A Mum Who Wanted Stability for Her Children, But Didn’t Know Where to Start

I remember standing in my kitchen, pasta boiling over on the hob, both kids arguing about something on the sofa behind me, and thinking: I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

Not with the pasta. With all of it. The separation had been confirmed a few weeks earlier, and I was still in that strange, numb phase where you keep functioning on the outside while something inside you has gone very quiet. My husband, soon to be my ex-husband, had moved into his brother's spare room. The kids, Freya who was seven and Callum who was five, knew something had changed but not exactly what. We hadn't told them properly yet. We were barely talking ourselves.

The practical stuff had started to pile up. Where would we live? What would happen with the house? Who would the children be with and when? I'd read enough online to know that when you cannot see your children the situation can escalate quickly, and I didn't want that for any of us. I'd heard the word "solicitor" thrown around by friends and family, said with a kind of solemn weight, like that was the obvious next step. A few people had already recommended theirs, offering the names with a look that said, you'll need this.

I didn't want a fight. That was the honest truth. I didn't want to be on opposite sides of a table from the man I'd spent eleven years with, with lawyers between us running up fees neither of us could really afford. I'd seen mentions of things like the C100 Form and court applications while I was searching online, and even reading about that process made me feel tired. I was angry, yes. Hurt, absolutely. But mostly I was exhausted, and I had two small children who still needed dinner and baths and stories and the reassurance that nothing terrible was going to happen to them.

I'd come across the idea of mediation almost by accident. A friend had mentioned it, almost in passing, said a colleague of hers had gone through it after her divorce and found it less bruising than she'd expected. I looked it up that same evening, sat on the bathroom floor after the kids had gone to bed because it was the only room in the flat with a lock, reading on my phone. I didn't really know what I was looking for. Some sign that there was a way through this that didn't involve making everything worse.

What struck me, reading about it, was the idea that mediation wasn't about who was right. It was about working out what came next. That framing, small as it sounds, meant something to me. Because I wasn't interested in winning. I wanted Freya to stop waking up at two in the morning and coming to find me. I wanted Callum to eat his tea again instead of pushing it around the plate. I wanted both of them to feel that their world, which had clearly shifted, still had solid ground underneath it.

Getting my husband to agree to try it was less difficult than I expected. I think he was as tired as I was. We'd both seen what a contested divorce looked like, through friends, and neither of us had any appetite for it. He was cautious, wanted to know more about how it worked before he committed, which was fair. We had a couple of short, stilted phone calls. They were awkward, but they were civil. That in itself felt like a small achievement.

The first meeting was strange. I'd driven there on my own and sat in the car park for ten minutes before going in, listening to the radio without actually hearing it. It was just me and the mediator, a calm woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up on her head. She explained the process clearly, without making me feel foolish for not already knowing how it worked. She said she wasn't there to judge, wouldn't make decisions for us, and that what I said there wouldn't be shared with him unless I agreed. Then she asked me, very simply, what I most hoped to get from the process.

I said I wanted a stable routine for the children. That was it. That was the whole of what I wanted. I'd expected to feel emotional saying it out loud and I did, a little, but there was also something grounding about putting it into words. It made it feel achievable. Like a problem that could be worked on, rather than a disaster to be survived.

Later, when we sat down together for the first joint session, I heard him say he wanted to stay involved, to be a consistent presence for them, to not lose the rhythm of their daily lives. Hearing that for the first time, I felt some of the tension I'd been carrying shift slightly. We weren't fighting about the same territory. We were both trying to reach the same place from different directions.

The early sessions were slow going. There were moments where old frustrations surfaced and we'd have to pull back, let the mediator steer us somewhere more useful. She was good at that, at spotting when a conversation was about to become a row and redirecting it without making either of us feel managed. At one point my husband said something that made me want to snap back, and I watched myself not do it. That surprised me. I think it surprised him too.

We talked through the children's week in detail. Which nights they'd be with me, which with their dad, how handovers would work, what we'd do at Christmas, what happened if one of us was ill. It sounds administrative, and in some ways it was, but it also forced us to think about Freya and Callum's lives concretely, in terms of their mornings and their swimming lessons and their reading books, rather than in terms of our own hurt feelings. That shift in focus helped. It kept pulling us back to what actually mattered.

There was one afternoon, about three sessions in, when we'd been going over the school pickup arrangement for what felt like the fifteenth time and we hadn't been able to agree, and I got home feeling defeated. I sat on the stairs and cried a bit, which I hadn't done in a while. But even then, even in the middle of that, I could feel that something was different from the early weeks. There was a structure now. There were conversations happening. We were, slowly and imperfectly, making progress.

We sorted the child arrangements first, then moved on to the financial side of things. That was harder in different ways, but by then we'd built up a kind of working relationship in the room. We weren't friends. We weren't always kind. But we were talking, and we were trying, and the mediator kept us on track.

Freya asked me one evening, out of nowhere, whether she'd still see Daddy on her birthday. We hadn't finalised that yet and I had to say I wasn't sure but that we were sorting it out, and that she absolutely would. She nodded and went back to her drawing. She seemed to accept that. I think she just needed to know that the adults were thinking about it.

That question, that small, matter-of-fact question from a seven-year-old with a felt-tip pen in her hand, is probably the thing I'll remember most from that whole period. It reminded me why we were doing it the way we were doing it. Not because it was easy. Not because it meant pretending nothing had gone wrong. But because she deserved to know that the people who loved her were doing their best to sort it out without making her life harder than it already was.

We got there, eventually. It took a few months. There were setbacks. But we got there.

I'm not sure I'd describe the experience as positive, exactly. It was still hard. But it was the kind of hard that felt like it was going somewhere, rather than just grinding us both down. And for two kids who needed to know their world wasn't collapsing, that felt like the most important thing I could do.

This story is based on real mediation experiences, with details changed to protect confidentiality.