I don’t believe in playing by the rules. That’s not entirely true…but sometimes the rules are stupid. For instance, did you know it's illegal for a store to sell toothpaste and a toothbrush to the same customer on a Sunday in the city of Providence? That’s not only a rule, it’s a law! Who the hell sat down and decided that a person shouldn’t be able to buy multiple oral hygiene products on a Sunday? Is this to shame people who had a one-night-stand a few hours earlier? No booty calls allowed in Providence! If you do, your punishment is…stinky breath?
It's ridiculous.
There are a lot of stupid societal rules such as children should live with their mother if/when the parents’ divorce. Why the mother? Are fathers unable to properly care for their offspring? Why do people assume that fathers automatically get their children every other weekend and for dinner on Wednesdays in a custody agreement? This setup is perfectly acceptable to society at large if you have a dick. Men aren’t judged for seeing their kids eight days a month. But if you’re a mother whose children aren’t under your constant care? People assume there must be something either psychologically or morally wrong with you. They conclude some court decided the children would be better off without you.
For the record, I have joint custody of my kids and a court gave me primary placement a million years ago (that’s for the judgmental buttinskis out there).
The same rules don’t apply to men and women and that’s spectacularly unfair. When my parents divorced back in the 80s, my brother and I lived with my father during our last few years of high school. People assumed the worst about my mom as well, especially back then! How could a mother leave her kids? The answer is, she didn’t. Looking back, my mother was just as present in our lives when she moved out as when she lived in the family home. Parenthood is about love and acceptance and she lavished us with both, despite having a different address.
The circumstances which led to my children living with their father during the week had nothing to do with my fitness as a mother and everything to do with employment and geography.
I’m a history teacher. You know…the dime-a-dozen variety educator, who, if you have a few years’ experience under your belt, is basically unemployable. Why hire an experienced history teacher (who took several years off to raise her children), over a new graduate a school can pay half as much? It took me two+ years to find a full-time, permanent, teaching gig after ten years of on the clock motherhood. The hitch? The job was on Block Island.
I know. Poor me, having to live and work on beautiful Block Island year round. Your heart is bleeding for me. But I had an extraordinarily difficult decision to make. Do I take my children out of one of the top three school districts in the state and bring them to a K-12 school with a sum total of 150 students, thirteen miles off the coast of mainland Rhode Island? A school that has virtually no after-school activities except sports (and my kids aren’t athletic)? What would they do for extracurricular activities that wouldn’t eventually devolve into an alcohol and/or drug problem?
It was a sucky position to be in, but I needed a job. So, my ex-husband and I had a serious sit down and decided it would be in the girls best interest to stay put, continue their orchestra, dance and theater activities, while I tried the island on for size.
(Painful, gut-wrenching) decision made.
I knew pretty quickly my new school wasn’t the right fit for my kids, but it was a good fit for me and there were no other jobs out there. So we’ve made it work. I can’t say it’s always been easy, but it is what it is. It’s an imperfect situation, but we’ve ‘made lemonade.’ I can’t always be physically present for concerts or back-to-school nights (why do they hold those mid-week?) but just as my mother did before me, I’ve made sure my children know they’re loved and accepted and if they need me, I’m just a phone call or boat ride away.
Since the pandemic, opportunities for history teachers have opened up on the mainland. Two years ago I told my girls I’d look for another job and move back to civilization and their visceral reaction to that news shocked me. My girls were emphatic. No! Absolutely not! We love Block Island! This is our home, you can’t leave!
So I stayed, because that’s what my daughters wanted.
Stupid rules are made to be broken. What’s best for my children isn’t necessarily what’s best for me. That doesn’t make me an unfit mother, it makes me a selfless one. I’m not tooting my own horn or placing myself on a pedestal by making that statement. Believe me, I would have preferred to live with my kids full time, but the gods had a different plan for us.
And now they’re almost adults, on the verge of leaving the nest. I can say with a great deal of pride, my children have grown into kind, sensitive humans. They see both sides of a situation and know nothing is black and white. They have empathy and curiosity. They value honesty and integrity. They dismiss those who are petty and narrow-minded. These are not virtues they absorbed from their father by osmosis (he’s not intimately acquainted with virtue as a concept). No, my daughters learned those values from me.
The moral of the story is this; when the rules are fucking archaic and stupid…make your own.