The Day You Get Back (Co-Parenting: Part Three of Three)

September 9, 2026

On letting go of control, and the freedom waiting on the other side

Tobia Bradley, CDC  ·  Certified Divorce Coach  ·  Ashby Jones & Associates, LLC

The first two parts of this were about your children. This one is about you.

I have been telling you what they absorb and what they are not old enough to carry, and every bit of it is true. But there is something I have not said yet, and it is the part that surprises people.

Letting go of control does not only help them.

It gives you your life back. Not eventually. Almost immediately, and more completely than you would believe from where you are standing.

The Saturday that costs you everything

The children go to their dad’s at nine. By nine forty, the first text has landed.

Did they eat breakfast?

He answers. Yes. At ten fifteen, another one. What are you doing today? He tells her his brother’s house, which she already knew, because it was in the email he sent Wednesday.

At noon she asks whether Emma is wearing the jacket she packed. At one she wants to know if he remembered that Jack will not eat tomatoes. At two, nothing, and the silence is worse, because now she is on Facebook looking at his sister in law’s page to see whether anybody posted a photo.

At three thirty she calls. He does not answer, because he is pushing a child on a swing, and by three thirty five she has decided what that means.

They come home at six and she meets them at the door, asking before their shoes are off. What did you eat. Who was there. Did Daddy leave you with anybody. Was that woman there.

Emma is nine and she is not stupid. Her answers get shorter. By the fourth question she says it was fine and goes to her room.

Her mother stands in the kitchen feeling exactly the way she felt at nine forty that morning, except now it is dark outside and the day is gone.

That is the part I want you to see. Not the texting.

The day.

She had one day off. She spent it inside a house she was not standing in.

What it is really costing

Most women in this pattern have never added it up, so let me.

The hours. Four days a month, roughly fifty a year. That is seven weeks. Seven weeks of your one life running surveillance on a household you cannot enter, and you will get those weeks whether you spend them this way or not.

Your body. The shoulders up near your ears from nine in the morning until six at night. The stomach. The particular exhaustion of running a background process all weekend, which does not feel like effort while you are doing it and leaves you flattened by Sunday.

Your attention. This is the expensive one, and it is the one nobody names.

As long as your attention is fixed on his house, you never have to look at your own. Monitoring him is a way of staying inside the marriage after it has ended. Uncomfortable, yes, but familiar, and familiar is very hard to give up when everything else has changed.

The women I have watched come through this well are not the ones who won the arguments about bedtimes and jackets. They are the ones who took their attention back and pointed it at their own life, which was the thing that needed them most and kept getting pushed to the back of the line.

Checking has never once produced the feeling you were checking for.

What you are actually being asked to let go of

I want to be specific, because letting go sounds lovely and means nothing until somebody defines it.

The small things. The bedtime, the screen time, the sugar, the mismatched outfit in the photograph. Every one of those is a real preference and most of yours are probably better than his. I am not going to flatter you by pretending otherwise.

But you cannot enforce them, and that is the whole problem. You can text about it, raise it at the exchange, bring it up in mediation, and at the end of it he still runs his house the way he runs it. The bedtime does not change. The only thing that changed is that you spent Saturday on it.

So the question was never whether you are right. You may well be right about all of it. The question is what you are buying with the energy, and the honest answer is nothing.

The authority. If your order gives you final say over school or medical or activities, that is real and it exists for good reasons. Somebody has to decide when two parents cannot agree.

Here is what I watch happen to it. It stops being a tiebreaker and becomes a leash. He has to ask before signing a permission slip. He cannot take them for a haircut. There is an email about a walk in clinic visit for an ear infection, and then a longer email about whether that clinic was appropriate.

Be honest with yourself about one question, because it is the whole thing. Are you using it to decide something, or to stay involved in everything?

Those feel identical from the inside. They are entirely different from the outside, and family court judges recognize the difference immediately, though that is not the main reason to stop.

The main reason is that it does not give you control. It gives you a job. An unpaid one, that runs on your days off.

Use it for the school, the surgery, the disagreement that will still matter in five years. Let the haircut be a haircut.

And the questions at the door. Stop asking your children things designed to produce information. There is an enormous difference between did you have a good time and what did you eat, and children can feel it by about age six. One is interest. The other is intelligence gathering, and it teaches a child that coming home means being debriefed.

