As I told my attorney when I left his office after round two with the judge yesterday, I would love to see him go to trial -- just as long as its not on my case. The pretrial was more than enough for me. There are few experiences in my life that have been anywhere near as icky as sitting on a cold, hard bench listening while people who barely know me try to convince someone else who barely knows me what my life -- at least my financial life -- should look like. What he should pay for, what I should be doing or not doing, where we should all be living, how much I should reasonably spend on food and clothing for my fifteen year old daughter. Guess I shouldn't have blown my wad on all those bras the other day.
It was my soon to be ex who finally seemed to get visibly fed up with all the line item nickel and diming. While our attorneys went at each other, he silently walked over to my side of the courtroom and we chatted amicably about how we would work out the minute details of a temporary support agreement. We probably could have ducked out for a cup of coffee, maybe even a quick nosh, and returned, unnoticed, before anyone turned around and realized the shocking violation of protocol and seating arrangements.
The judge looked like a proud parent, so happy that we were acting like two human beings in our fifties who have raised three children together and shared, well, a whole bunch of other stuff along the way (and I refer, here, not to tangible marital assets but rather to a quarter century of laughter and tears and accomplishments and disappointments, the good stuff and the bad stuff, the stuff that life is made of).
Maybe the matrimonial bar is onto something. Maybe its members know that the only way to get the litigants to get things done is to make them spectators at their own horror show. The Marital Dissolution Follies. Having your life reduced to a balance sheet, discussed by virtual strangers as if the whole thing was one arms length business transaction, well it really makes you think. Sure, getting back together is not a viable alternative, but there's gotta be a better takeaway than some stupid, arbitrary number (which, not surprisingly, seems to always fall right smack in the middle of where the two sides started).
We've both done some shitty things. People change, people grow apart, and, yes, people hurt the ones they're supposed to love. But he's the Irish Catholic guy who went ballistic when they forgot to deliver the chopped liver for our son's bris. He's the guy who delivered a eulogy at my father's funeral when I couldn't speak. And, as the judge pointed out, we have somehow managed to raise three wonderful, thriving children. Yes, we're both bitter and have managed to hate each other with such passion in the past few years it's surprising we can be in a room together. It's complicated. But how do you measure any of that with a simple arithmetic equation, a regular old balance sheet, prepared by someone else, no less.
As if the experience wasn't sufficiently surreal and nauseating, we ended the pretrial with the court reporter asking each of us -- just as a formality -- to raise our right hands and swear everything we had said in court that day was the truth. "I do," we both said in unison. Isn't that the simple phrase that got us into the mess we're now trying desperately to get out of? My soon to be ex and I avoided looking at each other, for fear of cracking up (at least on my end). I decided yelling mazel tov and breaking into a hora would not be appropriate. Sometimes I can be really good at reading situations.
I'd like to think that maybe it's not so interesting after all, day in and day out, for the bailiff. The guy who no doubt makes a lot less money than a lot of the folks entering his courtroom, and who can't figure out for the life of him what these people are all bitching about. Entertaining? Possibly. But I'm guessing it's just sad.
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