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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can you speak more to those adult level complexities? What might help if partners were amicable?[/quote]

It does help if they are amicable, but you can't amicable your way out of the logistics. It's a fantasy of divorced people that "amicable" makes it all okay. Things like:

I can't spend a lot of time with both my parents simultaneously, because they don't live near each other. So in order to get a decent amount of time with them, it takes me twice as much of my annual leave plus a travel day to get from one to the other. But I don't get extra annual leave just because my parents are divorced. I can't tell my boss "Oh, but they're so amicable" and get extra days off. So my parents each get less grandchild time. My mom didn't think about this when divorcing but she's unhappy about it now.

There's not enough room at my mom's house for us to visit and her partner's kids to visit at the same time. Not enough beds and also very crowded in the daytime now that there are grandkids. So we have to coordinate schedules. We also have to coordinate our schedule with my dad and his new wife. And her partner's kids have their mom too. So any sort of decision about who's visiting at what time, or when the grandparents travel to see anyone, has to go through multiple households for approval. This isn't the end of the world, but it's a level of hassle I wish I didn't have to go through. I wish things were simple.

At one point my dad's wife's son was doing a failure to launch thing, living with them and secretly drinking. My dad was super unhappy about it, he and his wife and her son had all these yelling fights, he fought with his wife and blamed her parenting, etc. etc. You couldn't be in that house at all without this tension hanging over everything and the kid moping around hung over. It went on for about two years. It was very hard for me to see my dad so unhappy. No amount of "amicable" from my mom would have changed anything. Yes, intact families can have this kind of problem too, but blending families adds more people and gives them more stress to cope with, so it increases the chance of problems. More people, more problems. If it were a bio brother, I would probably have had a more loving relationship and been more patient with it, but since we didn't grow up together at all, he felt like an interloper and a burden and I just wished the whole thing wasn't happening.

Eventually I'll need to find two assisted livings instead of one, and it'll be harder because all of that will have to be coordinated with my sibling and stepsiblings if both are alive and we're trying to keep them together. I'll need to sell two homes instead of just one, again coordinating with sibling and stepsiblings. It's very difficult to make these big decisions with a big group of people who have different cultures and financial circumstances. No matter how amicable my mom is to my dad and vice versa, that doesn't change the complexity here. There's no Amicable Divorce Retirement Home where they hand you two units for the price of one because they're just oh so very amicable.

The worst part is that my mom's partner hasn't made good choices (nor have his adult children) so he can't retire, not ever. So my mom subsidizes him and will have to pick up the tab entirely whenever he becomes unable to work. Leaving me wondering if my mom will run out of money for herself and how that will impact myself and my sibling. This is not at all an inheritance battle-- there isn't going to be an inheritance. It's just me not wanting to have to effectively subsidize my mom's partner and his lifetime of dumb decisions. My mom refuses to discuss this with me and my sibling at all. They have remained unmarried so that he can qualify for Medicaid and food stamps etc. I don't want my mom to be single but I wish she had chosen someone who doesn't bring these problems with him. No matter how "amicable" my dad is, my mom's partner is still a broke, mooching loser. See what I mean? Amicable doesn't fix it.

These examples will no doubt cause people to tell me I need therapy. Because people don't want to face up to what divorce can mean in the long term. I think it's very, very important to be financially and mentally prepared for the difficulties to come. Divorce and "blending" can be very hard in the last years of a person's life.

[/quote]

I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Parts made me laugh, but it's easy to hear the pain there too and I'm sorry for that. All I can say in many of these situations, there's no perfect solve.

I wonder if it's amicable + resources for all parties that makes it more manageable, but logistics are logistics.  [/quote]

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