The Moms Guide to a Good Divorce; Essential Coparenting Tips with Author Sarah Armstrong

Hey, welcome back, No Problem Parents. Before we get started today, I wanted to just talk a little bit about sponsorships and to thank the sponsors of the No Problem Parenting podcast. We are quite selective with who we partner with here at No Problem Parenting because I don't want this podcast to just be filled with a bunch of ads and promotions. what the goal of the podcast is, is to provide you with resources and things that are going to help you become the confident leader for your kids. Our kids crave our confident leadership, but we don't know what we don't know. And so the purpose of sponsors is actually to do two things. Number one, to help us keep this podcast going. We are top 2% podcast, just nearing that top 1%. Sponsors are helping us keep this going so that no matter where you live, you're informed, you have access to resources that are going to help you and your family, no matter what problem you are currently facing. And so we have a variety of topics on this podcast. And if you would like to become a sponsor of the No Problem Parenting Podcast, reach out to Jackie at NoProblemParents.com and let us know about your product or service that's going to help the family system and help parents become the confident leader their kids crave us to be. And today's podcast sponsor is Dr. JJ Kelly at drjjkelly.com and her Get Real program. Dr. JJ offers courses through her Get Real program,

which is an emotional skills training program based on dialectical behavioral therapy. Dr. Kelly makes learning a complex set of concepts and skills fun and funny. She says you're going to laugh yourself right into healthy. Through the Get Real program, you're going to build awareness of your emotional experiences, build a vocabulary of emotion words that's going to enhance awareness and competency to communicate your emotions. You'll build a framework for increasing your chances of getting what you want when you ask for something or saying no to something or someone else. Increase your capacity to experience joy and calm. If you have a teen or young adult experiencing ongoing conflicts in relationships, intense and rapid mood changes, the inability to relax, trouble recognizing choice, holding in your anger and then blowing up at others, or numbing out in response to fear or anger, Dr. JJ Kelly's Get Real program is going to help. So go to drjjkelly.com for more information. And thanks again, Dr. JJ, for being a sponsor of the No Problem Parenting podcast. All right, in today's episode, we're going to talk all things how to have a good divorce. You know, while divorce has increased since the 1960s, it's actually taken a decline since 1990. There's been a downward trend. And of course, most people don't go into marriage expecting their marriage to end in divorce. But when it does, my guest today is going to share

with us how we make that divorce a quote unquote good divorce. Let me introduce you to Sarah Armstrong. Sarah is a good divorce proponent and the author of The Mom's Guide to a Good Divorce. She's the vice president of global marketing operations at Google and the proud mom of Grace, who was seven years old when Sarah divorced. She has 14 years post-divorce and wrote this book in 2016. And Sarah is a mentor to other women as well as men in business. She's a longtime volunteer at various nonprofit organizations. And while she's not a proponent of divorce, she's a good divorce proponent. The guidance in her book is written in a conversational tone from one mom to another and is served up in bite-sized pieces. So it's meant to prepare you for the discussions that you need to have and the decisions you need to make while keeping your children as the focus and prioritizing yourself too. Ultimately, the goal of the book is for you to be able to put your experience in the category of a good divorce. I'm super excited to have you here today, Sarah.

Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be with you. Well, I'm super excited that we connected and that your book is just a much needed resource for moms. And we're going to get into that in a little bit. But before we do, I'd like you to Just tell us a little bit about how you went from being the global marketing VP at Google to saying, Hey, you know, I got some free time.

I want to help some other women. Tell us a little bit about your story. Great question. So, you know, I like to start even before I share my story, just say, you know, just for the record, I actually am not an advocate for divorce.

Okay. I, you know, in an ideal world, couples get married and they stay happily married for the long term, you know? And unfortunately, this isn't always the case. And these days it's more common than ever, as you mentioned.

So, you know, I just, I like to say that up front because I think it's important to reflect on, but. No, and I appreciate that. I think there's a lot of people that, you know, you don't get married thinking you're going to get a divorce. Well, and that's exactly, that is one of my absolute statements.

