Navigating Divorce and Caregiving at Midlife: Insights from Mardi Winder-Adams | EP032

Hi, welcome. I'm excited to have Mardi winter Adams with me today. Mardi is a divorce coach, and I'm going to ask her to introduce herself and and how she works with people in just a moment. And I hope that you're paying special attention to this. We all know that Gray Divorce has now become an important phenomenon, and many people are working in that sandwich generation. So I've asked Mardi to help us, to guide us through some of the thicket that seems to result when all of these things descend at once. So Mardi, welcome to the program. Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Mardi Winder-Adams: Thanks, Deborah, it's my pleasure to be here and to get a chance to share with your audience. I, as Deborah said, I'm a divorce coach. I've been doing this since 2015 I was an executive and leadership coach before that. I've worked in domestic violence shelters. I have done family and divorce mediation, and back in my past life, I was a teacher and behavior consultant in school districts. So I've had, I've had a lot of different jobs in in life, but they've all been people related, and I really love working with people. So yeah,

and I understand you've been a caregiver as well. So can you share a bit about that background? Because it feeds right into, I think, some of the things that you're talking about now. Yeah,

Mardi Winder-Adams: so my caregiving experience was very unexpected. I was I had gone through my divorce, moved I'm Canadian, moved down to Texas, was living down here, and I was actually working during a speaking event, as a matter of fact, in Dallas, and got a strange phone call from my husband. Didn't really think anything of it. Got another call at three o'clock in the morning, which was very unusual, and he was seemed very confused about what was going on. He thought it was the morning and and I didn't really think anything of it. And then I tried to call when I got up at like six, couldn't get an answer at the at the home, so I finally ended up calling my neighbor, who came over and found that my husband had had a massive stroke. And he had had the stroke when he was talking to me, and he was starting to have the, you know, the the cognitive loss and the the speech problem, but we didn't talk for long enough for me to pick it up. So he got rushed to the hospital, and he was in, in and out of, you know, the stroke unit and the trauma unit. For about six weeks, he moved several hospitals, and then finally came home and he was non ambulatory and had very limited speech. And then unfortunately, he fell and broke a hip after that, when he was just starting to walk again. So we went through another year of physical therapy and rehab and everything else, but he really never, never really bounced back. So I became a full time caregiver for him, and was a caregiver all the way up until for seven years, and then he passed away in 2017 of complications. But yeah, it was a very I mean, I literally went from having this job where I traveled all over and did things to home on the farm, one on one, with no support, no assistance, being a caregiver for my spouse and and also having to be the income earner at the same time. So I was doing online stuff long before COVID, which kind of was, you know, was helpful in some ways, to adjust to COVID.

Yeah, that's a very good thing. I think the online business was very helpful to many caregivers who had probably like you, I had lost a business when I had to become a caregiver for my parents, and then my husband had had a mental health crisis that seemed to be never ending. We couldn't just never get help. So I found myself divorced at 60, because the care, the caregiving I was trying to do, wasn't going any better than the therapy that he was getting. And more recently, I had a partner. I thought I found love again, and unfortunately, Alzheimer's was knocking at the door already when we met, so there were some time spent being a caregiver until it just wasn't feasible for me to do that anymore. But I think along the way, we learn a lot of things about ourselves, and I'd like you to turn, if you can, to speaking a bit about being the divorce coach, because I think more than one caregiver has been divorced because of a caregiving situation or partly due to that. So what would you like to share with us about that?

