1. If your former spouse chooses to marry do all you can to accept the “new” person – he or she will have a regular and meaningful role in your child’s life.
2. Meet and talk about a unified approach to parenting that all the adults in your child’s life will agree to – BEFORE and after the wedding. Of course you will not agree on everything but that doesn’t mean you should not meet and talk.
3. Don’t make the new person into the enemy. When enemies co-parent children get wounded by crossfire.
4. When issues arise go to the source – try to avoid telling your former spouse what you really want to say directly to his her new partner. You are an adult. Don’t walk on eggshells when it comes to your children.
5. Mind your own business. How “they” spend their money or where they go on holidays is none of your business. Your business begins and ends with your children.
6. Don’t recruit in-laws or grandparents to side with you. You are “enough” on your own.
7. Give your children room to form a relationship with the “new” person.

I am regularly informed that my message (speak up, define yourself) may be culturally relevant to an audience in North America but that it is not relevant to, say, Indians in Asia, to Koreans, or to British housewives. “We (whomever is writing or taking) are closer, tighter, more conservative, not like you Americans. We don’t allow women to express their opinions in our culture.”

While of course, I acknowledge the beauty, the power, and significance of unique cultures within all of their many forms – there are some aspects or things about most cultures should be challenged* and changed.

Here are a few:

1. When the voices of some are ignored or silenced because it is “cultural” (as in come caste systems).
2. When violence is par for the course because that’s our culture. (“He beats me, but that is how men are in these parts.”)
3. When boundaries are violated and one person or group is constantly the victim. (“Children get no privacy in our – insert place, race, religion, or language – families.”)
4. When thoughts and actions are monitored and suppressed in order to perpetuate the power of one group or person over another group or person. (“In our religion we are not allowed to think such things!”)
5. When the powerless are victimized and silence is the expected response. (“That’s just the way it is in the south – this county, this neighborhood, whatever!”)

The Differentiation of Self is applicable across all cultures and to consider it not so, is to misunderstand the concept at its core.

* I cannot prance around the world uttering racial slurs and then claim that, as a white South African reared under Apartheid, I am expressing my culture. Some things about my culture are despicable and ought to be harshly rejected. The same is true when a culture (or church, or family, or boss, or significant other) robs people of their voices for any reason (gender, race, age, economic status, or religion). Domination, manipulation, so-called co-dependence is not good for anyone, no matter where he or she is born, what language he or she speaks, or what faith he or she claims or proclaims.

By the way, one of my first Egyptian students wrote in response to a week of exposure to my lectures: “You are welcome to visit Egypt but do not say anything.”

“I’m 35 and have been divorced for 5 years. I met a woman whose husband passed away two years ago. We are in love. I can’t stay away. We spend hours on the phone. The problem is that she wants to move on but is discouraged by her family. Her mum doesn’t want her to move on. She told her daughter not to communicate with me. The mum feels if I take the daughter away there’s no one to take the mum shopping. The mum says to the daughter the reason the mom left work was because of her and to look after the two children. They make the daughter feel guilty in every way possible. I told the daughter she must take control of it but she doesn’t want to disrespect her parents.” (Edited)

Your girlfriend has some decisions to make. The mother has reasons for stopping the daughter from moving on. The reasons might appear obvious to you but I believe there are deeper and hidden reasons: the belief that moving on will allow the deceased to be forgotten, or moving on is in some ways disrespectful to the man who is now gone.

Do not push. Invite. Challenge. But do not push. Try not to make the mother the enemy.