Whose Weekend Is It Anyway?

My friend Beth's mom yelled up the stairs to her as we were playing with Barbies in her room: "Your dad called. He's picking you up at six." Back then parents didn't have texting or cell phones to manage the geography of co-parenting. They worked out children's schedules through voicemails and hand-written notes, and in some cases, judges and mediators. I imagined Beth's mom punching "play" on the answering machine in their kitchen before relaying the information to her.

In 1991, Beth was the only friend I knew whose parents were divorced, the details of which were hushed more than openly acknowledged. Beth wasn't sure when she'd be at her mom's house or dad's apartment, and she stressed about how we'd get together for play dates based on her ever-changing location in the fourth grade.

I couldn't totally relate. Even though I didn't want my parents to give each other dirty looks like hers did, I was occasionally jealous that she got two birthday parties and Christmas celebrations each year, along with double the number of gifts.

Communication Gaps

Beth had seemingly unlimited holiday celebrations in part because the infrastructure supporting divorced families was less clear or normalized in the ‘90s. Long before co-parenting apps, divorced parents had another communication platform: their children. "Tell your father…" and "Ask your mother…" turned kids into unwitting, unpaid custody coordinators.

Handwritten notes were shoved in backpacks, "She has a book report due Monday," "His inhaler is in the front pocket," "Bring 20 oranges to soccer practice." It really wasn't anyone's fault; things like smartphones and Google Calendar just didn't exist yet.

To avoid the stresses Beth dealt with in childhood, when I got married to a man with three kids, I vowed to do it differently. We displayed a dry erase calendar prominently in the kitchen that highlighted green days with their mom and blue days with me and their dad. He used an app called Our Family Wizard to keep track of shared expenses and scheduling changes with his ex. As the kids got older, smart watches and cell phones made communication a non-issue of our post-divorce logistics.

Today, it's also more common to have blended holidays and gatherings. We went to the kids' mom's house, along with my parents and brother's family, to celebrate my stepson's first communion. As we mingled with my husband's former inlaws like one big happy extended family, I couldn't imagine that would have happened in the ‘90s.

Thankfully for some of us nowadays, getting two exes, two stepparents and four grandparents around the same sheet cake without anyone throwing it doesn't seem like wizardry at all. With our positive co-parenting progress, we also successfully put Jerry Springer out of a job.