Decision making authority is for deciding things. It was never meant to keep you in the room.

The day she let go

She tried it on a Saturday. The children left at nine and she put her phone in a drawer in the kitchen.

The first hour was terrible. She opened the drawer twice and shut it again. She cleaned things that were already clean. Around eleven she noticed her shoulders had been up near her ears since the car pulled out of the driveway, and that they had been doing that every other Saturday for a year and a half without her ever once noticing.

By one she was on the back porch with a book she had owned for two years and never opened. She read forty pages, and the reading was easy in a way it had not been in a long time.

At three she fell asleep in the chair. She told me afterward she could not remember the last time before that she had fallen asleep in the daytime.

They came home at six. She did not meet them at the door. She let them get their shoes off and asked one question, whether they had a good time, and Emma said yes and then talked for twenty minutes without being asked anything else at all.

That is what happens when a child stops being interrogated. The pressure comes off and there is suddenly room, and they fill it.

Later, after they were in bed, she sat in the kitchen and worked out what had actually changed that day.

Nothing at his house. Not one single thing. That day had gone exactly the way it was always going to go, with the texts or without them.

The only difference was that she had not spent it braced.

You were not protecting them. You were paying admission to a show you could not watch.

What freedom actually feels like

I want to describe this properly, because people expect it to feel like relief and it does not, at first.

At first it feels like withdrawal. The pull to check is physical, and it will be loud all morning. You will invent good reasons. Something you forgot to mention. A question about Sunday. Those reasons will feel legitimate and they are not.

Then, sometime in the early afternoon, it lifts. Sooner than you expect. And what is underneath it is so quiet that most women do not recognize it at first, because they have not felt it in a long time.

It is the absence of bracing.

You will notice you are not listening for the phone. You will notice you got through an hour without composing anything in your head. You will notice, at some point, that you have not thought about your ex husband since lunch, and that noticing is the moment everything changes, because you cannot unfeel it. No argument I could make would be half as persuasive as one Saturday.

And here is what makes it hold. It does not require him to cooperate.

That is the piece I most want you to have. Everything else in this process depends on somebody else. The timeline, the settlement, the schedule, whether he behaves reasonably. This does not. It is the one thing available to you right now that does not need his permission, his agreement, or his good behavior.

He can be exactly as difficult as he has been, and you can still have your Saturday.

This is the only part of it that does not require him to cooperate.

Where the line actually is

I am not asking you to ignore real problems, and I want this said plainly so nothing above gets misused.

If your children come home describing something that frightens them, that is information. If somebody is being hurt, if there is drinking behind the wheel, if a child is genuinely unsafe, that is not a control issue and you must not talk yourself out of it because you read something about letting go. Write down what you were told, in the child’s own words, with the date. Take it to your attorney.

Real concern is specific. It is about something that happened, it has details, and it points toward an action you could take.

Anxiety is general. It is about what might be happening, it has no details because there is nothing to have details about, and it loops without producing anything.

One asks you to do something. The other only asks for reassurance, and reassurance is something you will have to learn to give yourself, because nobody can hand it to you at eleven in the morning on a Saturday.

Start small

You do not have to become someone new by this weekend. Try one Saturday.

Put the phone in a drawer. Not on silent in your pocket, because you will check it. In a drawer, in a different room from the one you are in.

Send nothing unless it genuinely cannot wait until Sunday, and be honest with yourself about that word.

Plan the day the way you would plan for company. An empty day is an invitation to go looking for the drawer.

Ask one question when they come home. Then let them talk, or not talk, and let either be all right.

Your children are going to be fine at their father’s house. They were always going to be fine.

The day was never really about them.

The only person that Saturday was hard on was you.

This is the third part of a three part series on co-parenting. Parts one and two, The Same Very Long Project and What the House Felt Like, are on the blog.

A gentle note: this is a small kindness, not a substitute for real support. If the heavy days are stacking up faster than the steady ones, please talk to someone, whether that’s a therapist, your doctor, or a friend who shows up. And nothing here is legal advice. Questions about your parenting order, your decision making authority, or your children’s safety belong with your attorney.

With love, Tobia

Tobia Bradley, CDC  ·  Certified Divorce Coach

ASHBY JONES & ASSOCIATES, LLC

Lexington  |  Columbia  |  Charleston  ·  ashbyjoneslaw.com