The Double Life of Divorce
Illustration by Goce Llievski.
By Nicole Campoy Jackson
Every week, I’m two people. They’re related, yes, and I’m getting better at blending them. But they live different lives and even have different friends.
The first half of the week, I’m on duty for elementary school drop-offs, midnight laundry (when I realize there are no clean uniforms), packing drum sticks for lessons, and worrying about things like screen time and snacks. In the second half of the week, my son is with his dad – and while I still manage plenty of kid logistics, my house is weirdly quiet, I get to be social without a babysitter, and I sometimes sleep in to a whopping 8am. (Every so often, I’ll lie in bed texting and writing emails until 9. Imagine.) I feel like a double agent, because at a moment’s notice I can talk kid shit and single-person shit. Most of my friends exist in one or the other sphere, so I also have people I tend to see in only the first or second halves of the week.
On the pro side, I have time with my seven-year-old son to myself, I plan around just us, and we make our home feel and operate the way we want it to. Then, the time to myself is a wonder. I rest after the physically taxing, busy, and over-stimulating days of full-time solo parenting. I have to ask, “do you need to go potty?” far less.
Cons… well, who wants to feel like they lead two lives? I am on the hook for everything all at once three to four days a week, which can look like dinner burning because he’s yelling that the water’s going up too high in the toilet. And, because I cram most of the housework in when he’s not around, I think my son is under the impression that it cleans itself. The same with doing the grocery shopping, running various errands, and going to my appointments.
In the four years since my divorce, I’ve made my way through phases so defined and recognizable there should be a karate-style belt for each one. We split our son’s time equally within the first few months of mediation and haven’t deviated from the schedule, besides a flexible day here or there. At first, I couldn’t bear the thought of not being his primary parent in every sense of the word. Then, one week that first year, I actually enjoyed my time to myself and the guilt threatened to swallow me whole. And at some point, I realized that I can’t control what time my son goes to bed at his dad’s, nor what he eats there. I can only control what happens in my own home, a lesson in relinquishing my grip.
A symptom of both learning to co-parent and the Covid-era, I’ve also gotten used to tailoring our time around him. Our time is almost exclusively kid shit; I schedule life’s necessary-yet-boring tasks on my time. If I only have a few days with him each week, why would I “waste” it by making him wait with me in line at the pharmacy?
It’s an understandable instinct, but it’s had the effect of him not being incorporated into my entire life. He’s the center of my universe for a few days, and then I stumble around off my axis figuring out the rest of life on my own. He’s physically present in my world half of his time and even then, he’s not invited into what I assume will be boring to him. It doesn’t come naturally, to me anyway, to tell him about my day over dinner. I ask about school, he tells me about Super Mario Maker 2. It’s a huge disservice to us both, I’ve come to realize, and not least because of the massive amount of brain space and logistics it takes to make sure that I only ever tackle a to-do list when he’s otherwise occupied.
But then, how does one incorporate their seven year old into one’s life more? No, truly, does this come with instructions? Because it feels like one more thing on my plate, yet another belt I’m tasked with earning. And I’m tired. I do know that one antidote is to mix my double lives up together more, but old habits die hard. I get that it’s healthier on both sides for me to bring my own damn self into our time together. He needs to be part of the fabric of the family, not the center of it as he swaps between houses, each primed and ready for his arrival. (That said, no matter how many boring errands I bring him along on, I don’t know that I need to brief him on every aspect of my grown up world. Chats about dating apps, for example, can wait.)
Last week, out of the blue, he asked about my new side hustle in travel planning. He said, “you were telling someone that you’re planning trips for people, but what does that mean?” I felt put on the spot! Why was he asking? What had he heard? I said, “well, you know how I love to plan our trips? I get to do it for other people now, too. Not everyone likes to do it, plus we’ve been lots of places, so I get to help other people go on fun vacations.”
He said, “that’s cool. I have lots of questions.” It quite literally hadn’t dawned on me to bring this up to him. This is how habitual this double life has become. We talked about travel for 30+ minutes (a very long time for a first grader). I don’t know why, but it blew my goddamn mind that the bits of my life that don’t directly involve him were even part of his thought process.
Then, the clincher. He said, “do you do it all by yourself?” And I said, yeah pretty much. His response was, “it’s really hard to do things all by yourself, you should let me help sometimes.” I cried on impact. The next day, he sat next to me at my laptop and asked, “what trip can I help with first?” I said, could you fold the laundry while I research the cloud forest in Costa Rica? But, somehow, he wasn’t into that.
All of this is to say: If you or someone you know is divorced and has shared custody, it helps to know that we’re not alone in feeling like a double agent. It is bizarre and you can’t really put words to it, at the start at least. For my next exercise, I’m bringing him with me to a nail appointment. If you see us — him with an iPad pressed against his face, me debating between two nearly identical polishes — give us a high five. We’re healing.