It may take time to find your way through the mess that ensues after the process of divorce and hopefully make peace with yourself in this new state of life. Part of this is figuring out a way to communicate and work together with your ex to raise your children. The point is not to strive for the ideal friendship or what you see as the perfect working relationship, but to make peace with the differences between the two of you and to find a relationship that works for you and the kids. Throw in a new step parent and things may get complicated, but there are ways to work at being the best ex you can be which can only benefit the situation.
First Things First: Searching Within
A divorce is a hard thing to stomach. It brings to mind all of the reasons why you got married and all of the reasons to blame your ex for the failure of that marriage. The problem with doing that is that your issues and your faults will be carried over into every future relationship. Before you can work on building a divorced-but-working-together partnership with your ex for the children, you must be willing to fix yourself first. By looking within and finding out what your part in the divorce was, you can discover the parts of yourself that you can improve.
Self improvement is something that everyone can benefit from because as humans we are constantly evolving and learning and are given the opportunity to better ourselves every day. By searching for the things you can change, you may find that you have a short fuse that needs to be a big longer in order to communicate with your ex or maybe that you have a tendency to micromanage and this will not work with two homes instead of one for your kids. Once you have made peace and forgiven yourself for what did not work with your marriage (and this may take years), you will be in a much better place to work on the new phase of your relationship.
Figuring Out What Works
The relationship between you and your ex may not start off as friendly, but you can work towards something that resembles a friendship by looking at your ex through cleansed eyes. An understanding of the issues that ended your marriage and an understanding of your ex’s positive and negative attributes will provide insight into what you must accept to move your new relationship along. Your ex may have certain traits that made him or her unbearable to live with but that are now easier to overlook from a further distance. By remembering the reason why you married this person to begin with, you can more easily find a way to make friends with them now.
Look back at how you got along before things turned sour. Think about how you worked to overcome problems or at how you communicated prior to divorce. The insights you uncover can guide you to building a successful system of communication now that will make talking about the kids easier and working together much more pleasant.
Steps to a New Relationship
So you’ve done some soul searching, some self evaluation, and some thoughtful and pointed remembering; now it is time to put in some work. In order to bridge the gap between you and your ex, you will both need to be willing to work on making things peaceful and cordial. Starting with a businesslike politeness now may be the first step in being friendly and even able to co-plan events later.
You may not want to be buddy-buddy with your ex, but the ability to be in the same room together will create a united front for your children. Try to communicate needs and information clearly and without sarcasm or passive aggressiveness. Make an effort not to hold the past over the head of your ex; it will not make anything better. Treat your ex like you would want to be treated and your kids will see what good examples their parents are at modeling good friendship behavior.
The Benefits
By treating your ex kindly, you may have an unexpected ally in the future. This is a person who knows you better than most of your friends and family and can be a useful friend to turn to if you have made an effort to heal the wounds of the divorce. Your children will appreciate the smiling faces, easy conversation, and absence of tension between the two of you for years to come. Even if you are not married and have moved into new relationships, your child or children will see that mommy and daddy are there for them, working together to be good providers and parents.
Katherine Ward - Katherine Ward is a freelance writer living in Southern California and a graduate from CSUN with a B.A. in English-Creative Writing.
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