The Fourth Grade Parents’ Night Out is in full swing. These adults-only gatherings, potluck style with plenty of cocktails, are a tradition at my sons’ school. A new couple introduces themselves and we make small talk over glasses of wine while I wait for the inevitable question. There it is, from the wife, looking around the room: “Who’s your husband?” We’re divorced, I explain. He’s with the boys tonight. We live in a traditional, smallish Midwestern city. Midwesterners are not big on sharing. Getting too personal makes us very nervous. Most often, as soon as I say divorce the conversation is quickly changed to a less embarrassing topic. So… how ‘bout those Colts! But the wife leans in, curious. “So do the kids live with you? What’s your arrangement?” (She must not be from around here, I muse.) I roll into my pitch. Not that I’m trying to sell anything. I’ve just found the more succinctly I state it, the easier it is for others to digest (hand gestures help). “Our living arrangement’s kind of unusual. The boys stay in the house [hands together in front of me, fingertips touching like I’m holding a big snowball] and their dad and I have separate apartments [right hand out to the side; then left hand]. We move in and out every week [right hand in; then move left hand in, while moving right out] to take care of them,” [hands back in front holding the precious snowball]. I stop flopping my hands around and wait for a reaction. The shocked silence and confused expression, I’m used to. Her eyes welling up with tears? That’s new. What I’m describing is called “bird nesting” or “nesting.” It’s based on the idea of the kids being like baby birds and the mother and father birds flying in and out of the nest to take care of them. This means, in non-ornithological terms, that after a divorce the kids continue to stay in the family home while the parents take turns moving in and out. In our case, my ex and I each have our own apartments where we live when we’re not in the house with the boys. We switch into the house on Wednesday mornings and Saturday evenings. The boys and all their stuff — clothing, homework, sports gear, musical instruments, and piles of beloved childhood detritus in their rooms — stay put.
I read about the idea in Laura Wasser’s great book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way: How to Divorce Without Destroying Your Family or Bankrupting Yourself.” Nesting struck a chord with the boys’ dad and me. We hoped keeping the routine of daily life as consistent as possible would give continuity as we figured out what divorce would mean for our family. Of course, changes were going to come. We hoped if their day-to-day life didn’t feel that much different, it could temper the fear and uncertainty.
When we sat them down to tell them we were getting a divorce – they were 12, 9, and 5 at the time — the very next thing we said was: But nothing’s changing for you. You will keep living right here. We presented it with familiar scenarios: It’s like when Dad goes on a business trip for a few days and Mom takes care of you. Or when Mom goes to see her friends and Dad’s in charge.
When we were divorcing nesting was almost unheard-of, at least in our part of the country. Anita M. Ventrelli, former chairwoman of the American Bar Association’s family law section, said she recalled the concept surfacing about 10 years ago, but she did not think anyone was keeping track of how common it is. “Nesting isn’t really something that’s in the divorce statutes,” she noted. “It’s a solution that creative lawyers and parents have developed to address concerns about moving kids. It’s often agreed to outside of court — a creature of settlements, not something that judges would likely order.” Describing it to our lawyers, therapists and financial adviser took some explaining and forced us to answer some tough questions. Telling family, friends and the boys’ teachers, required clarifying and repeating (hence the elevator-pitch-with-hand-gestures). The most frequent question? How long are you going to do that? The best answer we could come up with was, I don’t know, I guess until we decide not to? We’re moving into year three, and our answer is still the same. Which is not to say it’s easy. There are hassles, for sure – shared space, finances, and keeping track of my own stuff between the house and my apartment. For couples considering nesting, Ms. Ventrelli, a senior partner at Schiller DuCanto & Fleck in Chicago, suggests three questions: “Is this something my ex and I can both agree to do? Can we each find somewhere else to live when not in the nest? Can we work together to share and care for the nest?” If you can’t say “yes” to all of these, Ms. Ventrelli cautions, “You may find challenges of nesting make it unsustainable, though it could serve as a short-term solution until the divorce is settled.” Nesting isn’t necessarily the answer for everyone. But there’s no reason the traditional post-divorce scenario has to be the go-to solution, either. So many memories live in a family home. The boys continuing to live there – and all of us crossing paths there regularly — is a constant reminder to all of us. While our narrative is ever-changing, we were and always will be our version of a family. As for my new friend at the school party? “Oh my God, if my parents had done something like that, it would have made such a difference,” she says, wiping her eyes and glancing with embarrassment from her husband to me. “It was 30 years ago but I will never forget my little sister sobbing uncontrollably every time we had to move houses. It was awful.” Her eyes tear up again. “I’m so sorry I’m getting so emotional!” “That’s O.K.,” I say, my eyes welling up, too. “You just made me feel like what we’re doing might actually all be worth it.” Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/well/family/after-divorce-giving-our-kids-custody-of-the-home.html?_r=1
