Our family friend dragged herself up my porch steps as the sun was going down last night. She slumped into a patio chair. “I feel like this Halloween weekend will never end!” she sighed. It was Monday evening.
Maybe you felt the same.
For the Rice household, the Halloween party started on Friday afternoon, and ended around 10:30 on Monday night. First, a school carnival, then a block party, then Sunday Night Football, and finally, the grand finale, going bonkers with fifteen tweens running and screaming wild through the streets of Hermosa Beach… dragging 10 pound bags of sugar behind them.
And what is ten pounds of candy? 200,000 grams of sugar? 2 million maybe?
Absolute chaos. But I loved every moment.
Think of me as a matchmaker, and I just found your next great love affair: your divorce. Or, rather, I should say the divorce process itself.
For too many, the divorce process itself makes life worse. That’s not going to be you, however. You’re going to love your divorce by shifting your mindset.
You’re going to fall in love with the divorce process itself and, if we do this properly, you’re going to emerge stronger, healthier, and ideally the adult you hope your kids will be someday.
For example, one of the first, most painful things you have to do in the process of getting divorced in California is to exchange financial information through the Preliminary Declarations of Disclosure (“PDDs”). You have to disclose your income, work history, and a list of all your assets and debts (called the Schedule of Assets and Debts, or “SAD”), all signed under penalty of perjury. You have sixty days to give them to your ex.
Sounds simple enough, but let’s think about the PDDs in context. Here you are, you’ve taken months or years to muster up the courage to file for divorce (or you’ve dreaded it, if you’re the respondent), and the first thing you get from your lawyer is a formal order to fill out a bunch of financial forms.
The judge doesn’t send you a note saying, “I see you bestie.” No sympathy, empathy, or anything from the judge acknowledging all the years of emotional struggle or even just a hat tip for the courage it took to file. (In fact, the judge doesn’t even see your case at all unless you do something like filing a motion.)
Instead, your lawyer instructs you to do something that looks and feels a lot like doing your income taxes. Talking about money is not what you want to do after such a big, life altering moment as filing for divorce. It’s like filing out insurance forms while you’re waiting in the emergency room.
So your first instinct might be to resist the PDDs, to mentally fight filling them out, to experience the process as painful. But a mindset shift will completely alter your experience.
Instead of resisting the process, you can see this step in the divorce process as an invitation to start to embrace your future. Look at the PDDs as an opportunity, a requirement even, to step out of the emotional swirl, and get real about what your new financial life will be like. To start making it real. You might not like it, but you’re going to be strong and see reality for what it is.
The money is a really important part of what you need to start your new life, so don’t look at it as a painful part of the divorce process; instead, see it for what it is: an integral part of helping you start your new life!