Coparenting is a delicate dance of inept partners stepping on toes. If you have a good coparent, the missteps can feel accidental. If you have a terrible coparent, they seem intentional and pointlessly cruel.
Everyone has heard the adage that good parents will “put the children first.” This requires each parent to maturely transition from their emotional coupling to a more professional collaboration to successfully raise children into adulthood. Good coparents decide parenting mutually, speak well of the other parent, and leave the child OUT of the problems you might have with the other coparent. Raising a child is hard enough now; navigating e-bikes and hormones and cell phones. Add in a bitter ex who gets drunk and texts pages of vitriol to you when all you want is to see your kid? No fucking thank you.
I’ve been fortunate to not have to coparent with an insane person. People in my life? Not so much. I’ve sat in courtrooms with friends trying to make sure their kids aren’t exposed to emotional and physical abuse from their coparent. I’ve held other friends while they’ve cried over their coparent using the child to emotionally hurt them. In every single immature coparenting arrangement, the person who suffers is the child.
Coparenting younger children can be easier than coparenting a teenager, a child, while capable of independent thought, is only truly thinking with half of a brain. Courts give older children the option of who they will live with in a divorce. The hard part of the court’s decision is the fact that oftentimes there are interpersonal dynamics in the family that can’t be expressed in a 20 minute hearing. Courts can’t see (and can’t be arsed) that maybe one parent has openly bad mouthed and ostracized the other parent to “win.” It’s not the court’s problem, honestly, and they just want to make sure the kid is taken care of physically and financially. They don’t care about the years of therapy that a child will eventually have to undergo when they realize they were purposely kept from a decent parent who loved them just because the more immature coparent felt the need to drag a child into their personal beef with the coparent. Emotional neglect or abuse is hard to quantify in a court of law without a bigger case than family law cares about.
It takes a strong person to not make a child shoulder the burden of the pain of losing your relationship with the coparent. It takes swallowing your pride and ego and perhaps addressing your own shit in therapy to not make your child, the one you want to see succeed, have to address your shit and their own in therapy. How absolutely ill-adjusted do you have to be to make your child suffer because you’re sad or angry at their other parent?
It is interesting to see how family dynamics shift over the years too. I’ve found that immature coparents are extremely short sighted in their words and actions. A bad coparent doesn’t seem to realize that their child will grow up one day and be capable of realizing the manipulation or cruelty that was spewed at the cost of their own familial safety. Screenshots are forever, and conversations that a parent cannot have with a three, ten, or even seventeen year old can be had with a 35 year old adult child. Children grow up and realize that what they thought was happening…wasn’t. And that they suffered because of it. Hopefully the child will grow up, go out into the world, and realize that they actually had a decent parent, and it wasn’t the one using them to “win” an arbitrary game of parenting.
The saddest part is the time that will never be reclaimed because of a bad coparent. People die without reestablishing family bonds all of the time. So maybe be a better coparent.