Divorce is a hard process and perhaps nobody knows this better than the children of divorced parents, who can find themselves caught up in a situation over which they have little control facing an uncertain future. Whilst their emotional lives may be going through turmoil, they also have to contend with the idea that their everyday lives will change, whether that is not seeing one of their parents on a daily basis or moving to a different house or location. Historically there was usually a set plan regarding child custody. In the absence of any glaring reason not to, the mother was granted custodial custody of the children with the father being granted visiting rights. Fathers would see their children every weekend or every other weekend and perhaps for some time during the holidays. In the last decade or so there has been a much bigger shift to a shared custodial arrangement whereby the children spend almost equal time with each parent (or a substantial amount of time with the “non-custodial parent”), moving between their homes. There were many reasons for this shift including fathers being more involved in childrearing and research showing that the involvement of two parents had psychological benefits for the child. As divorce levels rise, people are becoming a lot more innovative about custodial arrangements. When Daria and David finally decided that their marriage was over they were determined that their divorce would have as little negative disruption on their children as possible. Daria and David decided to give “nesting” a try. Nesting is a relatively new and creative idea in the arena of child custody arrangements. It is called nesting because the children stay in the home while the parents are the ones who leave and return, similar to parent birds who come and go from the nest leaving the baby birds in situ. The concept is based on the idea of shared custody. Shared custody has the advantage that both parents continue to have a close bond with their children and are involved in their everyday lives, but it has a disadvantage of a disruptive effect on the children’s living arrangements as the children shuttle between their parents’ homes. The idea of nesting is that the children stay put in the marital home ensuring their security while it is the parents moving in and out of the house when it is their time with the children. Daria and David decided on a week each with the handover day being on Sunday. They rented a small flat near their house which the parent without the children would stay in. Daria explained, “We wanted stability for our children in a difficult time. We didn’t want the children to have to constantly pack themselves up. As it was our decision to divorce we felt that we should take the brunt of the moving about”. David added that financially they didn’t have enough money to keep their home and buy a second one which would be suitable for the children, sustaining one household and a small apartment was a lot cheaper. The advantages for the children mean that they have a feeling of permanence, their environment does not change and they don’t have to remember all their belongings and books each time they move. The sense of routine can be extremely helpful to the children at a time of change and turbulence. It can be great for the children to see their parents co-operating for their sake, and ultimately the children benefit by maintaining a close relationship with both parents in a familiar environment. For the parents, the financial aspects may also be attractive. However there are downsides in the nesting process. Children may find it hard to accept the end of their parents’ marriage where there is such close co-operation. It also takes a huge effort on the part of the parents to make this arrangement work. Grocery shopping and household chores can be flash points. Where the parents are constantly arguing this arrangement can be more damaging then shared custody where there is little contact between he parents. The lack of privacy can also be an issue, and where one or both of the parents finds a new partner this can make the arrangement impractical . Nesting only works where there is full co-operation between the parents. Many times couples start off wanting an amicable divorce but animosity can set in when the financial settlement is discussed which can make the nesting process difficult, even unsustainable. In any event nesting is usually for