I am not a guru

My ex-husband hosted Thanksgiving this year, and I was not included. My children inaccessible across town.

“Mommy, why can’t we be with you today?”

This isn’t what I wanted to write about. All month I’ve been trying to tell the story of the couples I’ve been spending time with — the women who want to be divorced, and those who are in process. I’d been piecing my encounters together into a narrative that will have to wait until December.

I think I’m a good coparent. It’s important to me, and the success of my coparenting relationship is propped up by a mix of character strengths and defects. Primarily, I am correcting my own childhood through theirs. I have a blueprint of what not to do; I have a map of how to traumatize children, and I avoid the on-ramps.

And a shallow but effective motivator is: I like to be good at things. I like to win. I’m adept at performance, and I don’t have to feel it to act it out. I don’t have to like you, respect you, or find you interesting... I can just pretend. Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.” And coparenting has given me plenty of opportunities to rise to the occasion when I would much rather sink and rage.