Although it's a generally accepted maxim that you should do as little as possible to disrupt children's lives after a divorce and strive to maintain the same residence, the same school, the same friends, the same household stuff, I'm not sure it makes sense to do this at the expense of your own sanity. If you are consistently losing it because you are surrounded by old demons, so too will your children.
I can't forget feeling, as I was pulling away from Vancouver harbour towards my new home, that I was leaving a huge chunk of pain sitting right there on the dock. As the space between the ferry and the shoreline increased I had the greatest sense of liberation! I had no idea what I was heading for but was I ever empowered by the visual image of leaving my old life behind! That said, of course problems and issues surrounding divorce don't just vanish with geographical change. What did change was my ability to cope with it all. And that was the beginning of the end of the old bad life.
If you can swing it financially to stay exactly where you are after a divorce, perhaps consider a little bit of ritual purging. Get rid of things that remind you of an old self or bring back bad memories; replace them with things that make you feel empowered and that remind you that you are a new person, with a new role, starting a whole new chapter of your life. You are now running a single parent household and that is a perfectly acceptable alternative to what you were doing before. Make the space reflect that. Make the space YOURS.
If you can't swing staying in the same place for financial or other reasons, and you have to move, don't sweat it - embrace it! It can be a life saving change that you can turn to yours and your childrens' advantage. As I tried to illustrate in the first few graphs of this post, you will probably find yourself healing in ways you never imagined.
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