Mardi Winder-Adams: You know, I think that's I think you're very right, Deborah, I think it's an additional strain on most relationships, because you know, when you your spouse expects that you are going to be part of a team that may and may be caring for kids, raising children, but then you put elder care requirements in on top of that, and having to be away from. The home, or having the parents live in the home, it's a huge strain on even a very healthy relationship, and if there's already some challenges, some dissatisfaction with one or both of the people, you can see how it could quickly snowball to create a really unhealthy marriage, an unsustainable relationship. So I do find that I work with a lot of women, and we were talking before this, I work with a lot of women who are either like yourself, they are going through what they call the Gray Divorce, right? So basically, 50 plus age, when you're going through the divorce, typically, there's not children in the home anymore, but they're still adult kids in a lot of families, and so you're, you know, you're not only dealing with having to maybe become a single again after decades of being in a marriage relationship, which is a big adjustment, and it's a big consideration. We're closer to, I'm my 60s, it's close. You're closer to retirement. You know, you don't have 30 years to rebuild your 401 ks anymore. Maybe you don't want to have a house, maybe you want to live in an apartment and travel. There's so many things to think about. So really, having somebody a divorce coach really is the person that will help you clarify, ask the questions, help you think about what you want to do, what you want your future to look like, where are your priorities? And then really support you in hiring the right professionals, getting your team together, and then helping you manage the emotional stuff around the divorce, which may include thinking about what does that caregiving relationship need to look like now? Because maybe what you were doing, and I think a lot of women are givers, they just give and give and give. And it may be a time, if you're going through a divorce and dealing with caregiving, to start saying, Where do I need to get some help? And how can I do this, and what services are out there? Because no matter where you well, I shouldn't say that in most areas you're there are going to be some lower cost or affordable services that could help you, even if it's just having somebody come in for respite care an hour a week, so you can go to the grocery store and go for coffee with a friend and just get out of there, because it's overwhelming to be 24 hours caring for somebody who needs medical or psychological or combinations of support.

Yeah, absolutely. I found that the expression that finally was helping me the most was life is what's happening while you made other plans. Yes, going going through the divorce after really trying to be a caregiver, but being very frustrated one, I I found that a lot of the dreams I thought I had when I was divorced, I suddenly didn't want those things anymore when I was free, and suddenly a clean house was more important to me than anything, and I was I was really surprised to find that, because they had felt a little frustrated at not having been able to travel when I was younger and do all these things, and some of that went by the wayside when I moved out. So what are some of the kinds of things you find yourself coaching people through emotional changes that they hadn't anticipated. Maybe,

Mardi Winder-Adams: I think, I think a lot of it is that. So I'm going to speak specifically to the Gray Divorce area. I think one of the things I see with with that group of people, is this sense of, what do I do now? There's so many things I wished I had done, and, I mean, I grew up in a different time when it was more common for the woman to just be the person who quit their job or quit their educational progress, to stay at home, to look after the home, to raise the children, and then if she did go back to work, maybe it was a part time job, maybe get a department store. Or, you know, it wasn't necessarily getting into a career. So not only working with with women about the practical stuff of being on your own, but also, what do you really want to do? Like, what is it that's going to make you get up in the morning and go, I can't wait to do this. It's not going to be every day, let's face it, but if you're doing something you enjoy, life is just so much better than if you're, you know, just in the grind, and you know, being strategic about how are you going to plan for your future? Because it's going to probably look very like you said. It's going to look very different than what your goals or your dreams were as a as a couple, and maybe it is doing more, or maybe it's doing a lot less, and just having time to do sit and read a book, if that's what you want to do in the afternoon, so everybody's future and passion and purpose is going to be different. And I think just helping people. Explore that so that when they go into mediation or where they go to litigation, they know what they want when they get out the other side. So

it isn't a good idea to wait till after the divorce to get the divorce coach. In other words, you want to, want to start on that process a bit sooner. And I would agree with that. I think there's another phase of it, which is common, I think, to elder caregivers, because often those are terminal years for people, so it's possible that the recipient of your care is not going to live beyond you. Is there a grief phase in divorce that that's similar? Do you think?

