EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Single Parenthood
|
||||
|
“But, mom, we LIKE scrambled eggs!” That’s a new one. I’d been trying to get my girls to eat them for years. Then one morning, this revelation. “We eat them all the time at daddy’s house!” Turns out, my children are leading double lives, too. And here I thought I was having all the fun. In a way, my daughters are strangers to me, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Parent/child alienation isn’t supposed to happen until the teenage years. But thanks to shared custody and 2 separate households we have an early jump on it. Every other weekend, my kids reinvent themselves. They come home from their father’s house with new discoveries, new interests, new “new ones.” With their dad, they hike (I don’t hike out of deference to snakes), they snowboard (I enjoy the snow from a window next to a crackling fire), they ride horses (I prefer cars), they know the latest bands and words to songs I’ve never heard (who is “Good Charlotte,” anyway?), and they frolic with their new puppy, Roxy. (They ignore our old dog, Higgins.) It’s like I’m raising 4 daughters, not 2. While I’m certainly not advocating divorce, my children have been enriched by the experience. Their world has doubled in size and opportunities. Ever since the divorce, their father and I have developed separate passions and different hobbies to which our children are now exposed. And I think that’s a good thing. With me, my daughters play tennis, bang out “Chopsticks” on the piano and Rollerblade. With their father, they mountain bike, listen to K-Rock and watch “The Simpsons.” Obviously, they’re well-educated in the fine arts. Recently, my ex got remarried. Our divided worlds are now more divided. Through this splintering process, my kids inherited a new set of relatives on their stepmom’s side. They talk about the “new grandpa” and “new cousin” in Minnesota. Seems strange that my flesh and blood are connected to people they don’t know, who don’t know them and who I’ll never meet. All those lectures about never talking to strangers down the drain. Now they’re related to them. (Would it be tacky to run a background check on these relatives?) Looking at the big picture, my daughters have twice the exposure to life, double the fun, 2 dogs and a wider circle of family and community. So why do I feel so sad? Truthfully, it hurts that I’ve been banished from part of their world. Scrambled emotions. Just when you think you know your own children, along comes divorce and changes everything. Senior Writer Lynn Armitage has happily added scrambled eggs to the breakfast menu. |
||||
RSS Subscribe
Digg This ArticleSEARCH THE SITE
