Naming Who This Is For

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Hi. Welcome back. Today Sunday, the eighth of March, is International Women's Day. And this episode is for you. The woman who is still in a relationship that has slowly, quietly taken more from her than she ever agreed to give. To the woman who has just separated and is standing in the wreckage of everything that she thought her life would look like trying to figure out what comes next. To the woman who is deep in family law proceedings, fighting for her children against a former partner who has decided that 50-50 is his right, regardless of what the children actually need or what the history of care actually was. To the woman who's done the hard things, who's survived and is still every day, every week, managing chaos, managing attempts to control, managing the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being the person who still has to keep everything together while the system calls it an outcome. And to the women who don't fit neatly into the gendered narrative, those of you who have exited or in the process of exiting same-sex relationships where the invisible labour is just as real, just as unrecognized, and where the legal and social systems can be even more opaque about who has been carrying what. This episode is for all of you. I want to name what you're carrying. I want to name what the world consistently refuses to see, and I want to talk about why. In a culture that congratulates itself on being progressive, on valuing equality, on recognizing the contributions of women, the reality for primary caregivers after separation is still so far from what it should be. Welcome to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host for today's episode, Danielle Black. I want to start by naming something that most people in a household take for granted until it's gone. There's a kind of work involved in raising children that never makes it onto a CV, never appears on a team, and almost never gets acknowledged fully in family law proceedings. In this episode I'll be referring to it as the invisible architecture of childhood. It's the thing that primary caregivers, the person who is the most present, most attuned, most responsible for the daily life of a child it's the thing that that person is doing constantly, relentlessly, often without even being fully conscious of it themselves. It's in the knowing the knowing which child is anxious on Sunday nights before the school week starts. It's knowing which teacher makes your child feel seen and which one makes them feel small. It's knowing that your child needs ten minutes of quiet when they get home before they're ready to talk about their day. It's knowing the names of all of their friends who they've fallen out with socially and why. What they're quietly worried about, what they're hoping for. It's in the anticipating, organizing the new school shoes, booking the dentist appointments, noticing the reading comprehension issue before the school does, remembering that the costume in bookwake needs to be organized for Thursday, and that your child desperately wants to go as a character from a book that nobody else will have heard of, which means you might be up late with a glue gun. It's in the holding holding the emotional register of the household, knowing when everyone's okay and when someone isn't. It's being the person that your children come to when they're frightened or confused or overwhelmed. It's being the safe base, the lighthouse that they return to. It's also in the managing, managing the communication with the school, managing the medical appointments, managing the extracurricular schedule, managing the relationships with the school, the GP, the speech pathologist, the psychologist. Managing the birthday party logistics, the conflict between siblings, the relationship between the children and the other parent. Often in ways that the other parent never sees, never thanks you for, never will. And this is not an exhaustive list, it's just the beginning. But this is what I want you to really hear. This work has almost no visibility. It's so embedded in the daily fabric of family life that the people who aren't doing it often genuinely don't know it exists. Not because they're stupid, not even necessarily because they're careless, but because the architecture is invisible precisely because it works. When someone is holding everything together, the held together state can sometimes look effortless. It looks like default. It looks like nothing. Until the person doing all of that, holding all of that stops. And then someone starts to suddenly notice that the dentist appointments haven't been made. The current school uniform doesn't fit. No one knows what the homework policy is. That the child who's been quietly struggling has actually been struggling for three months and nobody realized because nobody was watching in the way that the primary caregiver was watching. This is what you do, this is what you've been doing. An International Women's Day feels like exactly the right moment to say I see it I see you even when your former partner doesn't even when the law doesn't, even when the court doesn't I see it. I also want to talk about something that I find both fascinating and infuriating in equal measure. I call it the proximity illusion. The way that it works is when a non-primary caregiver spends time with their children, they often appear really competent, engaged and capable. They might know how to get the kids into bed. They may be able to manage the school drop-off. The kids are fed, the activities happen, homework might be getting done, and from the outside this looks like evidence that this person is equally capable of being a significant carer. What the outside doesn't see is that every single one of those things