Tonight Logan and I went to one of his friend’s birthday parties at Jungle Jim’s here in Utah. This little boy’s mother and I have been friends for several years and have watched each other go through the many struggles of single parenting. However, tonight I watched as her and her ex put aside all their differences so that they could both be there to celebrate their little one’s birthday. They stood beside each other as they took their son around to each of the different rides and laughed and joked with each other about how cute the kids were as they tried out each of the rides for the first time. You never would have known that they had any issues with each other, simply because they wanted their son to have a good birthday.
Do you and your ex celebrate holidays or birthdays together? For many of us, this simply isn’t an option, but it’s nice to see it work for others. I have seen my ex’s family on many occasions since our divorce. In fact, that first year they even invited me in to celebrate one of the kid’s birthdays with them, but I couldn’t imagine all of us getting together to celebrate Christmas or Logan’s birthday together. Do I think it could be done? Yes, but I’m not sure that it would be the best thing for us. I think the tension would take away from the celebration for Logan and I would never want that. I also wouldn’t want to give Logan any false hopes of his dad and I getting back together. So for us at this point, this is better.
This is one of the many difficult things about being divorced. The children often don’t get to see one parent or the other on certain holidays. My ex and I tried to alleviate that and split the day, but again this doesn’t work for everyone. What do you and your ex do to for holidays and birthdays? What can you do to make things easier on the kids?