Post Divorce Labor

One of the things I’ve watched with almost all of my friends who have divorced in later years (45+) is the expectation that women continue to do emotional labor for their ex-spouses and families. If you try to refuse to do this, you are often labeled a “bitch” or somehow “still mad about the divorce.” Which is, to be honest, the way that women always get labeled when they don’t do the work of patriarchy.

( I sometimes hate the word “emotional labor” because it makes it sound like it is somehow less than other labor or easier or somehow “natural” for women to produce. It is not. it is simply labor. It takes time and energy. The only difference is that women get no credit for it. No one acknowledges the real weight of this labor and the demand that it be filled in silence and without any kind of compensation.)

Women are often stuck in a position of asking for what the courts determine is fair (sometimes more than half the assets in lieu of alimony) and being accused of being greedy and selfish or taking less than what they need to make a good life for their children when they don’t get child support because they’ve agreed to 50/50 but the ex-spouse doesn’t do that and they have decided not to go back to court as a result. Because it’s better for the kids and also they often are now in a situation that they can’t afford to go back to court.

So you get divorced in your later years and then have to scramble to figure out how to get a job., retrain if you haven’t had a job since you’ve been, you know, raising children for decades, and now the job force thinks of you as useless and not worth paying a decent wage, let alone benefits. People years younger than you are your bosses and people your age are often men in management who dismiss you as their equals because in the workforce, you are not. You stretch your budget and you try to make things work and everyone keeps expecting you to be able to do what you used to be able to do in terms of emotional labor even though you’re now also working full-time. And you break. A lot of divorced women just—they are stretched too thin and they end up with health issues that can only be solved with insurance they can’t afford or that simply tells them that they don’t actually need the care they need. Or maybe a break for a few months to recover and reassess.

And ON TOP of that, these women end up being expected to continue to do many of the following:

1. Helping (especially disabled) kids financially when the divorce decree insists they are “adults” and don’t need any assistance.
2. Taking over family vacations or other events like “reunions” both financially and logistically, sometimes including the ex-spouse and their new spouse.
3. Being “flexible” about a variety of things, but especially holidays and summer vacations with minor children.
4. Not complaining about obligations that have gone unpaid, even when it’s ordered by the court like child support because it costs more in so many ways to demand it than it does to just work it out on your own.

I get tired of people blithely saying “the law says you get half in divorce.” Because the law doesn’t matter that much in divorce. Do you know how many cases actually go to court? A very, very small number. Almost always, people settle and that means it’s better for them in a lot of ways, because they can choose what works best for them. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a fair division. Women protect their children rather than themselves in divorce as in many other situations.

And if the court says that you get alimony and child support, guess what? The court doesn’t often make sure that happens. If your ex simply refuses to pay, you have to go back to court. And pay more money. And then it’s still very rare that the courts step in until it is years too late to pay for the food to feed the children that you had when you were together. Even if the courts do step in, far too many ex-spouses simply stop working or work for pay under the table to avoid the system that demands that they pay for their own children and other obligations.

It doesn’t work. The system doesn’t work.

If you look at the statistics of post-divorce financial situations of men and women, as I’ve been doing doing recertification for my CDFA, they are pretty clear. I admit, they are a little better than they were in the 1970s, when many men ended up better off financially in divorce. But it’s still clear that the divorce hits women financially harder than men and many men still complain that they were taken advantage of or that their exes “took everything” when this is not remotely true except in the sense that they agreed to the terms that they later wish they hadn’t had to.