It is too dramatic to say I felt disbelief staring at my sixteen-year-old daughter’s handwritten words. But it was certainly on the spectrum of stunned. In a rare and fleeting moment of one-on-one time with my busy teenager, she was sharing with me the journal she had been tasked with keeping for her high school writing class.
I read the words again: “For me, the holiday season has been hard. With having divorced parents, I don’t think it will ever be easy. There is always guilt when leaving one parent on Christmas morning to go to the other, knowing that the parent you left will spend the rest of the holiday alone.” In a few sentences, my daughter had turned several of my beliefs as a divorced parent, into myths in a matter of minutes.
Myth #1: Kids love having 2 of everything.
I had always assumed that my kids and other kids of divorced parents loved having two birthday parties, two-holiday celebrations, and two separate summer vacations. I am sure on a surface level, my assumption was correct. However, my daughter wrote about the strain of “having to get two Christmas trees.” It never occurred to me that this could quickly turn from feeling like a family experience to just another to-do. I had never once put myself in their shoes. How would I experience going to choose a Christmas tree with one family and then the next weekend having to do it all over again with another? It made me wish I had asked more questions of my girls about what experiences they most wanted to have with me, instead of just doing it because we always did it this way.
