There’s no manual for becoming a parent. There’s even less of one for co-parenting.
When you’re standing at the altar, or holding your newborn for the first time, divorce isn’t part of the picture you’re imagining. So when it happens, you’re not just grieving a marriage — you’re being handed a completely new, undocumented role, usually while still in the middle of the wreckage. It’s a very impossible task. It’s asking someone drowning to smile and nod whilst gasping for air.
I saw a quote recently that stopped me:
Divorce is the breaking up of a marriage, not the breaking up of a family.
It’s such an underrated statement. Because divorce isn’t a clean administrative event. It’s two damaged inner worlds colliding — two people carrying grief that, if not processed properly, doesn’t disappear. It just changes shape. It becomes resentment. Anger. Fury dressed up as “it’s about the kids” when really it’s still about the marriage. And this, is what hurts the kids. Not the breakup. The aftermath that follow.
In my own experience of blended family life, I’ve found two things are brutally hard to get right when you’re raising children with someone you’re no longer married to: respect, and letting go.
Respect: A Role, Not a Relationship
Respect in co-parenting isn’t about liking each other, agreeing with each other, or even being friends. It’s about making a mental shift — from my partner to the father (or mother) of my children.
That’s a much smaller, much more specific role than the one they used to hold in your life and it was one of the best pieces of advice I got from a friend when I was in the aftermath of this “horror”. He said to me: “Petro, imagine the relationship you want to have with your ex-husband a year from now. How do the conversations look. Every time you respond to a message, you hold that image in your mind.” And it’s strange how hard that narrowing can be. You catch yourself still expecting the version of respect a spouse owes a spouse, when what’s actually needed now is the far more basic respect one parent owes another — showing up on time for handovers, not undermining them in front of the kids, backing their decisions even when you’d have chosen differently.
Personally, I made a head decision (NOT a heart decision) to say one nice thing about their dad every week. Because, regardless of my own feelings, they deserved the space to love him. And no person in the world does not have good qualities that you can champion. Believe when I say that in the beginning it felt was said through gritted teeth and sheer willpower, but in time, and with healing, it became organic.
Letting Go: Making Peace With What You Can’t Control
The second one is harder still. Letting go means accepting that there is so much happening in your child’s other home that you simply cannot control — the routines, the rules, sometimes even the values being modelled.
You can only hold your own household well. You cannot hold both.
I will be the first to put my hand and say that I have gotten this wrong more than I’ve gotten it right. There is a reason people get divorced and more often than not it is because you see the world very differently. And the consequence of that is that you WILL parent differently.
I’ve had to sit with the discomfort of my children being parented differently in two homes, and resist the urge to “fix” or comment on all of it. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because the fixing was never really about them — it was about my own need for control in a situation that had already taken so much control away from me.
No Manual, Just Practice
Co-parenting isn’t something you arrive at. It’s something you practise, imperfectly, one handover, one disagreement, one Friday night curfew at a time.
Respect and letting go aren’t a destination either. They’re muscles — much like the ones I write about often: patience, self-regulation, sitting with discomfort. Different context, same inner work.