No one gets married to get divorced. They also, in general, no one gets married for positive reasons. There's usually a trigger or something that has caused you to go down that path. But the thing is the children that are involved in that situation did not get to decide that their parents were going to get the divorce, but their lives are the most significantly impacted by this decision.

And so I really think that that's so fundamental. So in my situation, as you mentioned, I got divorced in grace with seven, which is now 14. She turns 21 this October. So that was 14 years ago.

And my parents have been married for 55 years this summer. So I had the model of an amazing partnership and marriage. And I thought that's what we had. And unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way.

So when we were going down the path of getting a divorce, I had watched very ugly divorces of my parents' sons growing up. And so I thought to myself, I don't want to do it that way. I don't want that to be the situation that I'm in or that we put grace through. And because I saw the impact on my friends growing up.

And so we made some very conscious decisions along our divorce journey. and after we went through our whole process um it's interesting because i had a number of friends that once we went through it they i was the first in my friend group in fairness to go through divorce and they would come to me and say would you help me go through you know and think through the process um and i somehow had become the poster child for a good divorce so i i helped them um and i had three or four girlfriends that um over in the kind of the five post five year mark that help them through each of them would say at the end you should really write this stuff down and I thought well I mean I'm not a writer I I I'm I'm in business I write bullet points you know for my business documents and um you know I said I'm not sure I'll ever do that but thanks for suggesting that well I was at a business center in Mexico City and a colleague turned to me and he said Sarah he goes you're so happy and I said yeah he said well you're but you're divorced and And I said, you know, it's not like getting divorced is not a destiny.

My ex-husband and I decided to no longer be married to each other. I said, I'm happy. Grace is happy. My ex-husband's happy.

I said, we're all happy. And yes, we did go through a divorce. And I mentioned that many of my friends had been encouraging me to write down the guidance of how we've done this and how you could be happy after this very significant change in life. And he goes, you should really do that.

So the next morning I got on the plane flying out of Mexico city and I opened up my personal laptop and I wrote one line that said, this book is written by a girl who never, ever thought she would get a divorce, who got a divorce and what she learned along the way. And I wrote about 90% of the book on Delta over the course of a year. Oh my gosh. Because I traveled internationally for my job.

And instead of, after finishing my work on the plane, instead of watching movie or reading a book, I'd open my personal laptop and write. And so, but then I got very busy, Jackie, at work, and I set it aside for a while, about nine months. And then one day I was flying back out, actually to California. And I looked at the file and I talked to my laptop and on the flight and said, are you just going to be a file on my laptop? Or am I going to do something with you?

So I decided to go through the process. I self-published actually. And it came out in July of 2016 with about 150 topics originally. And five years later, right before the pandemic, I actually added 35 more topics. There's 185 bite-sized topics in the book that are broken into preparing the change, during the change, and post the change. And it's really meant to be a guide. It's not meant to be a guide that you read cover to cover. It's meant to be a guide that you go in for whatever phase you're in of your process and look at the table contents and say, what do you what are you trying to think through right now what decisions are you trying to make what discussions are you having and how can how can this book help you to think through those and so it's been a very interesting journey um and the only other thing i'll share because it's a really poignant moment is my daughter actually coined the term a good divorce so at age eight um a year after a divorce we're standing in a cvs at the checkout counter and there's a people magazine on the counter and there's a celebrity couple getting a divorce and she says mommy is that a good divorce or a bad divorce and i said grace i said i don't know what's the difference between a good divorce and a bad divorce he goes well good divorce is when the mommy and daddy are nice to each other like you and daddy and a bad divorce is when they scream and yell at each other

