Taking photos in my mind
next. That is very hard for him.”
If we haven’t managed his visits properly, one thing my ex and I have done well, says Archer, is to always protect the children from any adverse feelings we might feel towards each other. To me, it’s just obvious emotional common sense that you don’t criticise your ex in front of your children, yet we all know divorcees who do just this.
“In the heat of divorce it can be hard to respect your ex, but try to see the situation through your children’s eyes, and to find something good to say about their other parent.
“Children love both their parents and if they hear dad say something hurtful about mum, or vice versa, they feel torn inside.”
According to the Jewish Marriage Council, which works within an Orthodox framework, different parenting styles are often a Say good things about their other parent reason for divorce, so in the aftermath of separation try to make them less of a battleground than they might have been beforehand.
For example, when my kids visit their father in Italy for a week every summer, I know that any notion of bedtime vanishes and that their teeth make intermittent contact their toothbrushes. It has been hard, but I have now stopped sending self-righteous texts to Venice every August about what I see as his lazy parenting.
Sometimes, though, there is more at stake than tartare-free ivories. During and after separation it’s common for cultural and ideological differences between parents to be magnified.
What do you do, for example, if you think Friday night meals with the family are important, and your ex does not?
“It can be very hard when you are hurting, but do try to make a co-parenting plan,” advises Archer. “Try to respect your ex simply because he or she is your child’s other parent. There’s a reason kids have two parents — they need two role models.”
When it comes to religious practice, Baginsky’s ex, who is Jewish, has certainly come good.
When the children stay with him, he and his new partner keeps the same level of kashrut as Baginsky does, and if he has them on a Friday he will make kiddush with them.
“I think it’s about him trying to do the best by the kids and accepting that their identity and practice is important to them. And by supporting them, it means they include him in that part of their lives rather than excluding him,”she says.
Rabbi Jeremy Gordon, of Masorti’s New London Synagogue, doesn’t underestimate the difficulty of co-parenting “when you have said how awful the person is.” Yet it is, he says, certainly possible to divorce well, to consciously uncouple as Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin famously put it when they announced their separation after 10 years of marriage.
“It requires,” he says, “a conscious desire to be nice, to make sure the kids don’t feel your separation is their fault.”
He speaks from personal experience: the rabbi’s parents separated when he was 10.
“My parents got it right. They never bad-mouthed each other to me, and I never felt I was to blame for their break-up. And when I needed them both to be together at my barmitzvah and my wedding, for example, they were.”
Being together isn’t just something which exes need to learn to do, though. Divorced parents must also learn how to be “really present” with their children, says Archer.
“Even if it’s for 10 minutes walking the dog, or baking a cake together, carve out regular time to really get on your children’s wavelength. After divorce, children desperately need a sense of security about their place in the world, and that comes when they feel listened to and understood.”
In an increasingly globalised world that listening and understanding happens more and more when parent and child are not in the same country, let alone under the same roof. Luke certainly talks to his father more on Skype, than he does in the flesh.
“Technology can be a divorced parent’s friend, but remember that five minutes can feel a long time for a child on FaceTime,” says Archer. “Release the pressure by being proactive and tell your child what is going on in your life, rather than saying ‘how are you?’ or ‘what have you done today?’
“You can talk about what happening at work, or you can relay about something that happened in your childhood. Children love hearing stories, so store them up.”
Or, of course, you can read them an actual story. Particularly when the message in the book is that even though your child’s parents’ relationship may be broken, their love for him or her is not.
AS I got myself and my children ready for Shavuot, I was struck by the fact that with our phones switched off for the duration of the chag, there would be no way of recording anything that happened during those 49 hours. We would all look our best, many of us with new outfits to show off. But more than that, there would be some very precious moments over the course of those days, moments that would go unrecorded, the sort of moments that, on non-festive and non-Shabbat days, we would leap at the chance of uploading onto the most appropriate social-media platform.
And I thought about how we have quickly become so accustomed to whipping out our phones the instant we see anything remotely photogenic, and what it means not to do that, to be forced to enjoy the moment without any concrete means of consigning it to posterity.
Just a few weeks ago, I was driving down a road on a beautiful spring afternoon. Everywhere I had driven that day there seemed to be an explosion of cherry blossom, and as I drove down that particular road, I noticed a woman standing beneath a spectacular tree, head thrown back, phone in hand, taking a photo of the pink froth above her. It was exactly the sort of thing that I find myself doing — I love nothing more than being able to capture that fleeting moment of beauty of an especially lovely tree or flower. I like to feel that instant will never be lost, the glory of those petals or branches will never fade and I will be able to carry them with me forever if I really want to.
But as I watched that woman I wondered if she, and I, and all the others who do the same, miss out on something quite crucial when we do this. We unhesitatingly, unthinkingly place a lens between our eye and the object we are looking at, thinking that we are preserving the moment forever.
But perhaps we are chang- ing that moment, removing ourselves from experiencing it properly by seeking to freeze it in time.
What struck me was the contrast between that moment, and the realisation that observant Jews have no choice — once a week on Shabbat, more if there is a festival — other than to burn those instances, not onto our devices, but into our memories. And I wondered if moments captured in this way are preserved more faithfully. Perhaps it forces us to notice other things more carefully — a smell, the things that happened before and after that moment occurred, the timbre of a person’s voice, a perfume, the feel of someone’s clothing or a child’s embrace. We live in very visual times but perhaps, on these digitaldetox days, we experience the world with more of our senses.
One particular memory springs to mind. We were staying with my husband’s brother and his family for Pesach this year. They live up North, and our children relish the time spent with their “Manchester cousins”. On the afternoon of the first day of yomtov — an unexpectedly warm and beautiful day — the adults watched from the house as the children bounced on the trampoline in the garden. They were out there for a long time. As they bounced, the sun began to set behind them, casting a golden glow that even the filters on Instagram would struggle to replicate. Big children bounced with smaller ones, teaching them new tricks, inspiring them with a confidence that we adults would never know how to give them. I remember the sound of their laughter, their hair flying wildly as they soared and plunged, the brightness in their eyes, the raucousness of their laughter. Even now I can feel the air becoming chill as the sun set lower, wondering that the children were still not feeling the cold, insulated from it by the activity, and perhaps, also, by the joy of a day free from structure — no school, no set bedtime, meals at none of the usual hours.
And I wonder, would I have remembered all of this so vividly had I simply taken a photograph of it? Did I watch them more closely, committing as many details to memory as possible, because without a camera, this was the only way to immortalise the moment? And so, as a result, did I enjoy the moment more?
I will never know, and I am quite content not knowing. As vivid as it is to me now, I am aware that the memory may, in time, slip away from me. But then, so might a photograph, lost among all the hundreds and thousands that we keep on our devices but forget about anyway. Perhaps on Shabbat we use more of our senses