'Still a family': Blog encourages divorcing couples to keep the peace - Daily Hampshire Gazette
Staff Writer
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JERREY ROBERTS
Molly Monets blog, Postcards from a Peaceful Divorce, has made her part of a national conversation about divorce.
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JERREY ROBERTS
Molly Monet, a former Mount Holyoke College instructor, is seen recently at Haymarket Cafe in Northampton. Her blog, Postcards from a Peaceful Divorce, has made her part of an ongoing national conversation about divorce. Below is a screen shot from her blog.
SOUTH HADLEY - Molly Monet is knee-deep into the process of packing up everything she owns and moving from her home in Northampton to an apartment in Newton.
Her two children, Jonah, 9, and Layla, 7, will come east with her.
So too, if and when he can find a job in the Boston area, will her ex-husband.
And, possibly, his girlfriend.
Monet, 44, likens the relocation to a caravan.
"That's sort of the way it feels," she said the other day during an interview at the Haymarket Cafe in downtown Northampton.
Monet's move came about because her job teaching Spanish at Mount Holyoke College fell victim to budget cuts; she's landed a new job, starting in the fall, at Boston University.
Monet wrote about her move to Newton on her blog, Postcards from a Peaceful Divorce, which she started last year.
It grew out of a series of Facebook postings, in which Monet had written about the not always easy or harmonious effort she and her former spouse have made to divorce without becoming consumed with anger and scarring their children in the process. Monet says she and her former husband, who split up in 2007, still get together for Friday night dinners with their children, and they still mark holidays and birthdays together. They share custody of the children in a nearly 50/50 split.
"It takes steady cultivation and dedication," she wrote on her blog, "like the care of seedling plants."
Monet and her Postcards blog, which has drawn more than 73,500 page views to date, were featured in a June 17 article titled "How Divorce Lost Its Groove" in The New York Times.
The piece explored the changing shifts in attitudes surrounding divorce for couples of Monet's generation who are separating at a time when the divorce rate is coming down. Having peaked in 1980, divorce rates are now at their lowest level since 1970, according to statistics cited in the July 9-10 Wall Street Journal.
According to some of those interviewed by the Times, the personal pain of divorce today is exacerbated by the stigma of being judged a failure and - worse - an irresponsible, selfish parent.
Though she worried a lot at first about the effect of the divorce on her children, Monet says she now believes they'll be OK.
"I think they understand things remarkably well," she said. "This is what they know and they don't seem to compare us to other families. They just know we're still a family."
In her blog, Monet refers to her husband, who teaches at Westfield State College, only as her ex. "We did agree to set some guidelines," she said, to make it clear that she is offering her perspective, not theirs.
Readers expecting to find some ex-bashing on Postcards will come away disappointed.
"People have told me that I'm nicer to my ex on the blog than I am to men I've dated," she said. "Certainly my goal is not to make him look bad," she said, with a what-can-I-say smile. "He's a nice guy."
Monet winced a bit about one line in the Times article that quoted her saying that married women have seemed jealous of her lifestyle: "Dating, going to yoga five times a week, having time for myself. Raising young kids with a spouse doesn't afford you much time."
"That was probably the most re-tweeted quote of the whole piece," she said. Though she wasn't misquoted, Monet says she didn't mean to suggest that divorce is worthwhile if it frees up time for yoga.
She has seen divorced or separated women, she said, who seem "lost" when suddenly faced with expanses of time when their kids are with their fathers. Faced with that, she said, "I decided, I'm going to find out if there are any possible benefits to this. So I reached out to friends. I started dating. I went to yoga. It was my attempt to find something happy in a situation that was initially very sad."
Gut-wrenching blow
She and her husband had been together 13 years, she said, having met as graduate students at Yale University. But in their last years together, Monet says it became increasingly clear - even though she readily admits she didn't want to face it - that the relationship was deteriorating.
"We just didn't function as romantic partners," she said.