love it and i said grace i'm not quite sure from this magazine couple or cover um what type of divorce that is. But as I walked out of that CVS that day, Jackie, I thought, you know, whatever we are doing, the fact that our eight year old, a year after we have completely changed her life, she's living across two homes and all that comes with divorce, that she could say, we have a good divorce. I knew we were onto something and I knew the approach we were taking was working. And I use working in air quotes because it's not easy, but I felt like we were doing the right things for grace that she could have that perception. Absolutely love everything about that. You know, one of the authors in my, in our second book, Rosalind Sadak, I was telling you this before we started recording, but she is the reason that there is even the whole month of January is international child centered divorce month. And your book just is, again, I can't wait to connect the two of you because it's, it's really all about that. The child needs to be at the center of the divorce, whether you have a very brutal relationship with your partner and you're divorcing because of those reasons, or the goal is to at least make it amicable for the child and keep the rest of it away from the child's attention.

And that's the thing. I mean, there's just not enough conversation around the topic of how to have a good divorce. There's such a mental model of society of a bitter negative divorce because that's generally what we see. I think I'd love to stiff societal perception that a good divorce is an attainable outcome because we do owe it to our children. You know, I generally say when parents bring their children into this world, you know, we make a commitment to them. Absolutely.

That we're going to raise them in the healthiest, happiest, safest environment possible. You know, I, I just say that, you know, we cover the plugs, right? We put bike helmets on them. You know, we feed them organic milk, you know, whatever we whatever we decide that we think is going to keep them healthy and happy and safe.

And then but when you go through a divorce, you know, the stakes are so high and we really owe it to our kids to ensure that they're not the collateral damage due to the divorce. Absolutely. And I think just kids in general, when we become parents, you are making a decision to become a parent, to raise a child. And just like you said, you do all those things to make sure, you know, they've got helmets on and they're vaccinated or they're not vaccinated.

And they're, you know, like like all their health needs are taken care of. But what we neglect is to take either take care of our relationship, our adult relationship with our partner or with our friends and family. Even, you know, if you're a single parent and and then we share too much and sometimes not enough in the right way with our kids. right? Yeah. Yeah. We need to be adults. You're having a kid. You need to act like an adult.

And yeah. So two things on that. One is the toxicity that can come from a divorce. If you're not acting as an adult can have such long-term impact on your children's approach to relationships, you know, their views on marriage and their overall happiness of life.

Like this is, this is, this has one of those potentials of either having that scar that just is really, you know, so prevalent in their life and it defines so much of their life, or it can be something that happened in the course of their life, but not the first thing they mentioned every time they're, you know, explaining the course of their life. And so I really think as parents, and you said it exactly, sometimes we have to set aside our emotions in moments and do what's best for our children. And I say set aside our emotions because you still need to feel those emotions. You still need to express those emotions. I'm not saying to put them internal and inside and not let them out because that's not healthy either.

But if you can decide in those moments when your buttons are being pushed by potentially your ex-spouse or a situation that has been caused by the divorce, to not show those emotions to your children, because those are the things that they'll remember. Those are the things they take away. And I think if we can make the right choices in those moments, we're setting ourselves up for a different path for them to go on a different path for you to go on in terms of ending up in a happier place after the divorce is over awesome i love this so let's um i'm going to go back just a little bit when your daughter said that you know the difference between a good divorce and a bad divorce i want to what did you learn from that or how would you define that now like is there really such a thing as a good divorce and what is that exactly yeah so i learned a lot I learned it just was, it was affirmation for the approach we were taking.

I bet your heart had to fill up a little bit, right? It did. It did. It was like, I just took a deep breath.

I said, oh, okay. After, after you think about like how you're ruining your child's life as a parent, whether, you know, whether you're like, I am divorcing this person. If it's the last thing I do and your, your heart just tugs and you think I have wrecked my child. Yeah.

Yeah. And I'll, and I'll tell a story that was, was one of those moments before this moment that I was just struggling with. But to answer your question about the depth. So for me, a good divorce is when couples put aside their personal feelings for one another and they focus on what's best for the children.

