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Honestly, to announce this week’s episode of The Art of Living Big, we just want to say LISTEN. This one addresses one of the most common questions women ask themselves and ask Betsy. She offers new ways to evaluate this situation; understand what children are actually living in, and how they read tension at home.
Transcript:
Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the show today. Okay, so today, I’m gonna do a show,, I’m gonna say, I’m gonna say it like, like this. Today, I’m gonna do a show that I don’t wanna do. I know. It’s not that I don’t wanna do it, it’s that I know it’s tricky, and sometimes it’s hard to do a show on something that’s tricky because things in life are so nuanced.
So we can move forward together and do this show with the understanding that things are nuanced. This might or might not apply to you in your situation. You’re allowed to disagree with me. I’m not the overarching truth of all, of all truths. I’m offering some thoughts and some new perspectives here. So what I wanna talk about is about when you stay in a marriage for the kids, and I get messages, I get a lot of messages about this.
And there is this version of one message that I get sort of over and over again, like a couple times, I was gonna say a couple times a week, but sometimes it’s a couple times a day, you know, who, from people on Instagram or, or, you know, people who found the podcast and then they go to Instagram. And they’re, they’re very careful in how they write these messages to me, and I can see,, I can feel all the pain behind it.
And what they say is either, like, “I’m ready to go. I, I want to leave my marriage,” or, “I just decided to leave, and now we have to tell the kids,” or, “We told the kids, and it isn’t really what I wanted. It’s not how I wanted things to go. You know, even though I know in my heart of hearts this is the right choice for me, it’s really painful because I don’t know if it’s the right choice for my kids.”
And that’s the one that I hear all the time. And, you know, before I go any further, I wanna pause. I wanna pause for just a moment because I’m, I’m coming in here, m- you know, as a, as a trained master coach. I’m coming in here as a podcast host that’s had a podcast for 10 years. I’m coming in here as a woman who actually left a marriage with a four-year-old.
So I have done this also, and I know that it’s not easy. I could tell you a, a lot of success stories. I could tell you my own success story. My son’s dad is truly one of my closest friends. It’s not that I talk to him all the time. He’s remarried and has kids that are young teenagers now, but, but when we talk, I know he’s known me, like, the longest of almost anyone I know.
He’s known me since I was in my 20s, and so… And he’s the father to my kid. And so, you know, years ago, he was on the podcast, and we, we removed a lot of podcasts that were interviews from early on. We did, like, a lot of interviews, , business people or o- other things that weren’t really relevant, and a lot of those people didn’t even have their businesses anymore, so it just wasn’t relevant.
But I did a podcast with him, and I should bring that one back as, like, a special event. He’d probably come on today and talk, but I- I will do that. Th- you’ll see a podcast that will pop up that won’t be at the regular time, and we’ll just put that one in between because I think sometimes when we have evidence that things don’t have to go sideways, even if they start sideways, they don’t have to end sideways, that things can get better and be better.
So, but I wanna get back to these messages that I get, right? So, you know, the last part is always like, even though I know, like in my heart of hearts I know this is the thing, I, I feel terrible about it. And so- You know, in those messages, I hear, like, two things sort of that are sitting right next to each other.
One is, she knows, and she feels sick about it, and both of those can be true at the same time. They don’t cancel each other out. And, and, and here’s another thing that I wanna say before anything else. I had a lot of… This episode comes to you with a lot of disclaimers. But the other thing that I wanna say is, is guilt is not evidence.
Guilt is not a signal that you made the wrong decision. Guilt very often shows up when a woman does something for herself after a prolonged time period of not doing that. So your body does not know the difference between wrong and unfamiliar. It just knows that this is not what we usually do here. So
we’re gonna have this talk today about the kids, and I wanna be really careful about how I do it. And so I’m not gonna be telling you what to do. Like, I don’t know your marriage. I’ve never met your husband. I have never sat at your kitchen table on a Saturday night and watched what happens, you know, when he comes in in the afternoon.
And, , a- and I’m not here to hand you any kind of verdict. And so if you have been listening to me for any length of time, you know that that is not the work. The work is that you decide. Not me, and not your sister, not your therapist, and you know that. You know that. But what I’m doing today is a little different, and so I want you to just know what you’re getting.