a specified time and there needs to be an agreed arrangement in place for when the nesting ends. Daria and David worked very hard at making nesting work for their family and, although they hit many bumps along the way, they continued the arrangement for 18 months until David found a new partner. At this point they moved to a traditional shared custody arrangement with the children moving between two homes. Both David and Daria agree that although the nesting period was limited and hard, they feel that it has greatly benefitted their children as it provided them with a haven at a time of great uncertainty and change in their lives. Both parents felt that two years post-separation the children were in a better place emotionally to deal with moving between their homes. Daria added that she felt that having been through the frustrations of moving between two homes, she now understood the challenges of moving between homes. "Parents should walk in their kids' shoes," said Joseph S. Mattina a previous New York State Supreme Court justice, who once ordered nesting, with the consent of both parents, because he thought it was important for parents to understand the dislocation that kids often go through in divorce. Nesting is an idea which takes a lot of co-operation and although there have been rare court ordered nesting arrangements (in the US and Canada) it is mainly thought of as a custody arrangement that would have to be with the consent of both parents. Despite nesting still being an atypical arrangement, as collaborative divorces and mediated divorces come up with more creative child custody arrangements, there has been a lot more interest in the idea of nesting in the immediate period post-divorce. Nesting is certainly not for all couples as it requires a large amount of give and take at a very turbulent time, but for those who can, it definitely appears to be an option , albeit for a specific period of time, that could lend a sense of security to their children during a very uncertain time.
Having separate homes may not qualify as ‘bird’s nest custody’. But by building a whole new relationship with your ex, the spirit of nesting can help maintain a healthy environment for your children
Ten years ago, roughly nine months into our divorce, my ex and I started to build a relationship. The immediate aftermath of our split had been a sour blend of quiet and hurt. We tried to make politeness our default position, and it occasionally held. What kept us connected was our boys, then six and nine. They cut through whatever anger sat between us. We held to that one point of agreement: change the boys’ lives as little as possible. After children have seen their lives inverted, that all sounds a bit feeble, but it was a seed. Their mother retained primary custody. The boys lived with her in the only house in New York they had known, a loft in lower Manhattan. Before moving back to my childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn, I spent two years in an apartment close to Ground Zero, then a generally inactive construction site. In 2006, it was just a way to live near the boys’ home and school. The ghosts were quiet and my kids liked the hotel restaurant next to my building. When a central home is maintained, and parents cycle through it while the kids stay put, it’s called “bird’s nest custody” or “nesting”. We were improvising, with the help of therapists, and didn’t know what nesting was, even if we mimicked it. We maintained two separate homes, so our arrangement didn’t qualify, though we kept the boys’ concerns central. Our interactions with each other in the first year were the least generous. But a second rule went into effect early: no badmouthing the other parent, whatever the topic. And we were lucky – we liked and respected each other, beneath the turbulence. That’s where we had started. So the irregular interactions led to a committed decision to not be ugly, even when that seemed impossible. There was enough doubt and hurt for all four of us – anything to clean the air helped. It was a way of being both selfish and considerate. Even when there wasn’t much of it, talking was a boon. When living together, decisions can be made by default, without negotiation. Sightlines become assumed statements: “There she goes with the morning drop-off. I guess she’s OK with it.” But when you live in two places, and children aren’t old enough to travel alone, every movement has to be discussed. Who will take whom where and when? Can you take Friday night, because Thursday I need to do something for work? Generosity encouraged reciprocity. The marriage cynic would say: “Well, sure. You had to get along because you can’t engage in the silent warfare of marriages.” But of course you can fight, if one parent doesn’t care about seeing the kids. That wasn’t the case, and a cold war never came. We had no choice but to talk. Whatever else may vex me about cellphones, beginning with my own dependence on them, they allowed a reliable line to my kids. In the past 10 years, we’ve rarely gone a day without talking or texting, even when one of them had a Soviet-style flip phone that could only burp four words a minute.
