Whichever way you look at it, divorce is not good news, especially when there are children involved. However awful the relationship has become, a broken marriage still leaves a sense of failure and a bitter taste in the mouth of those involved.
When it's a marriage with children that's broken down, in most cases the children maintain a thread of connection between those children's parents, and this can be an on-going source of pain and isolation for many years after the divorce itself.
Even when the parents have remarried or forged new relationships, there can still be a pervading sense of guilt that some children within a blended family are missing out on support,love, grandparents or some other component of family life which one part of the family may have but the other doesn't.
The realities of blended family life are often essentially unfair, and whilst nobody said that life was fair, it's heart wrenching for a mother to have to watch her children learn this harsh fact at an early age.
Happy Families: Putting a Brave Face on Things
Blended family life can put enormous strains on all involved, particularly if absent partners are difficult to deal with. For the parent who has custody of the children of the first (or other) relationship, the effort involved in being even-handed, cheerful and positive whilst dealing with an ongoing situation where the emotional sands are always shifting is a huge challenge.
For the benefit of the new relationship, all children concerned and your own sanity, keeping the domestic boat on an even keel is infinitely desirable. However tempting it may be to give voice to all the uncharitable thoughts you may have about your erstwhile partner, it's probably better to keep anger and insults to a minimum if at all possible.
Human nature being what it is, this will not always be possible. The occasional emotional explosion is inevitable and healthy, but a continual drip of domestic acid is destructive to all concerned and to be avoided at all costs.
Keeping the emotional music in a low key and focusing on the big picture is really helpful when ex-partners behave appallingly. You have a new relationship and all your children have a little stability in their lives; this is better than being alone – it must be. You've experienced both solitude and togetherness, you've chosen a new partner but holding everything together can take the greatest effort you've ever made.
Single Parent Isolation
It's hardly surprising that partners within a new relationship can feel very isolated at times. Emotional storms can blow up from nowhere, unconnected with events in the new relationship. Guilt, blame, failure and other bad feelings can be very near the surface in a new and complex second family situation.
Try and share some of your feelings with your new partner. Try to lower the emotional temperature and make it clear that whatever storms are affecting you, their origins lie outside the current relationship.
It's hard for even those intimately involved to fully understand the dynamics of a marriage, so explaining exactly why your ex winds you up so much is never going to be easy. You may not even understand the mechanism yourself, so maybe it's all best left unexplored.
Accept that occasional feelings of isolation and anger are an inevitable part of building a new life; be very kind to yourself, take all the help you can get, keep adult rages and unreasonableness away from the children as much as is humanly possible and (most of all) accept that life isn't perfect or fair. A "good enough" second relationship where most of those involved have a reasonably good life most of the time has much to recommend it, so if you have one of those, count your blessings often!
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