I think that a lot of you are running one calculation in your head, and you’ve been running it for a long, long time, and it hurts every time you run it, and you keep running it anyway because you think that is the only calculation that there is So here’s an idea that I use with my clients a lot. I- in this, like, picture, okay?
So you are down in the brush, right? You’re lost, okay? You’re lost in it, and you are sure that there is one pathway out, and you have been hacking at that one path so long that your hands hurt. And I’m upstairs, I’m in a helicopter, right? I cannot tell you where to go. I genuinely cannot see your life from up there the way that you can see it from down there.
But I can see that there’s more than one path, and that is all I’m doing today, is offering you a couple of other paths, not because your thinking is wrong, but because the way that you’re thinking about it right now does not feel good to you. You’ve told me that in a million messages. I’ve gotten a million messages, and you’ve all said that.
And you tell me that in every message, and I believe you. And so Here is the sentence that I hear the most, is people say things like, “We stayed,” or, “I stayed because of the kids.” And I want to ask you something that I think people forget about, and that is what are they staying in? What are they staying in?
Because when we say we stayed for the kids, what that usually means is that we kept the house intact. We kept the location the same. We kept the Christmas card looking like the Christmas card, right? But your kids are not living in an address. They are living in a home with two people in it. The kids are the best readers of a room on the entire planet that I have ever met in my life
They have to be, ’cause it’s a survival skill. They cannot leave. They cannot pay rent. They cannot drive. And so they get extremely good at reading what’s happening inside that house. And you know this. You know the way your house is when it’s fine, and you know the way it is when it’s not fine. And you know that your kid can tell from the way that you walk in and throw your keys on the counter.
So think about what happens to your voice when his car pulls in the driveway. Like, does it change? Does it go up a half a step? Do you get careful? Do you sigh a lot? Do you scramble around and start picking stuff up? Do you jump off the couch if you were sitting down? Because they hear that. They’ve always heard that.
They don’t have a word for it. You could ask them about it, and they wouldn’t be able to identify it, but they have years and years of data. And so here’s what I think is the actual thing, is your kids are not learning about divorce from you. They are learning about marriage every single day. You are the template.
That is the model in the house, and that is the only one that they have gotten to see up close, likely. They have gotten to see what a woman is allowed to want, whether a woman gets to be tired, whether she gets to be loud or quiet. They get to see what you do when you’re unhappy for a decade, which is apparently nothing.
You just get really quiet, according to the messages. And that is their curriculum, you know? Whether you label it that way or not, that’s what they are learning. So the question is, if your daughter came to you when she was 45 years old and described your exact marriage to you, sentence for sentence, right? N- n- just exactly what you are living, and asked you what she should do, what would you say to her?
This is not me giving you an answer. This is just a question that I think a lot of us need to ask ourselves. If she came to you, what would you say to her? Right off the top of your head, what would it be? Okay, so now there’s another side of this, and this is something that I also hear a lot, and I wanna say it also very clear, ’cause I think when we hear it out loud, something shifts, right?
And here is the fear, and this is a real fear, so it’s not something silly. I’m not making fun of this, okay? But this is what I hear. “If I stay, if I stay, then I’m in the house, then I can see if something negative is happening. I can smooth it over. I can get in front of it. If we split up, then he has them every other weekend, and I’m not h- I’m not here.
I can’t fix it. I don’t know what he’s gonna say to them. I don’t know if he’s gonna lose his temper. I don’t know if he’s gonna be sharp with them, if they’re gonna cry. There’s gonna be nobody to take care of them. I do not know what kind of mood he is gonna be in, and I will not be in the room.” Fair.
It’s valid. So I wanna walk that f- you know, I wanna walk through that with you What you just told me, and this is something I hear all the time, okay? So what you just told me is that time alone with him is the thing that you’re worried about. That’s the risk that I hear named all the time, and the solution to that risk is to have them around him 100% of the time instead of 50%.
I wanna say that again. Your solution to that is to have him be around that person 100% of the time instead of 50% of the time. So, like, the math right off doesn’t work, but I know what you’re saying in your head, so just bear with me here. The math doesn’t work, so if exposure is the problem, more exposure isn’t the fix.
Now, there is this version of what I just said that is wrong, and I’m gonna talk about that. If what you are describing is danger, like actual danger, like if you are staying because you believe your kids are physically unsafe with him or because you have seen him do something that scares you, that is not a, a mindset conversation, and I am not the person for it.