Not everything clicked smoothly into place. Talking involved just as many unpleasant standoffs as reasonable compromises. “You’re letting them see what? And do what? And miss what school event?” But the distance between households in two different boroughs meant disagreements needed to end quickly. We couldn’t pretend the proximity of a shared house was some simulacrum of “dealing with it”. If we didn’t table a problem, we wouldn’t know how the other parent felt, or what we were supposed to be doing, empirically, minute by minute. Parents make decisions that are as constant as the subjects are varied. They can involve, but are not limited to, middle schools; high schools; unexpected silences from a normally chatty boy; punishments for ambitious, unauthorized parties; whether or not 48 Hours is a comedy; the choice of a party restaurant really far uptown, way the hell away from Brooklyn; and other traditional life events. I had no control over the most useful development. Two years into our divorce, my ex reunited with her college boyfriend. (Facebook is not entirely evil.) They became permanent partners, both wearing engagement rings to this day. “Marriage ruins everything,” they said, so suspended in love they remain, without any help from the state. Her partner became a third parent to my boys. It is hard to accept that he’s seen them more than I have in the past eight years. It would be harder to accept someone into our family who wasn’t willing to talk through whatever came up, and continues to come up.
Which is not to say the ache overwhelms the memories. For every breakfast I’ve been absent from, there is a trip to Junior’s Restaurant just for cornbread and coleslaw. For every Broadway play missed, there’s a duet of two fools twisting to the Fearless Four on dishtowels. Right now, all three are driving back to New York with my youngest son, now 16, after visiting a few colleges in New England. Not being there does not get easier for me. Debriefing helps. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/14/nesting-divorce-parents-children-custody
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In the book, I describe how co-parenting works, how bird-nesting (an extreme form of co-parenting) works, and how you can make this work for the benefit of all in your divorced family.
I believe it is an unusual but extremely child-centric form of co-parenting and me and my ex-wife have used it to raise our two daughters from our divorced-marriage with great success.
Anyone who buys the book can send me proof of their Amazon purchase and I'll gladly get back in touch to see if I can offer some personal and direct guidance on how to implement bird-nesting, co-parenting or assist in any other way with challenges they are currently facing.
Simply email me at toby@divorcedlifestyledesign.com.
Thanks, and I look forward to hearing what you think of the book! https://amzn.to/2NasnIA
For years, I’ve been waiting for someone to come clean about co-parenting. Celebrities and social media would have us believe it’s easy, even enjoyable, and I’m tired of contributing to that narrative. It’s not true. As a co-parenter and frequent social media over-sharer, I’m guilty of perpetuating the notion that anyone can seamlessly transition from a couple to co-parents with grace, dignity and ease. Sure. There have been happy moments in my co-parenting journey where that felt true, but those moments are not the majority of my experience. Shared family vacations and weekly dinner dates didn’t happen without endless negotiations and blurred lines along the way. So, here we go, I’ll say the thing that no one else wants to say: Co-parenting sucks.
My son was 1 years old when I moved out of the home I shared with my husband and ever since then his father and I have tried multiple ways to co-exist.