Nor was it their style to suffer in silence. "We were vocal and loud and dramatic," she said. "It was obvious to everyone involved that it wasn't working - and it was exhausting."
Still, Monet said her husband's decision to move out came as a gut-wrenching blow, and she initially tried, without success, to change his mind.
Even as she struggled to come to terms with her loss, Monet says her son seemed to understand the reasons behind the upheaval. After asking his dad why he was leaving, she said, he answered the question himself: "It's so you and Mommy don't fight anymore, right?"
Monet is well aware that many people - whether friends or social science researchers - would argue that they should have stayed together anyway. She respectfully disagrees.
"I can only speak from my own experience," she says. "But I now subscribe to the point of view that it's better to have a happy household than to live in a tense, family environment where people are fighting all the time. I know that's controversial."
Even in the initial weeks and months after her husband moved out, while she was still reeling with hurt and pain, Monet said, she began to think about how to handle the family breakup.
"There were definitely some dark moments," she said, "but there were certain things I did that helped. Right from the beginning, I was very clear about the vision I had for where this was going to go and holding on to that vision gave me hope and faith."
That vision was about maintaining a relationship, even as they began separate lives. The process was helped, she said, by the fact that her husband, after moving out into a new apartment in town, came back daily to see the kids and to share meals - and the kitchen cleanup.
"At first it was like we didn't know how not to have dinner together," Monet said. "We didn't exactly know how to separate. The experience taught us that we could still have those family moments."
In time, the routine became that the children spent four days a week with Monet and three with her husband. As for handling the legal proceedings, Monet said the couple is doing that through online services, without lawyers. When they've finished preparing the paperwork, they will still be required to appear before a judge, she said.
The couple chose not to seek outside help through mediation. It was in part a financial decision, Monet said, and in part their conclusion that they were handling things well on their own.
"We were communicating well," she said, "so why put faith in a third person?"
Monet says she knew as soon as she got the news last March that her job at Mount Holyoke was ending that the situation would present a serious challenge to the arrangements she and her ex-husband had worked out. It unleashed "a whirlwind," she said, as she was forced to grapple with her own upended career and how it affected her kids.
Selling the house was hard, she said. "It's the place where we come together, so it's a little bit un-grounding."
Long story short, her ex-husband will remain at Westfield for the coming year, she said, but is hoping to relocate after that.
"It made more sense economically for him to stay here now," she said, but his goal is to relocate. In the meantime, she says there's no question it will be harder to keep up their regular Friday dinners and other family gatherings.
"He doesn't want to be just a weekend dad," she says. "He wants to be where the kids and I are."
In the blogosphere
Having sent her observations and musings out to the wider world, Monet is now part of an ongoing, sometimes unruly but always interesting, national conversation about divorce.
She has heard from people, she says, who have thanked her for promoting the view that divorce doesn't have to leave scorched earth behind. She's heard from grown children who wish their own divorced parents had been able to do that.
She's also heard from people who said she should have tried harder to save her marriage - a tough criticism to answer, she says, given that she didn't initiate the separation. She's heard from people who say she's made it all sound too simple, too happy and too easy.
She's heard from women who say she's doing a disservice to women by lulling them into believing that it can all work out; women need to be on guard to protect their interests, especially those involving money, property and children. And she's heard from men, who say the system is stacked against them and favors their ex-wives.
"I was surprised at some of the vehemence," she said, especially after one of her pieces ran on The Huffington Post.
On balance though, it's all been a plus, she says. "The blog has connected me with a whole group of people - it sort of becomes a community." She even dated someone she met through her blog, she said.
Speaking of which, how's that going? She's been dating, she said, but nothing too long-term yet.
"I tend to gravitate to people who don't have acrimonious divorces," she said.
"Will we always be as close as we are now? That's hard to gauge," she said. "We've talked about someday being with other partners, at dinners and family gatherings. But we could grow in different directions ... I never thought I'd be divorced to begin with. You can't know the future."
Coming tomorrow: A closer look at the numbers, and how one court tries to help families.
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