That is that is a good that is what leads you to a good divorce, I believe. The moment I had that was one of those other moments that stood out is at the very early stages of our divorce process. We went through a collaborative divorce. And in that process, each of you get a coach, each of you have a lawyer eventually.

but there's a child specialist in a financial neutral person that helps you think through your finances. We were going to meet with a child specialist to talk to him about the fact that we're going to tell Grace about us getting a divorce. And he looked at me and he said, Sarah, do you travel? And I said, yeah, I travel internationally for my job. And he looked at my ex-husband and said, do you travel? And he says, yes, I travel domestically. He said, well, Grace is about to become a professional traveler. She's going to travel every week for the next 11 years and she's going to have to pack a bag and go between your two homes. And I burst into tears.

I burst into tears because I'm like, that's not what I want for her. That's not the life I want her to have to live. So it was a very hard moment. And so I walked out of there and I said to my soon to be ex-husband said, I don't know what this looks like yet, but I want to figure out how we minimize the impact of Grace feeling like she's a professional traveler and minimize the fact that she'd have to pack a bag every week and so now I realize some of the things I'm going to share here Jackie are a little bit they have socioeconomic considerations but I want to share that what we did is we just said let's have all the basics of both homes you know socks underwear couple extra sets of jeans t-shirts like so that when Grace went to school and then had to go to mom or dad's house after school she wasn't carrying an extra bag because there's the kid whose parents divorced because she has her extra bag yeah good point you know i didn't want that for her and so the only thing she had to do was walk out of whichever house with her backpack you know and whatever you know sports equipment or whatever was going on for that season but it wasn't the bag that went went back and forth and now the the funny part i can look back and laugh on it somehow the socks or you know the whatever things would get out of balance so they'd end up at one house house versus the other. And so I would call them rebalancing moments. And I'd text my ex-husband

and say, hey, I don't have any socks over here. Can you look in Grace's drawers? But it wasn't for Grace to do that. Grace did not decide to live across two homes. We decided that for her.

So we would take it upon ourselves to go in and figure out what had gotten out of balance. And then we would carry the bag that had all that stuff in it and hand it to the other parents and say, hey, here's the stuff. And then we would go put it in the other, you know, back in the dresser in her room. Because again, you didn't use this. You shouldn't have to rebalance your clothes.

That's a really good tip for parents. That is so important. And I think in, you know, one of the things as parents, we want our kids to take accountability and responsibility for things and making sure they have their sports equipment and their homework and all those things. But I love that in this situation for this specific need, it is not on the child's back, unless they choose you know unless the child's old enough and they say hey i don't have enough socks here mom i gotta get some socks from dad's house yeah and honestly once she was a teen i mean she wouldn't get for 10 years then then she can handle it but in the in seven eight nine ten i mean in those years they're just you know they're just kids you shouldn't have to figure out where their stuff is and you know as you said there were there were moments and now my ex-husband and i chose to live close by to each other so we were within 10 minutes so there was a moment one morning when she came down, she goes, it's just that day at school, my dress up shoes are at dad because we didn't have to be present. And, you know, those are the moments where I had to take a deep breath because first of all, it's not Grace's fault that her dress up shoes that are to dad. Right. So I'd say, you know what, let's go get your dress up shoes. Not, oh, Grace,

why aren't your dress up shoes here? You should have known you have dress up that, you know, because parents in that moment, you can be, you know, we're trying to race to get out the door to work in school. You know, you're pressed for time. And I thought, well, we'll be a little late for school, but you're going to have your dress up shoes. And so, but those are the moments I'm talking about where the emotion that you probably feel, which is why don't you have your dress up shoes? It's not her fault. It wasn't her fault. So those are just an example, but there's all of these are the many things, the little things that happen on a day-to-day basis that make the collective picture of how your children view what happened to their lives. You know, thinking about them and really being conscious of how you react in those moments is important. It's so great that you even thought to write this stuff down or that your friends encourage you to write all of this stuff down and then that you could put it together in a book, because I think the tips and the tools and things that you're putting in describe the book a little bit so that, cause you say it's not a read all the way through kind of thing. There's a table of contents with a bunch of different topics so that you can pick it up and be like, what do I do for this?

