“You’re going to feel like you hate me,” is what I told my husband after we separated. We wanted to be the good co-parents, doesn’t everyone start out that way? He smiled and shook his head, “No way,” he said. “I could never hate you.”
I knew, though. I knew. This was my second separation. My second kick at the can; not my first rodeo. I was a mom of two when I married him, my two boys sweet-cheeked toddlers in tuxedos with heads shaved by my new husband without my permission. Their father didn’t think he would ever hate me either, but there we were, doing the tense hand-offs at the local McDonald’s, big false smiles angled down and away, just for the boys. “Did you have FUN?" we would ask them, "Are you excited to be going HOME?” We injected every word with the bright false buzz of fluorescent lights. But it was just for them. Our words to each other were dead-eyed emojis before emojis even existed.
It’s been more than ten years, and I can say now that we don’t hate each other. Not now, probably not then. But we are not good co–parents.
I was raised without a dad. I cannot tell you how much I did not want this for my sons. I cannot tell you how bone-deep my fear was that exactly what happened would happen: That I would grow up and away from the person I chose so permanently that we simply could not be together anymore.
I thought the very least I could do was to stay best friends with my ex-husband, like all of the celebrities seemed to do. That way we could go for dinner together sometimes and stay bonded in our singular shared love of these people we created. I wanted to believe we could hold on to that one little spark of our closeness and just let the other stuff go. But we didn't. My first husband and I didn't hate each other, either, I don’t think. Not ultimately. I don’t even think hate is the right word for it. We were just worn down by our disappointment, that we were us.
“Trust me, you’re going to feel like you hate me," I told my soon-to-be ex-husband, the second time around. "But remember I’m still me.” We both cried then, over our little list of split hours with our shared kids. We talked about people who knew that we were ending things, gossiping about the gossips. We talked about his mom, who cried when she found out, and I loved her so much I cried to hear it. We promised, pinky-swore, anything and everything, that we would try to just hate each other for five days or so, then let that hatred get boring and fade. Let it be last week’s news.
Even still, we never were good co-parents. This is possibly the first time I’m admitting this to anyone and my blush could heat an entire house right now. My kids cannot even imagine me in a relationship with their father, they’ve said it so many times. Sometimes as a joke and sometimes maybe as a lament, I’m never sure. We went the way of the lawyers very early on and it was a mistake for us. So much money and it changed nothing in the end.
How easy, I told myself, to stay friends when you have money.
I don’t know how Gwyneth pulled it off and I’ve scoffed, my God how I’ve scoffed. Since her “conscious uncoupling” from Chris Martin I have sought out articles about her just so I could roll my eyes and mock her to no one in particular. Just myself. How easy, I told myself, to stay friends when you have money. How easy, I thought, to just make a clinical decision to stay friends like it was no big deal. I scoffed at her and others like her, the conscientious co-parents of the world, like I scoffed at people who smile before 9 in the morning or have good ponytails or know how to tie a scarf but worse. I have tried so hard to tell myself that the good co-parents of the world are somehow disingenuous. That they’re pretending. That it can’t be real and is probably like one of those dystopian suburban thrillers where things are not as they seem.
It’s the guilt, you see. The horrible guilt of this one colossal failure. That I could not make either one of my sons’ fathers want to be my friend and I could not make myself want to be their friend. That I could not swallow down the bile in my throat when one of them moved on to a new person and their life seemed suddenly so much shinier than my own. That I relished catty catch-ups about how wronged I was with my girlfriends, who nodded like automatons and agreed with everything I said so we could get on with our evening. I regret it now, so much, while also knowing I could not control this big huge chasm between us. Neither could they. We were not the only players in the game, not ever. We had family co-stars who wanted us to star in a certain kind of movie because that’s the only movie anyone had ever watched about divorce, I think it was called Kramer vs. Kramer. We had new partners who did not want to be friends with the old partners and who could blame them? They deserved to paint their own fresh white wall of a relationship like everyone.
What I’m telling you here is that it’s not so easy, deciding to be a great co-parent. It’s harder than being a good parent, I think. And I’m really hoping you can be one without the other.
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