new-fangled

Well, so much for my luck with Newsweek’s embedding tool. Here’s the link to the very sweet video essay (I’m mixed on whether those two words should really be allowed side by side) by a 14-year old Brooklynite who has grown up living equally in both parents’ homes, ten blocks apart. She says that though her parents probably had to pretend to like each other in the beginning, but today they are among each other’s best friends.

I continue to believe that divorce can and should be done differently, and that there’s a whole group of people out there who fly under the usual radar of acrimony and deceit, and who yearn for models of “good” divorces. As I wrote to Alex’s mother tonight, it appears to be possible for two people to continue to parent really well together, despite not being each other’s ideal partner.

I had a somewhat comical, bittersweet vision of this through the kids  tonight when they were playing at the sand table during a therapy session. Bea pointed to her winged goddess and said she was the queen, and that Thomas’ “Scorpion” warrior was the king. “But they’re divorced,” said Thomas. “Oh, right,” said Bea, pausing for only a moment to come up with a solution: “They don’t get along any more, but they go drink tea and coffee together, because that’s what divorced people do.”

The “not get along” part pinged my heart, but the fact that she has parents who even in her pretend world can still sip caffeine together felt pretty good.

legal angst

Back when it was still really hot out, I went to see a lawyer. One of my mom’s friends, a lawyer herself who is twice divorced, recommended this woman. “She is the best,” she said simply, adding that she’s won the best family law award for our state several times in a row. So I went. I was overwhelmed just going and felt nervous because I didn’t know what to ask. Like a kid at school, I felt I should be better prepared.

It turns out that she asked all the questions, writing everything down longhand on a legal pad. To many of my answers, especially regarding our lack of  income or Alex’s plans to go to Africa, she nodded her head disparagingly, as though I told  her that we subsist on garbage. “You have to get a job,”  she intoned. The fact that  I have about 5 freelance gigs at once clearly didn’t cut it with this woman. Given Alex’s poor earning powers in recent years, her mind was also rummaging through possibilities to locate a loop, find a time in his history when he was making more money and argue that that should be the bar from which we decide things. All I wanted was to understand what was going and what would happen in the months ahead as we proceeded with a divorce – something that can’t even occur when Alex is out of the country and thus is on perpetual hold. When I tried to ask, I got a very fast answer that floated well over my head and landed somewhere on the bookcase behind me. I might as well have asked my mechanic for a 30-second explanation of my exhaust system.