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    The Divorced Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy & Confident Children: A Journey Through the Places They Don't Talk About in Church
    The Divorced Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy & Confident Children: A Journey Through the Places They Don't Talk About in Church
    The Divorced Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy & Confident Children: A Journey Through the Places They Don't Talk About in Church
    Ebook125 pages2 hours

    The Divorced Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy & Confident Children: A Journey Through the Places They Don't Talk About in Church

    By Tony Pucket

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    About this ebook

    The Divorced Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy and Confident Children, is an opportunity for single parents and blended families to learn effective parenting strategies. The Divorced Parent's Guide is a holistic approach to parenting that looks at the health of the whole family as being the key to raising kids that are healthy, happy and confident. The journey begins with being single and takes you through several scenarios that include dating again, possible remarriage, and preparing your child to live independently after high school. This is not just a self-help book for parents, as it offers the perspective of someone who has not only counseled others on divorced parenting, but of someone who has also traveled the journey of being a single parent, dating again after divorce, remarriage and being a step parent in a blended family. The path of the journey is both a spiritual and practical one; as it coniders the emotional, spiritual and mental health of the parent as at least as important, if not more so, then the advice given on parenting.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 5, 2019
    ISBN9781950034086
    The Divorced Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy & Confident Children: A Journey Through the Places They Don't Talk About in Church

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      Book preview

      The Divorced Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy & Confident Children - Tony Pucket

      them.

      Chapter I

      So Here I am Single Again

      Iwoke up one fall morning in 1998, pulled myself up off the couch, went and looked in the bathroom mirror. I had come home the night before from a party with my wife and she had informed me that she was going to be taking my son in the morning to go live with a friend for a little while. She told me she needed to think about whether she wanted to continue our marriage. When I looked in the mirror that morning, there was no one around but me. Honestly, I can’t remember whether I said the words aloud or whether I was just thinking them in my head. The thoughts were something like this, I don’t like what I see anymore and no matter if my marriage continues or not, I am going to make some changes. I realized at that moment that I had not been living the values that I believed deep in my heart for many years. I needed to be true to myself and start living from my core beliefs or it was just not going to work anymore. My hope in this moment was that my wife would want to follow me on this journey and we would continue to be parents to our son as a married couple. From that day on changes would start happening that would transform my life, as well as our son’s. Before the biggest of those changes would occur, I had to process my loss. Those were the loss of the marriage dream, the loss of not being able to wake up in the same house every morning with my son and the reality that comes with those changes. Over the next several months I transitioned back and forth through the stages of grief and loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

      Everyone has their own divorce story and I always respect that when I meet people whose story is much different than mine. Some of us were the ones presented with the news that our partner wanted out, others told their partner the news, and a few of us even met at some kind of mutual understanding around the same time. There are people like me who grew up around a strong belief about the sanctity of marriage and others who came from a broken home growing up and might of went in wondering if it would last. I would venture to guess that regardless of the background and preconceived notion, most all of us went in hoping that the one we pledged our love to would be there for better or worse. At some point when reality of the loss of the intimacy the two of you once shared started to become apparent, it hurt. Maybe you stayed together a few more years and by the time it was over it felt like a relief, or maybe it hit you like a bomb and left you in shock. The latter was true for me, which in looking back, was surprising considering our loss of intimacy came very early in our relationship. When I speak of intimacy, I am not speaking merely of a physical relationship between two people. My Grad school professor explained it best when he broke the word down like this: into me see. Unfortunately, some relationships never experience true intimacy because there has never been the safety and security in them to peel back the layers of our innermost being. In those cases, marriage can be a like a slow death, as you began to hide your true nature from your partner in order to avoid their ridicule, cold indifference, or worse, that seemed to happen every time you allowed yourself to be a little vulnerable with them. Whatever your story is as to why things didn’t work out, you’re not alone.