is running on infrastructure that the primary caregiver has built and is still maintaining. The bedtime routine that works? The primary caregiver designed it and maintained it consistently for years prior to separation. The school drop-off that goes smoothly? The primary caregiver is organizing the uniforms, signing the permission slips, or doing whatever needs doing to approve something on whatever app is used by a particular school. They're the ones making sure the library books are organised. The homework that gets done, the primary caregiver knows where the child is at in the curriculum and has already spoken to the teacher about the areas where they're struggling. Now this doesn't mean that the non-primary caregiver is incompetent, but what they are is a beneficiary of a system that they didn't build and are often not even aware of. They're working within a framework that someone else created and they look good doing it precisely because that framework is so solid. And this is where it becomes particularly relevant in the separation context. When a non-primary caregiver says to a family report writer, in mediation, to mutual friends, I'm perfectly capable of caring for these children equally. They're often telling the truth as they understand it. They have actually experienced themselves as highly capable. They've done bedtime and school drop-offs and weekend activities. They have quote evidence. But what they're not accounting for is that their evidence was gathered while the invisible architecture was still standing, while the primary caregiver was still the one holding the thread that connected all the pieces. The test of genuine primary care capacity is not whether you can execute within a functioning system, it's whether you can build and maintain that system yourself, whether you know the children well enough, are attuned enough, are present enough to notice what's needed before it actually becomes urgent. When you can hold the emotions of a child's life over time, not just manage the obvious logistics in the moment. The family law system as it currently operates is not at all well designed to assess this distinction. It tends to assess parenting capacity through interviews and observations conducted over a very limited period of time, moments in time rather than patterns over years. And in those moments, someone who is engaged and cooperative in talking warmly about their children can present extremely well, regardless of what the history of actual care looks like. This is not a reason to despair, but it is a reason to document and to be specific. It's a reason to be able to articulate clearly and factually what you've done and what you know about your children that the other parent probably doesn't. Now I'd like to spend a moment here on the research because I think it is important to ground this conversation in evidence, not just experience. And because when you're sitting in a mediation or in a courtroom and someone implies that the idea of unequal division of care is something that you've invented to protect your own interests, it can help to know that the data is firmly on your side. The research on domestic labour and caregiving is remarkably consistent across decades and across numerous countries. Women, on average in heterosexual partnerships, perform significantly more unpaid work than their male partners. This includes childcare, household management, emotional labour, and the kind of invisible cognitive work I described in the last section, the planning, the anticipating, the remembering, the managing. In Australia specifically, the Australian Bureau of Statistics consistently finds that women perform around twice the unpaid childcare of men, even when both parents are working full-time. The gap is larger for younger children and it narrows somewhat as children age. But that gap doesn't close. And here is the finding that I think is most relevant to this conversation. The inequality does not disappear after separation. It changes shape, but it persists. Research on post-separation parenting consistently finds that primary caregivers, who are primarily women, continue to perform the majority of the invisible labour of childhood even in shared care arrangements. They manage the medical appointments, they maintain the school relationships, they hold the emotional needs of their children. They're the ones children call when they're upset, regardless of which parent they're physically with. Incidentally, they're also often the ones that the school staff call for all the things, regardless of which parent the child is physically with in that point in time. And the financial reality is stark. Post-separation, women's economic circumstances decline significantly more than men's. The costs of primary caregiving, reduced work hours, career interruptions, proximity to schools, the bearing of the majority of the child-related expenses continue to fall disproportionately on the parent who is doing the majority of the invisible work. And this is not a complaint about individual men. This is a systemic pattern documented across decades of research, and it's the water that women who are navigating post-separation parenting are swimming in, whether they like it or not. It's important to be explicit that these dynamics are not exclusive to heterosexual relationships. In same-sex partnerships, research consistently finds that the partner who took on the primary caregiving role, often the one who carried the pregnancy, faces the same pattern of invisible labour and the same tendency for that labour to be undervalued or invisible in legal proceedings. The gender dynamic shifts, but the primary care dynamic does not. Now I want to talk about something that sits right at the intersection of all of this, which I think is one of the most misunderstood conversations