There’s a lovely Australian site, The Hoopla, that I follow and today they had this article about a custody battle. In a nutshell, an Australian married an Italian and raised children in Italy and after a separation took their 4 daughters to Australia on holiday in 2010, but never returned to Italy.
There is a lot of talk about how it was handled and that the Mom is now in Australia and her girls back in Italy with their Dad. It is a bit of a sordid tale of how they had hidden the children in Australia in a bid to avoid them going back to Italy, but as always there is probably a lot more behind the story than anyone will ever know as they are now back in a villa in Florence behind locked gates. My heart ached for everyone, there is no happy ending.
I also read this story with such mixed feelings partly because I had a conversation with a Mom yesterday that has been battling with a difficult divorce for more than 2 years now so it’s been playing on my mind. This is besides another friend that recently settled a divorce after a hard 3 odd year battle. A battle that was often not played fairly by the other party and has left a very bitter taste and not many warm and fuzzy feelings toward this person (yes, I’m being vague. Think “I want to stab this person with a spoon” type not warm and fuzzy feelings)
So why am I blogging about stuff that really has nothing at all to do with me? There was so much going through my mind when I was reading about this, so many questions.
Many of us have lived overseas and I know plenty of people that were involved with/married/divorced people from other countries because they either met because we were traveling or they came here. (I was also not averse to dating the odd Australian)
Then I was thinking about how I would have parented if I had ended up having children with someone not from the same background as me or even from a different country. That must place an enormous amount of strain on a relationship, especially if both parents are very involved in raising the kids.
Often we will come to a little cross-road in raising kids about basic things like manners, that I know that there would have been a potential for conflict if Etienne and I weren’t raised so similarly and evolved from there. It comes naturally that we would agree, we don’t have to stop and figure it out first before we present a united front to the kids, it’s just THERE.
Are your parenting styles the same or different? If you are from different backgrounds/countries did you battle with some things? Did you manage to figure it out?