The Creative Solution Table of Contents
Summary:
This chapter describes the complexities of co-parenting during the holidays, using his own experience of navigating multiple family visits on Christmas Day as an example. Rose, a highly experienced divorce mediator, highlights the challenges of balancing differing parental traditions and extended family expectations, emphasizing the importance of cooperation and prioritizing the children’s well-being. He uses his personal anecdote to illustrate how prioritizing collaboration over conflict can create positive, lasting memories, even amidst logistical chaos. The piece ultimately serves as a case study showcasing successful co-parenting strategies, demonstrating the possibility of harmony during a typically stressful time of year.
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The Christmas holidays are trying enough without having to deal with the consequences of divorce and the breakup of the nuclear family unit. The adversity that arises at this time of year, over the parents’ conflicting desires and plans for the children, can make this one of the most difficult periods of co-parenting. Not only does each parent want to assert his or her particular style, customs and family traditions, but each sees the children as the sine qua non of the holiday celebration. And who, as a parent, can bear to miss those magic moments that crystallize on Christmas Eve and are displayed in the joyous expressions on the children’s faces on Christmas morning. As if the dilemma were not challenging enough, the problem may well be compounded by the addition of conflicting plans of extended maternal and paternal families and the wants and desires of meaningful step-family relationships. For most everyone who celebrates the day, the children are the ones who count on Christmas.
In general, I believe a mediator should be strategic and selective in deciding when to personalize the process. With the right couple and when the timing seems appropriate, I will share some of my own experiences around holiday co-parenting as a means of normalizing. As a practical matter, I have covered a lot of this same co-parenting territory in a prior life. Sharing a look back, I find that there is humor, pathos and wisdom in recounting some of these memories.
I became a step-parent to a one and a five year old, who are now 24 and 29 respectively. To the children’s good fortune, the biological parents and the first round of step-parents (yes, there were to be others) worked at maintaining friendly relations amongst themselves. Mom and Dad lived an hour and a half apart, but Dad only saw the children every couple of months. Because we were doing the day to day parenting, the children were with us for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. By agreement we had the children to their Dad’s house shortly after noon on Christmas day.
I always treated the children as my own. To enrich the bond with my parents, I chose to squeeze in a visit to their house before being delivered to Dad. Fortunately, these step-paternal grandparents lived in the same town as Dad. Additionally, the maternal grandparents also lived in the same town and were, by tradition, the first stop on the journey to Dad’s house. No doubt some of you have begun to do the math. To arrive at Dad’s by noon, less a visit with maternal grandma and grandpa (1 hour minimum–these are the biological grandparents, after all), less a trip to the home of step-grandma and step-grandpa (1 hour minimum–after all these are my parents), less an hour and a half commute up the coast, meant the departure from our house had to be no later than 8:30 a.m., assuming there would be no traffic delays. To allow for as relaxed a Christmas morning as we could conceive possible (under the circumstances) we had to: add 30 minutes for breakfast; 45 minutes to get dressed and pack the car with presents for all the relatives; throw in an hour to wake up, make the coffee, open presents and contemplate which end of the inevitable mechanical toy battery went in first. The inexorable result was a wake up call at 6:15 a.m., or a the domino effect of a delay in the first visit accumulating in a greater delay in each subsequent visit.
The insanity of all this was not lost on us at the time. We just couldn’t think of any way to do it differently without major family problems. How was this arrangement for the two children? It was crazy, of course, and by the time they hit the third house of this contemporary sleighride, they were reduced to wrapper-ripping present junkies. They would barely pause to acknowledge what was hidden in the festive wrapping paper before they would look up and ask: “What other presents are for me?” All this transpired before noon.
Once their Dad took them into the world of his family, the children were treated to additional stops with the paternal grandma and grandpa, who were themselves divorced, and one set of great-grandparents, who were considerate enough to have stayed together. I won’t even tell you the adjustments that became necessary when Dad divorced step-mom (to whom the children were very bonded) and the adjustments he subsequently had to make in his schedule to assure that the kids had a chance to exchange gifts with her.
Predictably, the grown children are the first to tell us how insane all this was for them. But they do express it with love and laughter. They were fortunate enough to be connected to all these adults whose greatest sin was wanting to be with them on such a special day. On the one hand, we certainly stretched ourselves (and certainly the kids) like rubber bands to accommodate the many extended family obligations. On the other hand, we never fought over scheduling, we never criticized, and we never asserted the self-interest of one to the detriment of the other. We even made an effort to linger for a glass of mull wine and a genuine toast of good will, when dropping off the kids. The reason the grown children can laugh at the craziness of it all now, is because of the efforts made then, by all the parents and grandparents, to cooperate, accommodate and protect them from any conflict associated with this special time of year.
The Creative Solution Table of Contents
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