happening in the post-separation space. The 50-50 parenting time arrangement has been positioned in public discourse and in many legal contexts as a progressive modern equal outcome, as being fair. The idea being that if both parents share care equally, that we have somehow achieved something fair and balanced, something that reflects contemporary values about gender equality. Now, there are some situations where equal shared care can be the right outcome for kids involved, albeit this is actually not most families. However, there are genuinely some families where both parents were equally embedded in the children's lives, where both have genuine capacity, where there is sufficient communication and goodwill to make it work, where there is no family violence and never has been, and where the children are truly thriving spending significant time with both parents. That does exist, and it's important not to dismiss it, but again, it is not the majority of families. What I'm questioning here is the idea that 50-50 is inherently progressive, inherently equal, or inherently in children's best interests, regardless of the specific history and circumstances of a family. Because here's what the research and lived experience of the families that I work with actually shows. And that is that quote, equal parenting time is not the same as equal parenting. You can have the children for half of every fortnight and perform almost none of the invisible work of caring for them. You can be present without being attuned. You can have physical care or custody without having emotional availability, educational involvement, medical knowledge, or genuine understanding of your child's developmental needs. And when a parent who has not been the primary caregiver pursues 50-50 equal care arrangements through a court system, not because it's what the children really need or want, not because there is a genuine established care pattern to protect, but because of a belief in their right to equal time, or because equal time means reduced or eliminated child support, or because equal time is a way of maintaining access, influence, and control over a former partner, then 50-50 is not progressive. It's a mechanism. And this won't surprise you for anyone who has listened to episodes of this podcast, and particularly for those of you who work with me one-on-one. I'm not going to soften my views on this topic. I've watched too many families go through too much damage for me to frame this more gently. The Australian family law system has moved in recent years towards a much stronger presumption in favour of the children's best interests as the paramount consideration, rather than a presumption of equal decision making or equal time. And this is the right direction to be moving in. But the presumption of equal, whether we're talking decision making or care arrangements, the cultural presumption that equal time is what quote fairness looks like is taking a really fucking long time to die. Primary caregivers are still fighting against it in mediations, in meetings with family report writers, in family court and in the court of public opinion every day. What children need is not an equal division of their time. What children need is stability, safety, attunement and continuity of care. Rarely does equal time deliver that. Most often it doesn't. There is no gold standard research suggesting that equal parenting time is beneficial to children. The starting point for any conversation about parenting arrangements should be what has the actual history of care looked like and what do these specific children at these specific ages and developmental stages genuinely need? This is what's covered extensively in the post-separation parenting blueprint. I want to spend some time now on something that doesn't get named clearly enough or often enough, and that's the pattern that my team and I see repeatedly in the families that we work with. That is, the non-primary caregiver pursuing significant parenting time, sometimes equal time, or something close to it. The arrangement is formalized either through agreement or through court orders, and then in the time that the non-primary caregiver has the children, they refuse to contribute to the cost of things, even the things that fall during their parenting time. School fees, school uniforms, excursions, extracurricular activities, speech pathology, psychology, orthodontic treatment, glasses, things that are not optional, things that are part of the ordinary everyday infrastructure of a child's life. The framing that they may use is well, you know, that's in your parenting time, you can pay for it. Or and this is a common one, I'm not paying for something that I don't agree with. Or if you want them to have that, you can pay for it. Sometimes they go further. They don't just refuse to pay, they also refuse to facilitate. They don't take the child to any allied health appointment scheduled during their week. They don't buy the school shoes when they're worn through. They tell the child that the extracurricular activity is a quote, mum thing, and won't support it during their parenting time. And it's important that we name this for what it is. It's post-separation abuse. It's financial abuse. It's a continuation of coercive control through a different mechanism. The relationship may have ended, but the pattern of using financial power or the withholding of financial contribution to control to undermine and to maintain dominance, that has not ended with the relationship. It's just found a new channel, and that channel runs directly via the children. Make no mistake, when a parent refuses to pay for school shoes, or refuses to take a child to a therapy appointment because they don't believe in it, or uses child support as a lever to extract cooperation on other matters, the