Not Your Dad's Divorce

Most parents will never forget the details of the day their children were born. For those who divorce, there's another day—equally vivid, totally different—that etches into memory: when they have to tell their children their mother and father are splitting up. What I remember is pacing through our apartment the night before, watching my girls sleep. The older one was 8 and still slept as she had when she was a newborn, arms thrown high above her head. The little one, just 4, was curled at the top of her bed, leaving two thirds of it empty.Their dad and I had read the divorce books and rehearsed our speech about how none of this was their fault, that we loved them. All of this was true, but it seemed insufficient. He and I made a big calendar, as advised, with mom days in red and dad days in purple. In the half-light of that sad morning, I opened the calendar and realized that this crazy quilt would be a map for our lives from now on.

In the morning, we sat the girls on the sofa and told them. They cried, and were confused, but they didn't ask the big questions we thought they would. They wanted to know where they'd live, and whether they would still have the same last name. When we showed them the calendar, our older girl turned it a few pages ahead to her birthday month, which we hadn't colored in yet. She panicked. "But Mom, is my birthday red or purple?" Her dad and I looked at each other and said, "Both. We'll both be there." She would not rest until we filled the day in with red and purple. And with that, our new family life was born.

Birthdays had been part of the initial conversations my ex-husband, Jorgen, and I had had about how the schedule would work. When his parents divorced in the 1970s, they adopted the standard every-other-weekend-with-dad setup. He remembered missing his father tremendously and didn't want that for our kids. We talked about sharing time with them more equally—legally it's called joint physical custody, as opposed to the more common joint legal custody, where the child may live primarily with one parent, but both parents make big decisions, like which school the child goes to, together.

Joint custody meant that the girls would be spending several nights a week with their dad. Switching would require collaboration and communication about homework and school projects and the thousand other things that kids need from day to day. To make it work, we'd have to live near each other for the next 13 years, until the youngest girl was off to college. It was a commitment not unlike marriage, and, given that feelings were still raw post-divorce, neither of us thought it would be easy.

No child custody schedule is. It can involve long commutes and budgets strained by the costs of maintaining two households. The traditional dad-gets-every-other-weekend formula is logistically easier than what Jorgen and I planned. But ours is an increasingly common arrangement. "It's not like it was 20 years ago," says Leslie Drozd, editor of the Journal of Child Custody. "There's no longer the same presumption that young children must be with their mother."