Exactly. Yeah. So it is bite-sized pieces. There's either, there's a topic per page and it's either a paragraph or it might be a full page.

And then the interesting thing is, and it was funny when I was laying out the book and I was working with my editor, he said, well, you can put more than one topic on the page. I said, no, no, no, if there's white space, that's to reflect on, that's to give you the space to think. And she goes, but you're wasting paper. I said, I'll be environmentally conscious somewhere else, but I'm going to do a topic per page.

So it is, and it's broken out in the phases, as I mentioned earlier. And, you know, what's interesting is I've had people, I actually had a woman right after I wrote the book, stopped me in the produce section at the grocery store. And she said to me, are you Sarah Armstrong, the author? And I had to stop because as I mentioned to you, I don't think of myself as a writer.

I said, oh yeah, actually I am. And she said, well, I was at your book signing at Barnes and Noble and I'm going through a divorce. And I want to thank you for writing this book because I carry it with me everywhere. and it keeps me calm. And I said to her, well, thank you for sharing that with me. Because I wrote it to help women like yourself that and the fact that it's keeping you calm, that that really means a lot. But she walked away. Jackie, I stood in the middle of the produce section and said, that's why I've written this book, you know, to help women I don't know, that are going through one of the toughest things you'll go through in life, especially when it comes to how you're going to raise your children in this new, you know, dual household environment is that if it's keeping her calm, that's one of the best things I could do. Oh my gosh. I love that. No problem. Parenting is all about becoming the confident leader. Our kids crave us to be, and you don't, when you don't feel confident, that's where, you know, I'm, we're here to help provide resources and connect you with people that can help boost that confidence. And, and so Sarah, this is, this book is actually,

is legitimately doing that for moms. It's helping them feel like, okay, there's, this isn't a death sentence. My child will be okay. I'm going to be okay, but it's my responsibility as the mom and dad to step up to the plate and take action on this and really be a leader and guide my child through this process. We can empower them too. Absolutely. And then also there are some things, and again, I mentioned earlier that a lot of this isn't easy. You know, I don't, I don't claim divorce is easy. It takes effort. And to your point, it takes being thoughtful about those different efforts along the way. And, you know, I even talked about the physical environment your kids are in. You know, generally, there's some type of move or some type of change in their environment. It's going to happen. And for us, Grace and I were going to stay in the home that I that we had been living in, and my husband was moving to a different home. And we had a long hallway of black and white family photos. It was a combination of my husband's family, my family,

all of us over the course of life. And I needed to give him his photo. And I wanted to give him. So I took it upon myself, and I call this one of those projects you don't think you have time for, but you make time for. And I went and got other photos of Grace and myself and my family, and got new frames. And one day I sent, again, she's seven, so I sent her down the street to a play date. And I took the photos of my ex-husband down, put them in a box, put new photos up, not at all sorted. Grace came home about an hour later. I'm in the kitchen. I hear this little voice from the hallway say, hey, mommy. I'm like, what's that, Grace? She says, the wall has changed.

And I stopped and I said, well, what's changed? She said, there are more pictures of me up there. It looks great. And she ran up to the room, her room. And I stopped and just took another deep breath and thought, Ooh, because if I hadn't Jackie taken the time to put new photos up and frame them and just left the little hangers throughout the places where her dad's photos had been, Grace would be telling a therapist years from now. Yes. Got a divorce. And my mom took all the photos of my dad off the wall and left the little thing. Yeah. Those little things.

That's what I love about this book. It's the little things that you in the big scheme of things when you're going through the divorce or even planning it, you're not, these things aren't necessarily on your radar. And that's the thing. And I was given a lot of books during my divorce that were thick and dense. And I opened them, I closed them. I didn't read one of them because it was too much. And so when I designed this book, I wanted it to be very much with the mindset of a woman going through divorce, a mom going through divorce. What do you have to think about? And that was really important. And so it's, it's, it's definitely, and by the way, I did keep photos of my ex-husband in Grace's room and her, and her family in Grace's room. That was Grace's room.

