorced parents handle these transitions through extended cross-country (or even local) custody visits? In our house, we simply grant Anna the time she needs to adjust. We never expect her to behave perfectly the minute – or even the day – she gets home. We expect whines, complaints, and emotional outbursts for the following week. When those moments come, we gently correct Anna and remind her of our rules, but then give plenty of hugs and reiterate her how much she is loved – both in Boston and St. Louis. We make a point of letting her know that we get along with my ex-husband very well. And we encourage her to tell us about much about her visits as she wants to; we never want her to feel like she has to compartmentalize her two “different lives.”
None of us are experts at this custody visit transition thing yet, but we are getting better. After the last visit, it took less time for Anna to adjust than it did the time before. I hope and pray that it will continue to get easier for her as she grows – although I have a feeling that it will never become completely “easy” to be a kid juggling two families.
No, this isn’t the life that I envisioned for my daughter when she was born. But Anna is blessed with a great home life and overall is an extremely happy and well-adjusted kid. We parents can handle the tough transitions. We’ll just keep reminding our little girl that two families means twice as much love.
