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Category: Doing Divorce

Angela Dunne provides practical advice based on real examples of what she and her clients have faced through the transition of divorce.

Doing Divorce

Angela Dunne provides practical advice based on real examples of what she and her clients have faced through the transition of divorce.

Beyond the Boundaries

“I feel so guilty,” she told me with true anguish in her voice, “This is so hard.” My daughter was in conflict with her dad over her summer schedule after returning home from college. “I hate being in the middle.” For 12 years I tried to heed the oft-stated warning for divorced parents to keep your children out of the middle. The middle being between me and their dad. On many occasions, I “sucked it up” and conceded on a co-parenting issue to shield my kids from knowing there was conflict between their parents. When we divorced our daughters were
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Fair and Weathered Friends

We sat on a bench pointed toward the sea like two women twice our age. I clutched my binoculars in one hand ready to spy anything (or anyone) worth my interest and I tsked the young man out on the coastal rocks by himself. She marveled at the constancy of the ocean waves and how they made our troubles seem small and remote.  We fell into easy silences and I scooched closer to keep her warm.  We have been side by side friends since we were twelve years old. We struggled through puberty and big eighties hair together. We bravely took
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Raw Regret

Sophia wanted her turn.  We sat at the dinner table going through our days and she was anxious to share.   It was a 7th grade drama – a mild version of mean girls.  Sophia set the scene.  “We were playing a trick on Josie and hiding her book.  I don’t know why.  It’s just a thing.  So I told her I had her book.  I didn’t.  So I don’t know why I said it, but that’s what I told her.”  I could see the snowball forming as she moved through her story.  “Sophia, you are too dumb to have my
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Picture Perfect

When Santa came to visit my house for Christmas in 1984, he gifted me a Fisher-Price Kids Kodak 110 Film blue camera.  It was the second-best Santa gift I ever received next to the “Pretty In Pink” Barbie from 1981. My camera came with a cartridge of eight flashbulbs to use indoors. I fancied myself a photographer while posing my Barbies, my cats, and my favorite Raggedy Ann doll around our backyard.  Soon after the first set of prints were picked up from the film developer, my mom bought me my first scrapbook. I meticulously kept scrapbooks from 1984 to
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Soggy Cereal

I stayed in bed because I knew I was supposed to.  I pretended to sleep through the whispered arguments and the clanking of dishes.   I peeked out from under the covers to see her proudly carrying the cookie sheet with her Mother’s Day display.  I successfully feigned waking up rested and delighted to the breakfast prepared in my honor.   How I choked down that very full bowl of soggy Special K, I will never know. My daughters, who were 9 and 7 that year, were trying their very best to make my Mother’s Day memorable.  And they did.  I will
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Remission

I sucked in every molecule of air in the room when my dad’s doctor confirmed it was prostate cancer.  After weeks of testing, we finally had the clarity that comes with results. Despite anticipating this would be the news, the tears streamed down my face. My dad had been through enough in the last seven months by going through two hematoma surgeries on his brain – didn’t he get a pass for this add-on? In the weeks that followed, I took detailed notes and read the summaries for multiple doctor appointments, my mom supported my dad with everything from his
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Parenting Plans

Both of us baby-faced and needing frequent naps, I could have spent the rest of my days with her head tucked safely under my chin and her little sixteen-pound body warming my heart.  At six months into her life, I was finally getting the hang of things and not congratulating myself nightly that she was still breathing. I was now accustomed to the permanent expansion of my heart. Little did I know then that in seven short years, her father and I would be working through a divorce and my plans for parenting with him would be barely recognizable by the
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Casserole Care

I thought it was heat rash when the red prickly, itchy bumps appeared.  Then the pain set in and my instincts told me otherwise.  The doctor took one look and resolutely said, “Shingles.”  “Adult chicken pox?” I asked.  “At your age the only explanation is that it is stress induced,” he looked at me with what felt like a smidge of silent judgment.  I was on Google as soon as I walked in the door to discern how long this bout would last, my mind already racing to the commitments I had the following work week and how was I
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Turning the Page

It is too dramatic to say I felt disbelief staring at my sixteen-year-old daughter’s handwritten words.  But it was certainly on the spectrum of stunned. In a rare and fleeting moment of one-on-one time with my busy teenager, she was sharing with me the journal she had been tasked with keeping for her high school writing class. I read the words again: “For me, the holiday season has been hard. With having divorced parents, I don’t think it will ever be easy.  There is always guilt when leaving one parent on Christmas morning to go to the other, knowing that the parent
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Caught with the Cookie Jar

Where was she now? My rambunctious and sneaky Sophia was nowhere to be found. Still in her footie pajamas, it was easier for her to be stealthy.  I retraced my steps through the house. When I came back down to the living room the quiet was eerie.  I heard the slightest shift of her. From where? Behind the chair? I knelt onto the chair with both knees so I could peer over the back.  In the corner, nestled behind the chair was my two-year-old, her face full of cookies.  She didn’t just get caught with her hand in the cookie
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