Right. Very smart. You know, that's, that's the thing. It's not about wiping him out of the house.

He is her dad. He deserved up photos of me and her dad and her cousins and her aunt and uncle, like they all deserve to be there. Her grandparents, that, that wasn't, you know. So it was non-negotiable, right? They were all going to be in her family was going to be represented in her room and they are still her family. Absolutely. The book is called the mom's guide to a good divorce. What to think through when children are involved and it is written for moms, but it also helps dads, right? The book does help dad. And, um, you know, there was a moment when, you know, I actually gave it to both of my parents to read before, you know, it was going to go out into the world. Um, I was raised very Catholic and I wanted to make sure they were comfortable with what I was sharing. And my dad said, you know, men would absolutely benefit from these books. And I said, no, I think you're right. And I have had a number of dads who have also read it because the messages, although I'm focused on as if I'm sitting in my living room, having a glass of wine, giving the guidance as I did with my friends,

as we went through those many conversations over many years. But it is something that can be for men or women. Some of the examples that I share, you know, one other really poignant moment, if I could share it with you, is we were at Grace's parent-teacher conference when she was in sixth grade. And in her school, both of the parents and Grace were meant to go. So we all show up for the parent-teacher conference. It's an hour, we're talking. At the end of the conference, the teacher looks at us and goes, wait a minute, are you two divorced? And I said, oh yeah, we've been divorced for five years. Grace was in first grade. She said, I had no idea. That's amazing.

And I said to her, well, it did not occur to me to walk in here and say, hi, we're divorced. Can we not talk about Grace's education? You know, and she said, she goes, you would be surprised at how few couples that are divorced can walk into this office and sit down for an hour and talk about their children's education. Right. And Grace is sitting, by the way, hearing the full conversation. And then, and the teacher said, it makes me very, very sad.

And I said, gosh, it makes me really sad too, because what's more important to parents than how their child is doing in school. You know, it's just, but that's an example where the mom and the dad need to show up. It's so complicated because there's just so many different reasons why people get divorced and circumstances. And so there's no judgment here. You know, there's circumstances or situations when you can't be that. And I get that.

Absolutely, Jackie. And I was about to say that in a totally fair call out. There are situations where there's been physical abuse. There's, you know, there's reasons where you won't want to be in the same room with that individual. I respect that. And then you have to do separate parent teacher conferences. Yes. But there are also reasons where it's like, you know, things may have unfolded, but does that cause you to be able to sit in the room and focus on your child's education for an hour, I'd say you might be able to be a bigger person. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And even, yeah, nobody said it was going to be easy, right? That's for sure. And take the high road. And I say, you know what? The high road, taking the high road is hard. It's steep. It's generally steep post-divorce. And there's moments where you're like, really? Do I need to do this?

You know, and the conversation I think you have with yourself is what is the impact on your child? if you take the high road, what will that do? What's the positive benefit of you taking the high road so that your kids can come through the end of whatever that little situation is that you're reflecting on. It can be okay. It can actually be more than okay.

It can be happy. It can be a positive situation versus, you know, going into a ditch and like wallowing in the negativity that can come with divorce, focusing on the past constantly, bringing up things from the past. Like, I just think that that's, you know, then you're anchoring on this negativity and you're anchoring on what happened in the past versus really looking forward. Hopefully the reason you got divorced is to be happier.

Exactly. Right. And to put your children in a more positive environment. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. I wonder what you think about this. A lot of the families that come to me to co-parent that are divorced, you know, they're struggling. The kids, maybe behavior is struggling.

maybe kid is favoring one parent over the other, or maybe they're just the child's kind of shut down altogether. One of the first things I asked the parents is, have you apologized for the divorce? And nine times out of 10, that response from the parents is no. They've said things like, I'm sorry, dad and I are getting divorced, but they haven't actually had that conversation to say, you know what? I'm sorry that you were put in the middle of this, if that's the case, right?