person who pays the price is the child. The child who misses an activity because it's not supported in both homes. The child who learns very early that they are a site of adult conflict rather than someone who is jointly cared for. And for the primary caregiver on the other end of it, the one absorbing the costs, who's navigating the child's distress, who's trying to explain to a seven-year-old why they might not be able to do swimming lessons this term. That weight is real and really exhausting. And it's compounded by the fact that the legal mechanisms for addressing it are slow, expensive, emotionally draining, and often pretty fucking useless. If this is your situation, please document it specifically, factually with dates and examples. Not because the documentation in and of itself is going to fix anything, but because documentation is evidence and evidence matters. And because you deserve to have a record that reflects the reality of what you're carrying. Next I want to mention something that comes up again and again in my work with primary caregivers and particularly with mothers. And it's something that I think causes a quiet, persistent kind of pain that doesn't always get named. It's the Disneyland comparison. You know the one. The other parent cares for the children, and it's trips and treats and staying up late and lots of screen time and special occasions and a mountain of chicken nuggets. And every visit is an event. Every pickup is greeted with excitement and and you're at home managing negotiations around eating vegetables and managing meltdowns. You're the parent who says no. You're the parent who holds the steady routine. You're the parent who is there for the ordinary Tuesday, not just the highlight reel. And children Particularly younger children, they don't have the developmental capacity to understand the difference between what feels good in the moment and what's truly building them from the inside out. So sometimes what you see, especially in the early years after separation, is children who are excited to go and subdued when they return. Children who tell you about all the fun that they had, and children who, when asked, will say that the other parent's house is more fun. And I know how much they can hurt. I know how easy it is to look at that and feel like you're losing some kind of invisible competition. Like you're the one doing everything right and getting none of the credit. Like the parent who shows up for the school concert and the dentist and the 2 a.m. nightmare and the fallout with the friendship. The parent who's just always there. Yeah, you can be feeling less visible, less exciting. You can sometimes even feel less loved. And this is where I want to offer a reframe on that thinking, not as a consolation and not as a but you're important too, but as a genuine evidence-based, developmentally grounded reframe of what's actually happening. Children do need different things from different relationships, and different moments call for different kinds of parenting. There's a parent for the rough and tumble, for the physical play, the wrestling, the adventure. There's a parent for silliness and games and staying up past bedtimes. There's a parent for excitement and novelty and the sense that life is full of possibility. And there's a parent for the big feelings. The parent who can hold a child's rage or grief or fear without flinching, without shaming, without needing the child to push down their emotions to protect the parent's comfort. There's a parent for I just want to be on the couch for quiet companionship, for the physical presence and co-regulation that doesn't require anything. There's a parent for the 2 a.m. nightmare and the school anxiety and the friendship heartbreak and the question that comes out of nowhere at dinner that turns out to be one of the most important questions that that child has ever asked. None of these is more important than the other. We don't want to get into some kind of comparison game here. We don't need to be holding any of these up as more important than the others in isolation. Children do need fun, children do need adventure. Children do need to feel that their parent delights in them and wants to give them good experiences. But there's a particular kind of parenting that's foundational in a way that the fun and the adventure are not. And that's the parenting that teaches a child that their emotions are survivable, that even the big feelings, the ones that just simply feel too large, too overwhelming, too frightening, that even those emotions can be felt and held and moved through without destroying them or anyone around them. That there is a person in the world who won't leave, who will not be overwhelmed, who will not need them to be different or smaller than they are in order to be loved. And this is what attachment researchers call the secure base. And it's not built through highlight reels, it's not built through treats and Disneyland moments. It's built through the ten thousand ordinary moments of everyday life in which the child brings their emotional reality and vulnerability to a parent, and the parent receives it calmly, consistently, and without judgment. It's built in the moments that no one's taking photographs of. The morning when you sat on the edge of their bed and listened to them work through why they were scared about going to school. The afternoon where they were furious at you and you stayed regulated and present until the storm passed. The night when they couldn't sleep and you didn't make them feel like a problem, you just stayed. Honestly, in our household that has sometimes looked like one or more of my kids wanting to have a really big, deep and meaningful conversation with me at nine o'clock at night or later, and I'm tired and I'm ready for bed. But you know