      According to an online article from 2018 at focusonthefamily.com, that cited a recent report from, The Fifth Annual Index of Family Belonging and Rejection, among older teens, age 15-17, only 46% of those children will have grown up with both of their biological parents always married. That number is astounding and not surprising all at the same time. On the surface, it seems like a surprise, until I start to think back on all the couples I knew when I was in my twenties and how many of them are no longer together. As you realize that there is this large segment of the population out there that has experienced the same breakup of their children’s parents, it offers some options to begin the healing process. After all, not all of society understands what you’re going through and those who know your pain can help you heal in order to become stronger individuals and offer hope to those with a fresh wound. It is a cycle that offers healing not found in trying to do it on your own. I would equate it to having a severe break in a bone. It might heal without professional help, but to grow back the way it was before the break— someone who knows how to help you heal from experience would give you the best possible chance to heal properly. This step may be one that you want to visit if it has been a while and you never properly grieved the loss of your former relationship. I have met people who stay stuck in a cycle of bitterness and what if ’s years later because they did not seek or were unaware that there was help for their broken heart out there. This step has great benefits to your parenting, as the healthy parent who has been able to remove much of their pain and move on, is a more effective parent. Look for a church organization in your area that provides divorce care; if you’re being honest with yourself and still dealing with strong emotions from the dissolution of your marriage. This will also prepare you to begin the next step in your personal journey.

      Often times when we get married, we find out what our true differences are over time. When we go through the dating and the courtship phase, we tend to focus a lot on all of the things that makes our partner compatible to us and many times ignore or are ignorant to those things that might be troubling to us. One of the things that happened to me was the inability to define what my foundational beliefs were and make sure I found a partner who had a compatible belief system. We were both young and enjoyed time with our friends attending parties, going to sporting events and doing other recreational activities. When we got married, we discovered over time that our upbringings had established certain core beliefs about what married life should look like. I grew up in a family where drinking was not a part of my parent’s marriage and my wife grew up in one where weekends were spent with the whole family socializing and drinking. The first three to four years of our marriage, as I was still maturing and growing into my new role as a family man, I readily accepted this. Over the last half of our marriage I started questioning this lifestyle and believed it was something we should move on from and outgrow. My foundational belief system wanted to return to some of the ways of the household I grew up in. I ran into a brick wall when trying to talk to my wife about these sorts of things and in spite of my troubled feelings around this subject, I would resign myself to just continue on the same path. When everything came crashing down at the end, I knew I had to start defining what my foundational beliefs were and start to live them out.

      If you’re like me and your foundation is grounded in your faith, that is a great place to start building your life. The silver lining to starting over is the ability to define for yourself the things that are important to you. For me I had decided that I was going to live my life exactly as Jesus had asked me to do and that included staying sexually pure until I was married again. Some of you probably just read that and thought I am through with this book! I went all in on my faith after my divorce because I had felt as though I had made marriage a false idol in my life. I had foregone becoming stronger in my faith in order to try to keep my marriage alive. I had fallen away from the church in my teens and now I wanted to establish this relationship with God that was stronger than my desires. I spent time reading His word and getting to know what it meant to be a Jesus follower. It took me on a journey that would prepare me for some lonely times ahead. Because of my beliefs to establish my foundation firmly on the commands of God and His son Jesus Christ, I moved on from several short relationships with women who were not wanting to follow His word quite so closely. It helped to define over the years the future mate I was looking for. Often times it felt lonely as I wondered if meeting another mate was in the cards for me. The longer I stayed devoted to my foundational beliefs and turned away relationships that did not fit it, the stronger I became. I had this inner confidence that God was narrowing the field to one day find that person who would share my same foundational belief system. This is where people go wrong so many times, they can’t stand the loneliness and instead of leaning into God and drawing closer, they settle for someone who does not have their same core beliefs and it is doomed from the start. You might be asking, How do I establish and remain true to my own foundation?

      I believe establishing a foundation and remaining true to it is almost impossible to do on your own. If you want to start a team in order to win the softball league title you will need to find others who like to play softball with you. One of the key steps in finding a foundational faith system is locating a body of believers who worship in a way that fits your spirit. If you’re very charismatic and like outward displays of worship, like raising

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