Opinion - For many years, I held the belief that kids needed both their parents together in order to be happy.
I bought into the misconception that it was okay to live a lie, in sacrifice, putting my kids first. This idea made me miserable.
I stayed in a marriage for longer than I should have; worried about what people would think and what effect my selfish decision would have on my kids.
I was facing my second divorce and I knew exactly the repercussions of that, in terms of how society, my family and friends and the community at large would perceive and receive me, because being selfish felt like something I needed to be ashamed of.
So I stuck it out, trying to do the “right” thing, while my soul broke into a million pieces.
It was only when I faced death that I decided that my happiness was actually important and I left my second marriage, with little support.
For a while, guilt and shame rode shotgun with me wherever I went.
I felt like I had to shrink myself as penance for choosing personal happiness.
I have spent the last four years doing lots of internal work and learning about relationships, truth, love and authentic living.
I have been awakened to a level of consciousness that emanated through the chaos of my past.
And it has given me a completely deeper level of understanding and gratitude for being brave enough to actually hear my soul’s calling and do what needed to be done for me, because this ultimately affects my children.
This is what I have learnt.
Couples who stay together long after the love is gone, for the sake of the children, citing stability, security and a good time as justifications, inevitably cause more damage than good.
There is empirical evidence that a dishonest family dynamic sets the narrative for children that ultimately skew their beliefs about love and marriage.
Children are naturally energetically in tune, and their perceptions are often correct.
When a couple are pretending in a marriage, kids pick up on the nuances of hostility and coldness.
Yet parents choose to continue the act, all the while teaching their kids to negate their inner voice of truth.
The damage that results from this is detrimental because the messages about love and marriage are conflicting.
This perpetuates the cycle of dysfunction as children replicate the relationships that they’re modelled with.
It's not what we say as parents, it’s what we do that sticks with our kids.
The grieving process of a divorce does come to an end and kids see two parents who are happy, whole and at peace separately, instead of two broken parents together.
Kids are more resilient than we give them credit for. With just one life, do we really want to live it in sacrifice?
That doesn’t serve anyone. We can only do better and be better if we are truly and authentically happy.
We owe our kids so much more than the physicality of an intact family.
We owe them our truth.
When I exited both my marriages, I made the conscious choice not to use my kids as pawns in an adult fight.
I did not keep my kids away or poison their innocent minds with harmful words slandering their fathers.
More than that, I made a decision after my second divorce to sit down with my ex-husband and pave the way for us in terms of how we parent.
We both acknowledged that we love our kids more than anything and wanted them to be happy.
We agreed that we failed at marriage but we would win at parenting together.
Making that distinction made it easy to move forward, but it came with the commitment from both of us to want to do what’s best for the kids rather than placating our own egos.
We weren’t interested in proving who was right and wrong in the marriage - we accepted jointly that we played a part in its destruction and we didn’t need to focus on that anymore.
We chose to have an open-door policy to each other’s home without the court being prescriptive about visitation rights.
As a result, both my kids are perfectly happy and content.
My 16-year-old daughter is an honours student, who gets an award every year and who is responsible and wise far beyond her years.
My seven-year-old son is a happy and joyful child who has not lost his innocence.
Both my kids see parents who are happy, content and at peace with themselves and each other.
In a world that tells us how to be, I’ve chosen to teach them, through my example, to look inward first and make a decision that is right for them.
It is vitally important to scrutinise ingrained belief systems to ascertain whether they actually work, or whether they’re there to condition our thinking.
The bigger question that should be asked is: Am I avoiding a bigger fear and using my kids as scapegoats?
As hard as that introspection may be, there is massive learning that emanates from it.
Divorce is not a failure.
Living a life of unhappiness, sacrifice and lies is a failure. Divorce, in and of itself, should not be construed as harmful.
It is the adversarial process that wreaks havoc, caused by ego-driven, self-righteous behaviour.
This is not good parenting.
We need to teach our kids an invaluable lesson that we all deserve to be happy and loved.
Loving our kids truly and authentically means demonstrating to them our own self-love, in order for them to learn and grow in a healthy way. It cannot simply be lip-service.
This is the legacy we owe them. Marriages are meant to be a vessel through which we model the authentic value of love.
It is not an imprisonment we justify because of our children.