what? I'm there for that conversation. Those are the moments that matter. The research on attachment and development is unambiguous about this. The quality of those early attachment relationships, specifically our children's experience of having a safe, attuned, reliably present caregiver, that shapes the architecture of our children's developing brains. It shapes our children's capacity to regulate their emotions, their capacity to trust, their capacity to be in relationships, intimate relationships, friendships, professional relationships, without being destroyed by conflict or abandonment or difficulties. In other words, what you're doing right now in the ordinary invisible daily work of being present and attuned and emotionally safe for your kids is literally building the neural pathways that will determine how they experience relationships for the rest of their lives. The Disneyland experiences will be happy memories. And what you're building is a felt sense of safety that lives in their nervous system, that travels with them into every relationship that they will ever have. It's the voice in their head or the felt sense in their body that says, I am worthy of love. I am safe. I can survive hard things. You aren't the consolation prize. You are the foundation. This is not an argument against the other parent or for the idea that excitement and joy and adventure don't matter. They do. Children who have both a secure base and a parent who brings delight and novelty in play are truly lucky. When both parents are genuinely present and genuinely capable, the child benefits from all of it. But if you're a primary caregiver who has looked at the excitement that your children show about Disneyland time and you feel diminished by it, your children will grow up, and when they do they will know in their bones, in the way they navigate the world, in the relationships that they choose and maintain, who their safe person was. Who was there for the ordinary Tuesdays? Who held them through the hard parts? Who built the home that they carry inside them? That will be you, because it already is. I want to speak now to each of the women that I named at the beginning of this episode, because your experiences are connected, but they're also distinct. And I don't want anyone to feel like I've described the landscape without speaking directly into your particular part of it. If you're still in a relationship that is taking more from you than it gives, still doing the invisible work alone, still managing the emotional lives of your children, without a genuine partner in it, still feeling the weight of a household that runs on your labour while that labour goes unseen, I want you to know that what you're experiencing is real. The exhaustion you feel is not weakness. It's the rational response to an unsustainable load. The loneliness that you feel is not ingratitude. It's the experience of being present in a partnership where the partnership is actually not really present. And if the relationship has moved beyond just simply being unequal into something that's harmful, if there's control, if there's fear, if there are patterns that your body recognizes even when your mind is still explaining them away, please know that support exists. That leaving when the time is right and when it's safe is possible, and that the invisible architecture that you've built for your children does not disappear when you walk out the door. You can take it with you. My team and I are here if you need someone to help you plan your exit. The first weeks and months of separation can feel like standing in the middle of a building that has just come down around you. It can feel like everything's rubble. The shape of your life has changed overnight, and in the middle of managing your own grief and shock and fear, you're still needing to get up every morning and make the lunches and do the school run and hold it together for the kids. That's extraordinary, even when it doesn't feel that way. Even when it feels like barely functioning. And this is where I want to say two specific things to you. First, the chaos that you feel right now is not permanent. The ground will stabilize. Not immediately, no, but it will eventually. Second, the decisions that you make in these early months, what you agree to, what you document, what you establish as the pattern of care, are really going to matter later. So please get informed support, not just legal advice, but coaching support that can help you understand what you're truly navigating and what you're actually able to ask for. To the women who are in court proceedings, you are right in the thick of what is one of the hardest experiences. You're fighting for your children in a system that is slow, expensive, adversarial, and really not designed with your specific circumstances in mind. You're being asked to perform reasonableness while someone else is using the system as a weapon. You're perhaps being told to be realistic about a family report or a recommendation that doesn't reflect what you know to be true. You're not imagining any of those things. The system really does have blind spots. But please hold on. Gather your evidence, stay child focused, regulate your nervous system, grow your capacity. Grow your capacity so that your capacity to advocate doesn't get hijacked by the very real and legitimate fear that is present in all of this. And please know that the family report is not the last word. I have another episode coming up about family reports. You might want to tune in for that one. I also want to speak to the women whose children have been turned against them. I want to speak carefully and gently to you because what you're carrying is unlike almost anything else I can think of in the human experience. You love your child completely, and the relationship between you