Or that you could be put in the middle. I'm sorry that dad and I got divorced or mom and I got divorced. What I love about this book is that there's now when I talk to parents, I can say, and dad and I are committed. Or if you don't know that you can say, I am committed to make this a good divorce. I'm just super grateful that we've connected and met because that's the next thing I'm going to share with the parents and I can coach those parents on, are you committed to make this a good divorce?

I think it's, first of all, I'm really excited that we have connected. And I think that's the whole goal of this is to put that concept into people's minds and think about how they would approach it. Now I do have some people say, well, what if I don't have a willing participant on the other end of this? You know, I have an ex-spouse that's not going to do that.

I said, well, you can only control what you can control, which is yourself. okay so how do you want to show up how do you want to react in those moments how do you want to be there for your children and show them that you're doing i always say i used to say to grace mom's doing the best she can in every aspect of life right and so i think that's what your kids want to know is that you are trying to do the best you can with the situation at hand and um you know with the intent of having a positive outcome. And, you know, society does still paint. And we talked about this earlier, society paints divorce as a bit of a skull that letter. Right. Right.

And there is this, you know, Oh, there, there's a little bit of a whisper. You know, and I mean, I, I do tell a funny story. I recently went to the dentist. I went to a new dentist and it asks you if you're single, married, divorced or other. And I'm thinking, why does that matter at the dentist?

I'm getting my teeth cleaned. Like, you need to know my, my, my social status. And so, but it's an, but it's an example where do you check that box? I'm like, you know, and then, and then the shame every time if you're, I mean, some people are already super confident about their divorce. They have no issues with it. They're like, Nope, this is what we're doing. And they're, they're feeling super confident about that. Many people are not. And I think you're right. It's because there's that stigma with it.

Now, I can imagine your parents married for 55 years, did you say? Catholic family. You were the girl that envisioned the same kind of thing for your future. So the shame and the guilt that could come along with that, even when you're confident that this is not working and you and your spouse should not be together, it's not good for either of you and or your child, doesn't mean that shame and the guilt just go out the window.

No, no, you have to work through that. You have to figure out how you come to terms with this change in your life you didn't plan for. The other thing I would add is the grief. A very, very big part of divorce is grief.

Yeah. You have to mourn the life that you no longer have. And you have to decide what life you're now going to build with your child or children in a way that is different than what was in, you know, I call it the new normal. You know, it's a new normal.

And it's, again, it isn't what you envisioned. I did not envision being a single working mom. That was not, that was not the goal. Right.

Right. Um, but it's interesting because now, and I'm like, gosh, I'm 14 years post-divorce. I've been in a long-term relationship for 12 years now, but it's, it's one of those things where I have people tell me that I make divorce look too good. Oh, well, of course you're always going to have people that, man, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Right. And I think, wow, I said, I'm just trying to live a happy life. Right. I'm just having, and I think if, if that's what it means that I'm making divorce look too good. Okay. But I want people to know that if you do go through divorce, that at the end of it, you can be happy. Your kids can be happy. Hopefully your spouse is happy with their new life.

And, you know, that's my goal with all of this. And, you know, there's, there's just a lot of motion, as you said, that you have to work through. And, but at the end of it, and if you can stay focused on what's best for your children, what's best for you too, there's a lot of self-healing. there's a lot of self-care that you have to do in this process but when you do it you can definitely end up in a better place I just love it all so much and again it's the book is called the mom's guide to a good divorce we can shift our mindset we can change the way that that we feel we can help our kids feel okay and empowered that mom and dad are going to be okay and they're going to be okay and again that's why I just love this is such a great fit with no problem parenting become the confident leader your kids crave you to be, divorced or not, you got this, mama.

So Sarah, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. I highly encourage everyone to head over to your website, momsguidedogooddivorce.com. And I look forward to speaking with you again.

So great to be with you. Thanks for a great discussion. And I hope everyone knows that striving for that good divorce is an attainable outcome. Great to be with you.

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