Category: Doing Divorce

Patrick and Shirley Dunne are my parents.  Pat and Shirley celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary on September 19, 2020.  They married with little fanfare but great love in a tiny church in Portland, Oregon.  After the ceremony, they did not go to a wedding reception.  There wasn’t one.  Instead, they went to the hospital to share the day with my mom’s father who was healing from a heart attack.  Little did they know that in these first decisions they made as a couple they were setting the priority for their fifty-year path. They met at the University of Oregon –

“Like mother, like daughter” she said in response to my daughter reporting I took her to a doctor to inspect a dime-sized black spot on her thigh that after a week was not resolving.  When my distressed daughter relayed this to me, I asked for the context.  “I don’t know mom!  Why does she ever talk about you?”  Without context to guide my reaction, I was left flailing to understand. “Like mother, like daughter” are the words I want to hear about my daughters in relation to me.  I still beam with pride when someone says it in reference to

I just turned it off one day.  It was too much.  I could no longer consume, react, and mourn the rancorous dissension filling up my social media feeds and nightly newscasts.  To mask or not to mask, to reopen restaurants and bars or not, to social distance or stay quarantined – it was all taking its toll.  And then I read an article that by turning it all off I was exercising again my white privilege – leading to more helplessness. Now it is back-to-school time.  I read posts like “Kids. Need. School,” and I want to engage.  Who is

I found myself careening down a mountain, my hands gripping the steering wheel, and rarely uttered prayers slipping out of my mouth up toward the heavens.  The gas gauge read 0 miles.  Zero. None. No more.  I had already gone 7 miles on 0 miles of gas left in my tank and panic was setting in.  This had never happened to me.  By sheer will alone I am sure, I coasted into a tiny gas station in middle-of-nowhere Oregon to refill my tank.  I started to cry once I plugged the gas pump into my tank.  Pure relief and something more surprising washed over

Excitement is building with news of states opening back up after the initial wave of COVID in our community.  That old familiar feeling of what can only be explained as bubbles swirling in my stomach and heart on the precipice of bursting.  I put pen to paper this week planning those first steps back into what we hope will be “back to normal life.”  It is my responsibility to prepare the action plan for my team. Sometimes I think this shouldn’t be my job.  Patience has long been a virtue that I have failed time and time again to achieve. 

Exhaustion, tears, and tense lines across foreheads were daily revealing themselves to me as I checked in with my team.  I studied them in Brady Bunch boxes on zoom.  I could feel their frustrations, fears, and as we tally-marked our COVID way through March and now through April. Our culture is built on principle of support and I felt I was failing in fully supporting my co-workers during this pandemic.  What could I do for them?  Deliver gifts, coffee, what? I thought back to the last time I felt days comparable to these.  Days fluctuating on a spectrum in loneliness,

I woke up with a jump-start.  I showered, shaved, and slathered on my favorite smelling lotion.  Despite day 41 of sheltering in place, I was determined.  It was my birthday.  I LOVE birthdays!  I was going to make this day feel as pre-pandemic as possible – and the next day.  My newly minted sixteen-year-old and I share back-to-back birthdays. For her milestone day with no driving to be done – I was on a magic making mission. The day started with a sweet delivery from my dear friend – literally a box full of treats from the best bakery in

I broke down in front of my girls.  Now it was my turn to cry under the stress of it all.  It was Easter.  No family gathering.  A pre-made rather than homemade meal was planned.  The girls’ Easter baskets were empty for the first time in history because the gift I planned to give was on back-order due to high demand under the pandemic (it wasn’t toilet paper – it was a gaming system). Then my girls were being playful and reciting what Easter would “normally” be like.  Their grandparents and uncle would be over for dinner.  Their aunt and

Backpack-bound and smiling, my girls pierced the silent serenity of my car talking over each other and fussing over who would sit shotgun as we pulled away from their dad’s house.  They were instantly chattering about the topic of the day – the topic now of every day – coronavirus.  We hit the highlights:  How was Susan’s son who lives in New York City?  Are grandma and grandpa being safe when they go to the grocery store?  Did I hear the annual Okoboji soccer tournament was canceled and Sophia would miss her last year?  Has Traci (our ER nurse friend

“I don’t want to go to Dad’s.  I have all of my school stuff here and I don’t want to pack it up.”  I knew it would come.  Last week was “I can’t wait to go” and this week it was bemoaning the same fact.  Co-parenting during COVID-19 continues. This week in my lawyer role, we saw the good, bad, and the ugly in co-parenting surface. I used to say that divorce sometimes brings out the worst in parents.  Now I know better.  Divorcing during a pandemic beats that by a mile. The Good For the most part, parents continue