Mardi Winder-Adams: Absolutely I think that. And I think that's probably the part that when you go through the divorce without any kind of support on the emotional side, you don't realize that you really are grieving. You're grieving the loss of that relationship and what that meant to you. I always say to my clients, you didn't go down the aisle at your church or wherever you got married going, Wow, I can't wait for the divorce, this is going to be fantastic, right? We what do we say? I mean, what are our vows? Forever till death, do us part? And now, all of a sudden, and most divorces are filed by women. 70% of divorces in the United States are filed by women. So it's like there's this guilt and there's this grief and there's this sometimes there's embarrassment about that the relationship failed. And sometimes we get a lot of pressure from friends and family, especially if we're in the Gray Divorce, like, Oh, come on, you guys have been together for 30 years. Just stick it out. You know, those kind of things. And so all of that negative kind of emotion comes comes through. But I do agree with you. Grief is one thing that people probably don't prepare for when they're going through divorce. Yeah, I guess,

as in the case of a death, you really don't know how to prepare for that until you're in it, because it's different every time too. We don't always go through the same process of steps. I mean, I know they're cooler. Ross talked about stages of grief, but everyone doesn't hit them at the same point. We're in the same way, or receive them that way. So there's a lot, a lot to process, and I'm sure it would be really wonderful to have a native guide. There someone to to hold your hand, because the next aisle is one that you take solo. So right Bridge is a really important deal. I also think most of us are not prepared for what till death do us part. You know, in spite of everything really means until we're in in the thick of it. So, right, yeah,

Mardi Winder-Adams: and, and I like that you brought up that Kubler Ross cycles of grief, because I think a lot of the anger and bitterness we see in divorce is coming right from that anger stage of the grief cycle. But people can get stuck there, and that's where you see people that have been divorced for 20 years and they're still so vitriolic about their ex, and they just haven't let go of that. That's all that's all affecting you emotionally. It's affect affecting you physically. It's affecting your everybody that you interact with. So letting go of that anger and dealing with that grief is really critical. Yeah,

really incapacitating, I found, and I realized there was just no point to that. So yeah, I think it was a little easier to let go than it was for my spouse. But you know, every people don't change a whole lot when they're going through a divorce, they're going to be who they are, yes. So so it may change you in the process, but as you're going through it, you are, you are who you are. I'd like to believe that people can change, though, and can find another way to be. So I love it that you have fashioned yourself as a coach to help guide people to find out who they are, not who you want them to be, but who they are themselves. Which it could be a really scary process for either caregivers coming out of a caregiving situation or or a person emerging from a relationship that had certain rules that are no longer operating.

Mardi Winder-Adams: Right? Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, you find it's

a little bit like adolescence all over again for some people. I

Mardi Winder-Adams: think that's a good analogy, yes, but it's also that, you know, there's, there's so many opportunities, so that's the other thing. There is this, it's almost like there's an overwhelming choice. For some people, like, what do I want to do now and and I think, you know, when you can look at life and go, Oh my gosh, I got like, 20 things I really want to accomplish, I always think that that's such a positive way, rather than looking back and going, this is the one thing I failed at. This relationship is my one failure. Let that go. Let it go. Yeah,

yeah. And if you have kids, I think it's better to try to take the long view for yourself that this is different. It's a different path, but we can create something here that that is going to work for all of us. So

Mardi Winder-Adams: absolutely, absolutely, yeah, well, this has been a

really great chat, and I'm sorry it's almost coming to an end, but I would love for you to tell us, share with the audience, how people can connect with you afterwards. Because your service is so vital to so many people's lives, and I want to make sure that we can find you. Oh,

Mardi Winder-Adams: thank you so much. Deborah, the best way is my website. It is divorce coach for women, and that's the number four. So www, dot divorce coach for women.com, and Deborah, thank you. I've really enjoyed this conversation, and thank you for what you're doing and supporting caregivers. Because, boy, there's a lot of people out there that need the support, so thank you for what you do

likewise. Thank you so much, Mardi and I'm sure going to make sure to share give this conversation as a podcast, so that people are more aware that there is help out there, and you don't have to go it alone. Thanks again. Thank you. Um.