That is documentation. That is a lawyer. That is a custody arrangement built by somebody who does that work, and there are people who do that and are really good at it. So don’t let anybody, including me, talk you out of a real safety concern. But if your gut is telling you something different, then that’s what I wanna talk about.
I wanna talk about today is way more common, and it’s the one where he’s not dangerous. He’s just not good at it. Mm-hmm. He’s just not good at showing up for his kids. Like, he’s checked out, or he’s short with them, or he’s on his phone, or he gets on video games or whatever, or he just goes cold for days, and nobody really understands why.
And that’s the one where that math actually matters. Because I don’t think that, that the fear is that he is bad. I think your fear is that you are the translator, and you’ve been standing in the middle for years. You’re able to, you know, soften things that he says at dinner. You explain him to them in the car when you’re on your way to practice.
“He’s just tired, honey. He just has had a long week.” You watch his face, and you get ahead of it, and you d- redirect the conversation before it can get bad. So you are essentially, like, the shock absorber in the house. And honestly, of course you’re tired. You’re tired. That’s an impossible job to have, and, and, and I promise nobody has ever said, “Thank you for doing that.”
‘Cause that’s a job that is, like, an invisible job, right? It’s an ultra important and very invisible. Because if it was visible, you’d have to acknowledge that something was going wrong. And so when you imagine not being in the room, you’re not imagining him hurting them, you’re imagining them getting the unbuffed or unbuffered version of him, the one that you have been standing in the middle of and translating for years and years.
And that’s, you know, that- that’s love, you know? I wanna say that. That impulse to do that is love. And, and I want to show you that the cost of it is still real. So two things happen when you are the translator. One is that they never learn how to read him without you. They never get to have their own relationship with their own dad, with his actual, like, being-ness, his actual temperature, right?
They never get to form their own opinion about it. You’ve been handling that for them. And the second one is, and this is the one I really want you to hear, is that they are watching you do that job, and they are learning that this is what a woman does. She manages a man’s weather, temperature. She stays alert.
She stays small so that the room stays calm. Your daughter is taking notes on that. Your son is taking notes on that in a different way. And what he is learning is that somebody will always do that for him. You call it protecting the kids, and I wanna offer you that it might also be managing his emotions, and those are not the same thing
Okay, so I wanna talk a little bit about the language that I’ve heard people use for this, and I mentioned it a little bit before. But I think that the words actually do a lot of damage. Now, you know I’m, I’m a lover, I’m a lover of words. I’m constantly looking in the dictionary for definitions of stuff, but this is what I hear people say.
I hear them say, “I, I don’t wanna blow up the family. I don’t wanna break up the family, or destroy the family. I don’t wanna ruin their childhoods.”, What else have I heard? Oh, shatter is a word. I, like, “I don’t wanna shatter this for them.” And the words people use to describe this, and I get it, I get it, but those are, like, explosion words.
Like, those are words for, like, a bomb going off in a building, and maybe even as I say that, you’re like, “Well, it is like a bomb, a bomb going off in the building, Betsy.” But what I wanna say is that when that is the language that’s running around in your head, of course you cannot make a choice. Of course.
Nobody detonates their own house on purpose. And so you stay, and you stay, and you stay, and you stay, and more time goes by. And so what I wanna do is I wanna offer you a different sentence, and this is one that I actually really believe. You are not blowing anything up. You are just changing the way that it operates.
That’s it. That’s all you’re doing. They still have a father, they still have a mother, and honestly, they might end up with a better version of both of those, because when you are a woman who can hear yourself, then you become a better parent than the woman who is disappearing every day in the middle of the kitchen.
A family is not a building. It’s not where everybody sits at Thanksgiving time. It is a group of people who belong to each other, and belonging does not require one common roof and you’re not deciding whether your children get handed this really hard thing. They already are in a hard thing. They are already living in a house with careful voices, and tiptoes, and walking on eggshells, and arguments perhaps, and all of the things. It’s you deciding that’s the hard thing and, and deciding whether this has an end.
So again, I am not telling you to go. I wanna be really clear. I don’t know anything about your marriage. It may be that just the version of your marriage you’re living needs to go, and you could rebuild it depending on where you are. It’s what we do in the Navigate method. But this is me telling you that the comparison that you have been running is not fair to you, because you are comparing a, a happy, intact family to a broken one, and neither one of those are the choices. The real comparison is exactly what it is for however long it’s been against something else that you haven’t let yourself imagine yet.
