Christmas Parenting Plans

Letters to Linda – Dreading Christmas after Divorce

Published on
Linda Simpson
Linda Simpson
Divorce and Parenting Consultant
Writer and Speaker

This will be the first Christmas after our divorce. Our children are worried about how it will all work. I love Christmas with them. I haven’t spoken directly to my Ex for months. We text arranging pickup of our children but have not talked. He has a girlfriend who isn’t really interested in anything to do with our family. Being altogether at Christmas is out of the question. How can I get through this holiday season?

The first time for anything after a divorce is always a challenge. The first major holiday can definitely be one of the biggest challenges if you allow it to be.

Your Ex is involved with your children so the two of you need to discuss how the holiday can work for everyone. Although you haven’t spoken, consider how you could plan the holiday via text. Is it possible? Texting is a very limited form of communication. Could you chat on the phone?

Before any interaction carefully look at options, and set the stage by stating that you both need to co-operate for the sake of the children. 

Negotiate and aim for being reasonable and firm. If the discussion gets heated then agree to try again when you both have calmed down.

Your children have been through a lot this year and disagreements with your Ex should be minimized.

Take charge and make plans for the time you will have with your children. Look carefully at the family traditions and be prepared to press delete if some traditions just don’t look like they will work.

Include your children – if they are old enough- to have a say in the holiday. Find out what traditions they definitely want to keep. Do they have any new ideas? Give them some options and agree to add at least one new venture. Being pro-active will help relieve some of the anxiety toward the holiday.

In my situation we found the best way forward was to change a few traditions and add some new ones of our own. More than twenty years later I can say that it worked brilliantly to create ‘new’ in our family holiday.

We often try to include friends new and old and that has given our Christmas an added dimension. There are always people that for some reason might be alone at Christmas.

There will be alone time for you over the holiday when your children are with their father.

Plan now to alleviate the aloneness we all inevitably feel in those situations. You can visit friends or family or do something you’ve always wanted to do at Christmas but were not able to do during your marriage. It might be a show or concert, pampering –whatever your budget allows.

Consider that lots of places have community dinners. Either volunteer to help or go to one as an adventure in meeting new people. It is our choice to write a positive next chapter in life.

Holidays, at the best of times, are emotionally charged.  Plan ahead, have a positive attitude and be flexible. If you can genuinely feel it will be alright your children will take your cue.

Check in with yourself, determine how you are coping and take time to recharge. When it is over, be open to assessing the events with your children.

Then begin your plans for the next holiday. 

Whatever it is that you need help, advice or support  with contact Linda at letterstolinda@thedivorcemagazine.co.uk.  We will never print your name nor email.

 

ABOUT LINDA SIMPSON

“I take strength from your calm, your honesty, and the hope you give me for my future.” Cheryl 

Linda is a fresh voice in the divorce advice world. She offers a pragmatic, common sense approach to life after divorce issues based on over twenty years surviving and thriving following a very traumatic divorce.

As a single parent, her sons are an enormous source of joy in her life. She is a loving mother and grandmother to four delightful grandchildren.

She holds a degree from the University of Waterloo with concentrations in sociology and philosophy and guidance counselling certification from Queen’s University.

She is an accredited trainer for The Peace Education Foundation, a leader in conflict resolution training. The institute is ‘dedicated to educating children and adults in the dynamics of conflict resolution and promoting peacemaking skills in home, schools, and community.’

In a long and successful teaching career, she also served as a counsellor and workshop facilitator for SEL (social emotional learning) programming and The Peace Education Foundation throughout her school and school district and was a frequent conference presenter for SUNY Potsdam Faculty of Education USA.

She writes for The Divorce Magazine UK and her blog is seen regularly on Huffington Post Canada where the focus is life after divorce and parenting issues.

She is a writer and poet and is presently at work on a book based on her divorce experience.

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Christmas parenting plans

Children of Divorce – Getting your Christmas Parenting Plans at the Ready

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For children of divorce, spending Christmas with parents in conflict is like you winning an all-paid-for holiday to an amazing destination to stay in one of the most fabulous 5 star hotels…that is under going extensive renovations.

Everything is great about the whole idea, except that you will certainly not find peace and tranquility and that defeats the whole purpose.

Forget about lying by the pool for hours on end, with your cocktails, books and magazines; it’s shut.

There will be early morning drilling sounds, trucks all over the place and limited use of the great facilities that the place usually has to offer.  Before you know it, you want to spend the rest of your holiday, outside the hotel, only returning to go to bed.

That’s what it’s like for children whose parents are going through an acrimonious divorce and/or separation during this time of year.

They will get the most fabulous presents that you can afford but their joy, excitement and delight will be short lived and blanketed in worry, uncertainty and uneasiness.  And if they are anything like some clients I have worked with, some gifts will act as reminders of the very difficult Christmases they lived through in their childhood for years to come.

If this is your first Christmas as divorcing or separating parents, there’s one thing your children could greatly do with and benefit from.

Peace.

And this you can gift them by:

  • letting them be. Let them wake up and sleep through these holidays stress free.  Yes, it’s not easy for you as the divorcing or separating parents to do, but it’s not impossible either. You can do it for them, if you really want to. Allow them to enjoy their holidays without conflict, anxieties and worries.
  • creating a good structured plan that you can share with them so that they know where they will be, with whom and for how long. One father in mediation recently agreed for his ex-wife to have the children from 23th – 27th December.  He explained his decision by saying that it really didn’t matter which day you spend Christmas with your children; all they need is to be with you at some point and on that day, at that time, you can celebrate Christmas, as you choose and wish, in peace.  They don’t care if you do it on 25th or on 30th. He’s absolutely correct.  They don’t care.
  • sticking to the plan and should you need to change the plans for good, legitimate and genuine reasons, not just because you’re angry and riddled with vengeful thoughts and emotions, then tell them in advance and acknowledge any feelings of disappointment they may have or show. Be the adult in the room that they need you to be. Because after all, they only have you two as parents.  Which one of you will ensure that their holidays go as smoothly as possible?

Clients I have worked with, have often asked me what my co-parenting plan over the Christmas period looks like.

We chose to make it really simple for the children and ourselves. We alternate every year from 23rd to the new year.  This means that each year either one of us has the children for a good block of time which allows us to travel abroad if we choose to.

During the time that they are away, the children get to speak with the “absent” parent almost everyday, over Skype, phone, whatsapp or Facetime.  We share stories of what we have done and our plans for the next few days.

This means that our children know exactly what they are doing, with whom, where and for how long. This structure has remained in place since my eldest daughter was 6 and she is now 25.  It just works.

Of course it’s not easy for the parent without the children.

You will miss them but all you have to do is plan out your time.  If you feel that you will be lonely, sad and upset without them. Then you will really need to deal with that without sharing it with the children.  They don’t need to be worrying about you.  Let them be. You do you.

If you’re stuck with how to manage these holidays for you and your little ones, then do contact me and let’s take it from there.  It really needn’t be hell.

ABOUT SOILA

Soila is a Parenting Therapist, accredited Triple P practitioner, Certified Trauma Specialist and trained Family Mediator.  She works in private practice mainly, but not exclusively, with families going through divorce and separation.

Soila is the founder of The Davis Centre and The Divorce Magazine.

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