The holiday season is hard enough on grown ups without the added stresses of dealing with divorce. You want to make sure your kids have a great holiday, but you have your own feelings to consider as well. Finding ways to help you, and your family, heal and thrive during the post-divorce holiday seasons is a real challenge.
The holiday’s are all about ritual, which is part of what makes it so hard to be alone, and away from your children, during the season. It’s important to establish new rituals that work with the new dimensions of your family, rather than fighting them. Make sure your children get to celebrate with both of their parents, whether it’s on the actual day of the holiday, or another day designated for your own personal festivities.
“One of the suggestions I make to parents who now live apart is to make New Year’s the second Christmas,” Robin Siebold, a psychology told ParentDish.”In other words, just because the calendar says December 25 is the actual day, the next week is a whole other set of holidays, with an Eve to go with it.”
When you’re establishing new rituals for your kids, don’t leave yourself out. Being alone on a holiday is difficult, even worse if you know the rest of what used to be your family is out there, together. Hook up with other friends and neighbors and make your holiday something special and grown up, rather than lonely and sad. Or, enjoy the day off. As a single parent, alone time is almost impossible to find. Make yourself a list of things you never get to do with the children in the house and do them.