So compare the real thing to the real thing So let me come back, let me come back to the messages that I get where people tell me that, you know, they need to have this conversation with their kids, and they’re trying to come up with a plan, and they just, they don’t wanna fail. Or they message me and they’re like, “I think I totally screwed this up.”
And so what I wanna say is that you cannot grade yourself on the delivery of one conversation. Your kids aren’t gonna remember one sentence. Almost nobody remembers the sentence. In fact, a lot of kids don’t even remember the conversation. But they remember the next two years, you know? They remember whether the house got calmer.
They remember whether you seemed really happy, you know? They remember whether you were around at 9:00 at night when they wanted to chat about it. You know, and the second thing is about repair. You know, n- if you have a conversation with your kids and it doesn’t go the way that you want, you get to go back.
You get to go back, walk in their room and say, “You know what? I don’t like how that conversation went. Like, that came out wrong.” We don’t have to be perfect. We’re human. You know, I say this to my kid all the time. I’m just a girl. It’s my first time here, trying to figure this out. But do you know what that teaches your kids when you go back and you say, “That came out wrong.
I kinda screwed up. I’m just learning. Can I try that again?” Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how many grown women that never once in their entire life have ever had a parent come back and redo a conversation? That’s the thing that your kid’s gonna remember, not the one bad sentence or the conversation in the car that didn’t go right.
It’s the coming back. It’s the repairing. It’s the you having and finding joy again And, you know, it may be that your kids ask for some truth. You know? Maybe you hedge the conversation, and they ask the question, “Are you gonna, are you gonna get divorced?” And you answer honestly, a real answer from their mother.
Your kid is not gonna remember how you said it or what was happening around it. They’re gonna remember that you didn’t lie to her, even when it cost you something. So I know some of you are listening to this in the car right now with your hands, with your hands at 10:00 and 2:00. That’s how I drive all the time, with your hands at 10:00 and 2:00.
And, you know, you’re listening, and this is just getting filed in the back of your brain. You’re not gonna do anything about it today, and that’s totally fine. Like I, I’m not asking you to. I just want you to notice which part of this that you kinda argued with me when I was talking ’cause that’s the part for you to figure out.
And like I said at the top of the show, you get to choose. You get to choose what part of this works for you, what part of it doesn’t. Maybe it’s some new thoughts. Maybe it’s all things you’ve already thought before. But I want you to notice if there’s something you argued with in your brain about, with me because maybe that’s just some place for you to explore because we don’t argue with things that we know are true.
We just go, “Eh, they’re wrong.” We argue with things that push on a bruise. And so I want you to just think about that one. That’s something that you can sort through. And, you know, this is the work that we do with women inside the Navigate Method. So, you know, book a call with us, and we can talk you through that.
And, you know, if you just wanna get really honest, did you know on my website,, under self-paced courses, like in the menu bar, there is something called The Bridge? It’s like 79 bucks, and it’ll walk you through how to get really honest with yourself about lots of things. Maybe that’s a place to start.
All right. Before we close up, I just want to let you know that our retreat is gonna be live next week, next Tuesday. If you’re on the email list, you’re gonna get an email about it. It’s gonna be in Punta Cana. It’s gonna be on January 21st to the 25th. It includes everything but your transportation, and it is gonna be amazing. It’s gonna be a real adventure. I think we’re gonna dive deep into some really cool things. We’re gonna really develop a life that you really want. We’re gonna think through a lot of hard things that maybe you’ve been rolling around in your brain.
And for those first 10 people, you get 400 bucks off. So make sure you’re on the list, ’cause I think it brings the price way down to like, I don’t know, 24, 2,500 bucks with that, with that discount. So make sure you’re on the mail list, or follow me on Instagram, ’cause I’ll be announcing it on Tuesday, and come with me to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, January 21st through the 25th, 2027.
And if you’re listening to this long after that, we’ll probably doing it again. We, we got a lot of them. Every… T- twice a year probably we’re gonna do them. So I would love to be able to see you and talk about all this stuff in real life. All right. I think when you can look at all that hard stuff and be really brave, I think that is how you live a big life.
All right. I love you so much. I’ll see you guys next week
Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today.
You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pake and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.
