The following is Part III of an excerpt from "Reconcilable Differences: Marriages End, Families Don't" (Parts One and Two can be found here).
When ex-spouses decide to share a house, it takes a few months to establish new routines. Joe and I each have our own kitchens so we take turns with lunch and dinner duty. Our doors are never locked, and the kids roam between the two apartments. When I'm not home, our daughter sleeps upstairs in her dad's apartment. Our son, who has now moved out on his own, used to wander down to my kitchen rooting for food at all hours, often clad in nothing but his boxer shorts. There's a clear division of our households, but also lots of overlap. For us, that works well. It allows us to participate equally in our children's lives while helping each other with the mundane details of daily life.
We share our little mutt, Cola, and she sleeps wherever she wants. We created a system of being on and off duty, taking turns doing dinner or making lunches, ferrying the kids to music lessons and getting them to doctors' appointments. We trade off responsibility for weekends, confer regularly about our schedules, and share our parenting responsibilities in a way that gives each of us a lot of flexibility. We communicate a lot via phone now, but early on we had intercom units that sat on the kitchen counter in each apartment, and most mornings there'd be a buzz and I'd hear, "Good morning. You guys up yet? Can I send Cola down?" The dog would come bouncing down the stairs and park herself at my front door until I let her out into the garden for a morning pee. She still does. Thousands of minor decisions were negotiated over those little speakers, everything from making sure school forms had been signed to extending a spontaneous dinner invite.
Over the years, there have been times when we've had to work hard to maintain a balance within our unusual family. We discovered that potentially explosive issues are sometimes better resolved in writing than in person, so e-mail is our mediator. However, we've also learned to listen carefully to each other, and to trust that we will back each other up. I've stopped telling Joe how he should feel about things, and he's stopped letting me do it. I don't storm off in a huff, and he doesn't shrug off my concerns. Most of the time it works. For the rest, we do what we've had lots of practice doing: we apologize when we are in the wrong. Throughout this process, we've taken great pains to explain to the children that we are committed to working things out when we disagree, and over time they've seen us wrestle with some perplexing and difficult situations. Our arrangement demands that the adults behave like grownups, even if they're not feeling particularly mature about things, but we do have moments when we push each other's buttons, and familiar demons whisper in our ears from time to time. We're getting better at recognizing them before they wreak havoc on our state of calm.
There have definitely been moments where the kids have been frustrated or frightened or downright angry with one or both of us. And the kids have taken turns testing the solidarity of our arrangement in their own ways. Our son once tried to pull a fast one over curfew times, playing Joe and me off against each other. The three of us had a spontaneous meeting on neutral ground, the stairs between Joe's place and mine, and we explained to him that we were still operating as a family, that Joe and I discuss him and his sister every day. Still, my daughter confided to me recently that she'll always wish we had stayed married, but if we had to break up, she's glad we did it the way we did. My son has told me the same thing. Neither of our children could possibly have understood what a gift they were giving with those words.
We try to present a united front to the children, making the family's ground rules clear and consistent. This is particularly important in an unorthodox arrangement, since we break with convention in so many other ways. And since our arrangement doesn't look like most family setups, there are times when we have to stretch to find solutions to problems it presents, but we've found a balance that allows us to co-parent our children while retaining space to lead independent lives. When we get rattled, we remind ourselves what drew us to this solution in the first place, and we're okay.
Dating is complicated in this new world of reconstructed families. Joe and I have both had new romantic partners. It hasn't been an issue for either of us, but we've learned to tread lightly where our children are concerned. It made our daughter uneasy when I began to date again. She worried that her dad would be lonely, and she looked askance at "the new guy." When a new woman entered her father's life, she relaxed. For the most part newcomers haven't been threatened by our arrangement, perhaps because they've seen their own share of sour separations. But what Joe and I are doing is not what is expected of separated couples, and that does present challenges and impose some limits on any new relationships we form. But what mid-life romance doesn't bring with it a set of complications of its own? Individuals rarely arrive solo. They, too, have families of their own, ex-partners they deal with, and baggage they carry around with them.
Life has begun to take on a somewhat predictable shape. Our family tree keeps getting bigger and we try to spend big family events together -- Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, Passover, Easter, and birthdays. One Christmas my former mother-in-law, my sister, my children, my partner and his ex-wife and their daughter were all seated at my dining table. It has now been more than seven years since Joe and I separated, and we've eased into the new kind of complicated, unorthodox, flawed, and unfinished family we've become. I'm enormously proud of this work-in-progress that has given our kids one house, two proximal parents, and the knowledge that even the most serious disagreements can be managed. Initially, Joe and I made all this effort for our children, who had no choice but to come along for the ride. Lately though, I've begun to notice that something else is happening. One morning, Joe and our daughter were sitting on my back steps while I bustled around the kitchen, and I overheard him tell her that he couldn't imagine life without Mommy in it. I silently thanked him for his generosity, not only for her sake, but for mine.
When we separated, Joe stopped giving me comic-strip gifts. But on my fiftieth birthday, a new one arrived. It documents our life as a reconstituted family, and while there is one image where we're squabbling a bit, there isn't a single frame in which I'm using my mouth as a weapon. As I looked at it, I realized that at last we've begun to find the friendship that eluded us in the tug-of-war that was our marriage.
I, too, wanted to celebrate our history together and our future as co-parents, so I took the eternity ring that Joe had given me on our tenth anniversary and had the diamonds reset in a new band that symbolized for me the evolving relationship with my ex-husband. I wear it with another circle of tiny diamonds that represents my enduring relationship with my children, and those two rings serve as a daily reminder of what matters most to me.