What Happens When You Use a Coparenting App for a Decade?
You Build a Better One.

"It wasn't one text that broke me. It was the ten-thousandth."

From 2011 to 2016, I was trapped in endless texts and emails. Weekly reminders about cutting the kids' fingernails. Articles forwarded about screen time, health advice, antibiotic use. Messages questioning who I might be dating, whether I should have a dog, how I should be living my life.

Every conversation, no matter where it started, ended the same way: with the underlying message that I needed to do things his way. I felt gaslit. Bullied. Constantly second-guessing parenting decisions I knew were right.

It wasn't about the kids. It was about keeping control.

Coparenting felt less like coordination and more like walking on eggshells. Every notification made my stomach drop. Every exchange—no matter how mundane—became complicated. I started seeing a therapist just to learn how to navigate it all.

Finally, my lawyer said what I'd been afraid to admit: "You need a parenting coordinator."

Getting one required a judge's order. More paperwork. More money. More months of my life spent in a system that moved slowly while I tried to hold everything together.

But when that parenting coordinator—a family law attorney who'd seen it all—finally reviewed our communication history, her recommendation was clear: "You're using Our Family Wizard. Both of you. That's not optional."

We put structure in place, and I felt relieved.

Having everything timestamped and documented created accountability. The calendar kept us from the endless "I thought you had them this weekend" debates. It was... functional.

But functional isn't the same as good

The thing no one tells you about coparenting tools

Our Family Wizard was built for families like mine—high-conflict situations where every interaction needs a paper trail. And that makes sense. That's a real need.

The structure was valuable, but the feel for me was adversarial. There were frustrating moments—automated warnings about my tone when I was responding to genuinely harsh messages, simply because I'd quoted what was said. Little things that added up over time and made me think: there has to be a better way to design this.

I couldn't organize messages the way I needed to. I couldn't flag important things for my own records without creating workarounds. And every time I wanted to find something—a receipt, a specific conversation, a decision we'd made months ago—I felt like I was excavating a digital landfill.

I'd complain to friends: "There has to be a better app out there, right?"

But I never looked. Because we were mandated to use OFW. And honestly, I was just trying to survive.

Learning to set boundaries (and getting really good at AI prompts)

Over the years, I got better at the game. I learned how to set boundaries for my own mental health. I learned when a response was necessary and when silence was the better choice. I started using AI to help me craft professional, emotion-free responses to messages that used to make me want to scream into the void.

I got good at coparenting in a way I never wanted to have to be good at.

And life moved forward. I met Chris in 2014, and we got married in 2016. We blended our families—suddenly we had three kids in three different schools, two full-time jobs, two cats, two dogs, and a house that never seemed to stay clean for more than five minutes. Life was beautifully chaotic.

Our kids grew. They're 16, 17, and 20 now. The coparenting battles quieted down (mostly). OFW just became part of the routine—like paying car insurance or remembering to check the mail. Not great, but... fine.

Until it wasn't.

The year that reset everything

In 2025, I lost my job due to a reduction in force. Five months of unemployment after spending years as a senior talent advisor in the corporate tech world.

And something strange happened during those five months: my brain reset.

I'd been so buried in routine, so reliant on working for someone else, that I'd forgotten what I actually wanted. I'd always wanted to help people going through tough situations. Years earlier, I'd even created a website called "And Still She Persisted"—a resource for people navigating divorce, separation, grief, and difficult coparenting dynamics. It was a labor of love.

But when my ex and his lawyer took aim at it, I took it down. I let fear win.

During those five months of unemployment, I realized I didn't want to let fear win anymore.

Chris and I had always talked about building something together someday. But "someday" is often meaningless.

Then one day, Chris just said: "I'm going to start building this."

No grand announcement. No business plan. Just... decision.

When I asked him what suddenly lit a fire under him, he just calmly said, "I realize I want to retire someday."

We're in our 50s. We have our 401(k)s, our savings, and a mortgage that'll be paid off in another decade. But something about that year—the job loss, the reset, the realization that time doesn't wait—made us both understand: if not now, when?

Building the app I wish I'd had

Chris isn't a developer. He's brilliant—one of those math-and-engineering minds that can solve problems I can't even understand. He'd never built software before, but understood coding to a certain extent.

So it was just him, a laptop, and an unshakable belief that this could work. I was his sounding board—the person who'd actually lived with OFW for nearly a decade, who knew what worked and what didn't.

We started asking better questions:

• What if coparenting tools weren't just for high-conflict situations?What if they were designed for all families in transition—the ones trying to do this peacefully, the ones who just need help with logistics, the ones who want to focus on their kids instead of fighting with their ex?
• What if kids had a voice?What if they could see their own schedule, check in about how they're feeling, message their parents directly? What if we gave children navigating two homes some sense of agency in their own lives?
• What if it didn't require both parents to join?What if you could use the full platform on your own, tracking everything you need to track, and if your co-parent eventually joined, great. But you weren't stuck waiting for someone else's cooperation to get organized.
• What if the pricing wasn't punitive?What if families paid one price together, instead of being nickel-and-dimed per parent?
• What if the design was... calm?What if using a coparenting tool didn't feel like bracing for conflict every time you logged in?

Those questions became CoParent Compass.

Why we're building this (and why I'm telling you)

I'm not sharing this story because I think my experience is unique. I'm sharing it because I know it's not.

There are thousands of parents out there right now standing in school pickup lines, staring at their phones, wondering how something as simple as coordinating their kids' lives became this hard.

There are parents who've been told they need to use a specific tool because their situation is "high conflict," and they're stuck paying for something that doesn't quite fit.

There are kids shuttling between homes who feel like they have no control over their own schedules, no way to tell their parents how they're really feeling.

And there are parents who just want to focus on being good parents—who want the logistics to fade into the background so they can actually be present for their kids.

That's who we're building this for.

Not because Chris and I are tech gurus or business masterminds. We're just two people in our 50s who finally realized that "someday" needed to become "today."

We're building CoParent Compass because after ten years of using tools that were good enough, I finally asked myself: What if there was something better?

An invitation

We're still in the early stages. Chris is fixing bugs. I'm learning how to market something I deeply believe in (turns out that's harder than it sounds when you're an introvert). We're inviting friends and family to test it first, then opening it up to others who want to help us shape this into something truly useful.

If you're navigating coparenting and feeling like the tools out there don't quite get it—or if you're someone who just wants to help families in transition find a calmer way forward—I'd love to have you along for this journey.

Because here's what I've learned after all these years:

You can't control your ex. You can't control the court system. You can't control how long it takes for the hard parts to get easier.

But you can control the tools you use. You can choose something that supports you instead of adding to the stress.

And maybe you can build something better than what existed before.

That's what we're trying to do.