How to Be a Good Dad During Divorce: Where Your Attention Goes
How to be a good dad during divorce comes down to one resource nobody warns you is finite. It is not time and it is not money. It is your attention, and in the beginning I spent mine in the worst place I could.
I was not sad in the early part of the process. I was busy. There is a difference, and it took me longer than I want to admit to see it.
What I was busy with was the board. Who was ahead. What had just been said and what the response should be. Whether the last thing that happened counted for me or against me. I told myself this was diligence. It was not diligence. It was a full time job I had assigned myself, and I was working it around the clock without ever once asking what the wage was.
Then a moment came early on where the whole thing added a layer. The stakes felt like they jumped in a single afternoon, and I went through a short stretch of real panic. A few days, no more.
The panic was not the problem. What it did with my attention was the problem.
The scoreboard nobody is keeping but you
Here is what I finally noticed, and it is the thing I wish someone had put in front of me sooner.
My kids were in the house that whole stretch. Coming to me with the ordinary things kids come to you with. And I was there, physically, completely there, and also not there at all, because a part of me was still standing in front of a scoreboard running numbers that nobody else was even looking at.
That is the cost, and it does not get paid in some abstract future. It gets paid in the specific minute your kid walks up to you and gets a version of you that is already busy.
You cannot watch two boards at once. That is not a willpower problem, it is a capacity problem. Attention is finite. You get one allocation of it per day, and every unit that goes to the board where you are keeping score is a unit that did not go to the one thing you actually wanted, which was to be the steady point in the room while everything around your kids moved.
How to be a good dad during divorce when your attention is the thing at stake
I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying. This is not about competition, and I have written before about why you are not competing, you are building. I am not saying the process does not matter or that you should go passive inside it. I am saying the scoreboard is a story you tell yourself about the process, and the story is far more expensive than the process ever is.
Winning an exchange changes nothing your kids can feel. Being regulated in front of them changes everything they can feel. That is not a sentiment, it is a mechanism. Clinicians call it co regulation, and the finding underneath it is blunt. Your stress transmits to them, and so does your calm. Whichever one you are running, they are absorbing it. Nothing in that mechanism cares who was right.
What I did instead
The correction was not complicated and it was not a mindset. It was a redirect, and I had to run it over and over.
I stopped asking what the last move meant and started asking one question in its place. What does this kid need from his dad right now, in this moment, today. Not this week. Not in the outcome. Right now.
Some days the answer was a real conversation. Most days it was much smaller than that, and that is the part I did not expect. Most days the answer was that I needed to be findable and unhurried for ten minutes. That was the whole assignment, and it is most of what your kids actually need from you.
When I put my energy there, the board did not vanish. I just stopped checking it every hour, and the hours got quieter.
The line I hold now
I am the center of gravity in an unstable season. That is the job. Not the winner of it. The center of it.
Everything else I was carrying in those first months, I was carrying because I picked it up, not because it was mine. That is worth writing down somewhere you will read it again later, which is the whole reason I started keeping the record in the first place, and the same reason I wrote last week that you only ever see the progress looking backward.
Put down the board. Pick up the kid.
That is the standard.
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#IllCarryIt
