Let's Make Challenging Conversations Not so Challenging. You in?
We're joining the Substack world—let's talk about talking 👋🏼
Well, this is fun and we haven’t even started.
I’m Katie, and I’ll let my co-collaborator Marta introduce herself in a minute.
I was introduced to Marta by one of my nearest and dearest, Elizabeth Kendig. She is one of those rare people who collects humans the way others collect books and somehow connects all the right ones. If you do not know her, go say hi over at LFQ.
Last year I had just finished my certificate in Conflict Resolution at Mitchell Hamline Law School. (Important note: not a law degree, a very specific program in conflict resolution.) I wasn’t totally sure what I would do with everything I had learned. Communication has always been my love language. It was my undergrad degree back in the early 2000s and when I entered grad school, I started in Organizational Leadership with an emphasis in ADR, alternative dispute resolution. Midway through, I shifted into a Masters in Holistic Health and had to set the ADR work aside. For more than a decade, it gnawed at me. I had taken negotiation, challenging conversations taught by the actual hostage negotiator, and arbitration. I missed all of it.
Picking it back up was not easy, mostly because tuition is no joke. Fast forward to 2023 and after 11 years on ice, I graduated. Enter Elizabeth, who connected me with Marta, an active divorce mediator, and the rest unfolded quickly. Marta had been building a divorce course called “Divorce, Do it Differently.” She had written the whole thing end to end. I stepped in to modularize it, make updates, and get it built into a site we could share with the world. Not long after that, The Bend was born.
Thanks Katie. Hi everyone, I’m Marta.
As you just read, our partnership truly felt like timing and stars aligning.
My mediation path started about 16 years ago when I made the hard decision to divorce my husband. We had two little kids at the time, now giant college-age ones, and even though I was clear it was the right decision, it felt incredibly lonely. Divorce was still something people whispered about. Both of us came from divorced families. While divorce is never easy, his early childhood experience carried trauma we were determined not to repeat. So we put our heads down and worked hard to co-create a home where our boys could thrive.
About a year later I started dating the man who would become my husband. He had two kids of his own and we fell in love. Unfortunately his ex was not thrilled, which created years of turbulence in our home. Firsthand, I watched the difference between positive co-parenting and conflict-parenting and what each path does to children. That was the moment I knew we needed to start talking about this more openly as a society.
I researched every way I could support families through divorce in a healthier way and landed on mediation. I received my Rule 114 Neutral certification in 2019. Katie and I met soon after and here we are, building Monarch Mediation and now The Bend together.
Divorce is rough. It is not fun. It is also not something everyone goes through. Which is exactly why we wanted to take our skills into this space. We want to share tools, perspectives, and a little Dear Abby-style Q and A to help you navigate the hard stuff. You can stay fully anonymous. We welcome your stories, whether your conflict is with a partner, kids, parents, boss, co-parent, or even a best friend.
Tell us what is going on. We will bring the mediation lens. Together we will learn a lot.
Oh, and send us those challenging questions you want us to tackle. We are all ears.