The gritty how-to's

Critical Rules for a Party to a Divorce to Follow

1. Try to deal with the stress of the case and with your spouse and children in a reasonable mature fashion.
2. Never enter into an agreement with your spouse without the benefit of your counsel’s legal advice.
3. Remember if you criticize your spouse in front of the children you diminish your own child as well.
4. Remember, anything you say to your spouse can and will likely show up in a written document or be presented to the judge. Thus, do not say anything that you would not feel comfortable having repeated in front of the judge hearing your case.
5. Do not hide evidence, or mislead the court in the proceeding. Even one misstatement is too many and will cause your credibility on other issues to be sadly lacking. It may be that a judge disbelieves all of your truthful statements, because of one careless misstatement made during the proceedings. Do not attempt to hide evidence for assets or to destroy or get rid of financial documents.
6. Your divorce will be stressful, but it will not be the end of the world.
7. It is not uncommon for spouses to be angry at the start of the BC divorce, but to gain perspective and become more rational as the proceedings go on.
8. Remember that your spouse may not have been the greatest husband or wife during the marriage, but that you will be parents forever of your children.

Making it through the day.

If anyone is like me, the biggest challenge and stress in divorcing a spouse is the fall-out that is dealt with by our children. My ex-husband and I separated when our boys were 10 and 6. We filed for divorce when they were 12 and 8. Even with time and many explanations, it's difficult for children to digest and adjust to the fact that mommy and daddy not only don't live together, they have trouble even liking each other.

Toss in the fact that in my particular case, it was not a pleasant divorce. My ex-husbands lawyer was brutal, and I took a beating both emotionally and financially. The stress of that was hard to hide from the boys, but I gave it my best. Children are smart however, and also much more aware of a parent's state of mind then we give them credit for.

Given that certain questions were being asked over and over, I spent some time searching for ways to explain to them that even though their father and I were barely on speaking terms, they were still well loved by both of us, and nothing that had occurred was their fault.

An excellent website that I found for them to peruse was a site about divorce, aimed specifically at children, maintined by kidshealth.org

I found that mainly open communication, a willingness to answer any question asked by either of them as honestly and calmly as I could, was the best solution in the end.