We’ve tried mediation and meditation, and seeing each other in moderation. We’ve lived separately, together and have even tried nesting (a name for the cohabitation set-up where the child stays in one home while the parents rotate in and out). We’ve tried cooperative parenting and parallel parenting, going no-contact and going full-contact (a name for the emotional set back where you start sleeping together again against all better judgment). I could write the Kama Sutra on co-parenting. After five years, the conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s nothing natural about this. Successfully sharing the person who brings you the most joy with the person who brings you the most pain is nothing short of a miracle. I always laugh — and then scream — when people suggest getting divorced is taking the easy way out. I can’t think of anything more difficult than failing at marriage, and then having to raise a child together without having the necessary time and distance to recover from every micro and macro heartbreak that has occurred. There’s nothing easy about this easy way out. In fact, the only thing that’s easier than leaving a relationship that isn’t working is choosing to stay in it. I didn’t realize that divorce doesn’t really exist when you have children. If it does, it looks something like this: “I now pronounce you ex-husband and ex-wife, you may keep seeing each other for the rest of your lives.” That’s where I am now, the separate but together forever until death do we part. That vow doesn’t go away even after all of the other vows have been broken. When I filed for divorce in 2012, I wasn’t yet ready to let go. I still felt so much love for the man I was leaving and I was still gripping onto the idea of a perfect family. What I didn’t understand back then is that the love I have for my son and the love I had for his father would always be tangled up together in knots. I couldn’t admit this to anyone else because I was too busy pretending I knew what I’d gotten myself into, pretending for my son’s sake and for my own sanity that my divorce didn’t faze me. We tried really hard to be the world’s friendliest exes and in photos it was believable, but in reality we were actually two people desperately clinging onto the fantasy of what we thought our family could look like. A fantasy where there was one Christmas, not two, no separate mommy time and daddy time, no elaborate and colorful calendar to help us keep track of where our child would be sleeping on any given night. It would take years to face the facts of separating. No matter how much my ex-husband and I love each other, how much we’ve forgiven one another and how much we’re willing to work together, divorce means we set fire to the fantasy. And what’s left in the ashes is harder to accept than I imagined. Co-parenting means my child will grow up always missing one of his parents. When he says to me in tears, “This isn’t fair,” I tell him that he’s right, there’s nothing fair about this. When he says, “I miss daddy,” I want to cry with him and say, “I miss daddy too.” But I take a deep breath and I tell him what I know is true: “Anything less than always will feel like not enough time together.” There is nothing natural about the fact that my son will grow half his height while I’m not watching or that he’ll tuck half of his baby teeth under the pillow at a different home. He won’t get the little sibling he wants anytime soon, and if he ever does that child won’t share his father’s eyes or my lips and he’ll only spend every other Christmas with him or her.
I didn’t know back then, when I was one foot in the fantasy and one foot out, how much I would dread dropping off my son with his father. How do I describe how alone a home feels when a child has left it? Maybe you already know this feeling. Maybe you too have sat, or collapsed, on the living room floor and looked at old photos and videos of your child. Maybe you too have given in to the unexpected and overwhelming feelings of nostalgia and self-pity and regret.
A married friend once told me how much she envied me. “At least you get some time off,” she said. The comment wasn’t malicious, but it was misled. How could I explain to her that there is no such thing as time off when you’re a parent. The minute my son is gone I wonder where he is and what he’s doing. I wonder whether he’s hungry, tired or sad. I fill up my calendar so that every hour we’re apart is accounted for because if I don’t do this there’s a good chance I won’t get out of bed.
It’s in these moments that I wonder what is wrong with me. And I’m not entirely convinced that there is something wrong with me because I don’t know how other co-parents cope. We don’t talk about it. We nod and we smile and we fill our calendars on our “days off,” and for the rest of the world we put our most evolved foot forward. At least, I did. I kept up the act: I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re all fine. But for a long time, I wasn’t fine. And now, I’m done trying to convince myself that I’m part of a secret society of mothers who stay best friends with their exes, travel together with their exes and regularly reunite for a bedtime story or bath time routine. This might be the reality for some divorced parents, but it isn’t mine — not yet, not really and maybe it never will be. Slowly, I’m beginning to accept this fact. What I know now and desperately needed to hear then is this: Let go of the family you thought you’d be and accept the family that you are. Redefine your reality. It won’t be easy and there will be days when it feels nearly impossible. You will feel guilt, but you are not guilty. You will feel shame, but you did nothing shameful. You will feel regret, but you did the right thing. There is a space that exists between the family that you were and the family that you’ll end up being. You’re not alone in that space. I’m right there with you. And my guess is that we’re not the only ones. Source: http://time.com/5183804/co-parenting-difficult-hard-jessica-henriquez/
