“I feel so guilty,” she told me with true anguish in her voice, “This is so hard.” My daughter was in conflict with her dad over her summer schedule after returning home from college. “I hate being in the middle.”

For 12 years I tried to heed the oft-stated warning for divorced parents to keep your children out of the middle. The middle being between me and their dad. On many occasions, I “sucked it up” and conceded on a co-parenting issue to shield my kids from knowing there was conflict between their parents.

When we divorced our daughters were 7 and 5. We were required by law to follow a Parenting Plan until our girls turned 19 (the age of majority in Nebraska). We were fortunate enough to design our Parenting Plan ourselves without court intervention. We would alternate Mondays/Tuesdays with one parent, Wednesdays/Thursdays with the other parent and rotate our weekends. This provided us the structure we needed. With an established plan we avoided conflict over who’s time was whose. We were fortunate to afford each other flexibility when needed but if ever a conflict arose, we were able to objectively follow our plan.

My daughter reached her milestone 19th birthday this spring and now that the parenting plan no longer applies to her, and she finds herself in the space that I tried to pretend didn’t exist for all these years. She can now decide her own schedule, her terms, and her own “dad days” and “mom days.”


You can find more of Angela's writing in her book Patched Up Parenting.