has been harmed, sometimes profoundly, and oftentimes not by anything significant that you did, but rather by the deliberate sustained effort of another person to make your child see you as the enemy. The grief of this is not something that most people around you will fully understand. It doesn't look like the grief of loss from the outside. Your child's still there. They're still reachable in theory. And yet the person who looks back at you might seem like a stranger. May say things that sound nothing like the child that you know. May reject your calls, your messages, your presence in a way that cuts right through to the centre of you. I want to say something about the invisible architecture here because I think it's directly relevant. That every moment of attunement every held feeling every safe ordinary Tuesday that you gave your child before this began, none of that's gone. It's not erased by the influencing, however sustained that might be. It's still within them. It's still in their neural pathways that were built during the years when you were their safe base. It's still in their nervous system's understanding of what safety feels like, even if they cannot access that understanding right now. Children who have been deliberately turned against a parent are, in many cases, children in a loyalty bind so profound that their psychological survival depends on maintaining the position that they've been pressured into. That is not rejection. That's a child doing what they have learned they must do to stay safe in the other household. And it's important to hold that distinction, not because it makes it hurt any less, but because it means that the child that you knew is still in there. The research on this actually, in many cases, is a story of eventual return, of children who reach adulthood and autonomy and begin quietly and sometimes less quietly to piece together what actually happened. To reconcile the parent that they rejected with the parent that they actually remember, to grieve what was taken from them and from you by someone else's need to control and to win. That reckoning is of course not guaranteed. I won't tell you that it always comes. But it comes far more often than the people who are stuck in the middle of this believe that it will. And what those children return to, what they're looking for when they reach back, is a parent who stayed, who stayed strong, who kept the door open, who's still the lighthouse. The parent who didn't retaliate, the parent who remained as much as any human being could, the person that they remembered. Do what you can to keep being that person. Not because it will definitely fix it, but because it's who you are. And because your child, whatever they're able to show you right now, on some level they know it. To the women with final orders who are still managing all the things in the chaos, you might actually be the most invisible of all the women that I'm speaking to today, because from the outside, your case is closed. You've got orders, it's settled, it's done. People expect you to simply be okay now. But you know that final orders are not the same as genuine peace. That a person who is determined to maintain control will find any fucking mechanism in order to do it. That parallel parenting, which is the approach most recommended when cooperation's not possible, requires a level of sustained fortitude that is rarely fully appreciated by someone who has not had to do it week after week for years. You're still doing it, you're still showing up, still absorbing, still doing what you can to be the regulated, stable, present parent that your children need, while managing the ongoing effects of a relationship that was never safe or that left scars that take years to heal. I see it, I see you. What you're doing counts. And if the orders are not working, if there are genuine, persistent breaches that are affecting your kids, please know that final orders are not immovable. Circumstances change, children's needs change, there can be pathways to change things when they're truly needed. I'll wrap up this episode with something that I genuinely believe, and that is that the invisible architecture of childhood is not truly invisible to the children that are living inside it. Children on some level know who's holding all the threads. They know which parent knows them, really knows them, and which parent is still learning who they are. They know where it's safe to fall apart, they know who'll be there when the school calls, they know even before they have the language for it, who's truly carrying the weight. On some level, I truly believe that they know this, and that they'll know it for the rest of their lives. Again, on some level, whether conscious or not. The work you're doing, the invisible, the unglamorous, the exhausting, the essential work of building a safe childhood for your children in the middle of the most difficult circumstances, it's not wasted because the court struggles to see it. It's not diminished because your former partner minimizes it. It's not undone by the chaos that continues. It's written into your children, in the way that they trust, the way that they attach, the way that they understand what love looks like and feels like. It's the most lasting thing that any of us will ever do. On this International Women's Day, I want to honour every primary caregiver who is doing this work without recognition, without adequate support, and without the systemic acknowledgement that it truly deserves. You are why I do this work. If you're new here, I'd like to invite you to reach out to me or to another coach on my team if you're ready for deeper support. We're here for you. Happy International Women's Day. You are so much more powerful than you know. Thank you for your time. I look forward to chatting with you again soon.