With each passing year of my life, I feel for parents more and more. I had no idea the emotions that I would experience as a parent watching my children travel through each phase of their life and how happy and sad I could be at the same moment when they hit certain milestones. In the last three days, I watched my son graduate from high school and hosted a big graduation party to celebrate him. The next day was Father’s Day where we celebrated my husband, ex-husband, and my step-dad for all of their contributions to the lives of all of the kids and adults that live in our home. Early Monday morning, it was off to the DMV so that my daughter could get her learner’s permit. It was a whirlwind weekend full of emotions, milestones, change and tears. I even found myself choked up in the DMV, which was a first.

The highlight of the weekend was watching all of the members of my family work together to celebrate my son. His step-dad (my husband) spent countless hours preparing the yard for the party and getting everything ready and cleaned up. His dad (my ex-husband) and I worked together for weeks to prepare a slide show of his life that included pictures from our marriage together, and then pictures from our second marriages and the blended families that resulted. All of us went to dinner together after graduation – step brothers and sisters, step- parents, parents, grand step-parents, brothers, sisters. To my son, this is just his family. It is not a sad and awkward tale of divorce, but instead a real and true picture of life and the adult decisions that impact children but shouldn’t destroy them. This is all he has ever known since the day he was born. My own parents were divorced when I was 11 and his first memories include step-grandparents and grandparents, but to him it was all just more Grandpas and Grandmas to love.

Sadly, many families don’t operate like this and children are forced into confronting and handling adult decisions that really have nothing to do with them. Most of us have seen all sides of nasty divorces in our lives, and it is hard to understand why adults choose for kids to live and feel tension and anger. Children have nothing to do with why adults divorce. Some children are relieved when their parents get divorced after years of fighting or obvious unhappiness. Others are surprised but want nothing more than their lives to go on peacefully while the adults handle the adults’ problems. Divorce is a sad and difficult part of life that still occurs in almost 50% of households across our country. I have been asked so many times why I got divorced from my first husband and the question always give me a little laugh since it really doesn’t have an easy answer. If I tried to answer it in one sentence, I don’t believe I would be holding both of us accountable to what happened. The best guess I can give for why I got divorced and why I think most people get divorced is that we were born and subsequently our lives started happening. There are so many factors that play into divorce – personality, families, careers, handling of finances, communication, economics, friends, and differences that come up when children are born. There are lots of ways that marriages end, but most of share common ground in why we got divorced.

When my ex-husband and I decided to get divorced, it was a very hard and sad decision, but we sat down together and worked out a solution that would that would split up the assets and make sure that our kids would have what they needed no matter where they were sleeping. We didn’t need an attorney to explain that to us so we didn’t use one. We split everything in half because that is the law and we developed a schedule for our kids in case we ever needed a document to tell us what was in their best interest (which we don’t). We work together to discuss holidays and birthdays and vacations until we know we have found what works for everyone involved (and that includes his step-kids and my step-kids). We do this because we love our children and decided years ago it would be ridiculous to spend any more time discussing or fighting about why we got divorced. We knew it was irrelevant to our kids and I believe that is the case for almost every divorce out there.

We aren’t amazing people for doing this. We are just parents who decided to focus on our children and nothing else. We both believe that the other is a good and capable parent which means that any other part of our life doesn’t need to be discussed. When we start to get off track from time to time, we give each other space and we always come back together with what is best for our children. Adults need to acknowledge that adult problems require adult communication to arrive at adult decisions. That is all it takes to have an amicable divorce. You can strongly dislike your ex-spouse but love your children enough to end up sitting together at a dinner someday celebrating a big milestone like a graduation. You can show your children that mature adults can guide them through life no matter how much blending goes on in their family. The key is to blend everyone, love equally, and make sure the kids are allowed to be kids while the adults are acting like adults.