We can learn a lot from our kids, right? Put them all in the middle of the playground and watch. You can tell a little about them by the way they play. Some kids think it’s normal to let others go first, and some kids want all the attention. Some kids think that chaos is normal, and some kids think it’s normal to be alone. Have you ever wondered where they learned how to behave?
I learned a huge lesson about myself when my son told me that he wanted to live with his Grandmama (my mother). His father and I had been in court for a couple of years, and it was a mess. We had a de facto joint custody arrangement at first, and would have been on our way to making that legal if it weren’t for the fact that the latest papers he filed had contained a surprise for me. He was seeking sole custody.
We had a warped way of communicating. My ex-husband would sit at his mother’s kitchen table and rag on me. Other times, when I dropped my son off there, his Grandma would sit me down at that same kitchen table and get me to talk about it, and I would start ragging on my ex. She was really trying to get us to talk in person, but neither one of us would “find the time” to sit down to a civil conversation with each other, so it got a little nasty – and my son heard every word.
The first time my son got into a fight on the playground at school, we sat him down, talked to him, and thought that was the end of it. The second time it happened, it was a little more one-sided. The teacher asked if he was having trouble at home. The kitchen table started buzzing again, with the blame game being thrown around like a beach ball. I tried to talk to him about it in the car on the way home one day, and he just said, “Can I live with Grandmama? Nobody argues at her house.”
I hadn’t realized how my mouth was affecting him at all. The more I dished the dirt, the more he learned to run his mouth to his classmates. It was hard to stay positive and be kind when someone said something nasty to me (or about me). Good night, that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. I don’t know that we totally succeeded, but we knew that we had to try to put a lid on it. That was the last of the fighting on the playground.
I told him, “You’re actually a pretty lucky guy. You have a lot of people who love you.” He just looked at me like I was nuts and said, “Yeah – I guess so.”
Points of view or opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author. They have not been adopted or endorsed by The Modern Woman’s Divorce Guide.
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