By Laura Stavoe
The wooden chairs were connected, facing the same direction, theater style. There was a screen up front, a laptop open on the podium. The blue screen read The Legal Process, and below was a computer-generated version of the balanced scale. A poster board propped up to one side of the screen spelled out the stages of grief, like steps leading down to darkness: Shock, Denial, Anger… There were more steps than I remembered from the early eighties, when grief became a process rather than an emotion.
Judge Karen introduced the instructor. She was halfway through before I registered the oak banister, the juror’s box, and seats off beyond the screen. It dawned on me that I was in a courtroom. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I entered the stone courthouse myself and placed my keys in the tray as I walked through the metal detector at the foot of the staircase. The night guard asked whether I carried mace while he pulled items out of my green book bag: water bottle, empty Altoids tin, chrome Matchbox car.
All of us here had been court ordered to attend the evening session, Focus on the Children. It was not unlike the substance abuse classes people must attend if they get a DUI, not unlike traffic school in California where for seventy-five dollars and eight hours on a Saturday you can avoid having points added to your driving record. Only our transgression was getting divorced, or, more specifically, having children and then getting divorced. We would be allowed to get divorced as long as we took this class first. Greg had attended the course the previous Thursday; this week was my turn.
As Judge Karen—red blazer, navy slacks, white blouse, gold hoop earrings—explained that her involvement with the Focus on the Children class was the best part of her job, I felt a stabbing pain in the right side of my back, just below the rib cage. The week before, I had felt the symptoms of a urinary tract infection. I hadn’t suffered one since I was a teenager, but it’s not a feeling you forget. I’d drunk a gallon of cranberry juice and about five gallons of water a day since then and thought I’d kicked it. But at two that morning, I’d woken up to sweat and incredible back pain. I had tossed and turned and paced until the urgent care facility opened at eight.
“It’s a bad one,” the doctor had said, “Lots of blood and pus. Sometimes, if you let it go too long, or just have bad luck, it travels up to the kidneys.” He’d considered a trip to the emergency room for an IV but instead had written a prescription for large white pills. For a few hours afterwards I’d felt worse. I’d tried to drive to work, in part because I was afraid to be home alone while I was so sick, but I’d had to pull over to the side of the road because I’d been shaking so badly with chills and fever. I’d called in to work from my cell phone and then had called Greg and asked him if he could pick up our twin sons from kindergarten. I’d spent the rest of the day in bed groaning. I couldn’t see straight. Finally, around four, I’d called the court to ask if I could take the class some other time. The lady had said yes, but that our court date would then have to be postponed, probably for at least three months. I’d dragged myself into the bathroom and braced myself while taking a shower.
I thought, Wow, I really want to get divorced. After two years of going back and forth, stalling, letting him stall, making brief attempts at reconciliation, I was so desperate to finish that I was willing to sit in a courtroom for three hours while my vital organs were giving out.
There was a time when I would have said the papers don’t matter, the ritual didn’t matter. Love is love and separation is separation and when it’s over it’s over, no matter what the papers say.
It’s true that not signing won’t keep a marriage alive, but I learned that it would keep you living in a tomb with the stench of the corpse. I longed for the sun. I wanted to finish before winter solstice, before the light started returning. This year, when the earth turned, I wanted to turn with it.
Judge Karen removed her glasses. She wanted to tell us one more thing before she turned the class over to Sue, the instructor. “The court dockets are full during the holiday season. Emotions escalate and people want judges to decide Christmas for them. But the judges don’t love your children the way you do,” she said. “Don’t ruin Christmas by dragging it through court.” She smiled again and told us to ask questions, to participate. It was an interactive class, she said, and we had a lot to contribute. Then she walked out the mahogany double doors of the courtroom.
The night before, Greg and I had exploded over Christmas. I paced the kitchen floor with the phone in one hand, my other over my back where my kidneys ached, trying to argue and cry in a tone soft enough not to wake the boys. It was like the old days. We took it to the mats and both came out bloodied, but with nothing decided.Sue walked to the front. She was blonde, with very blue eyes, about fifty, plump. She wore pink nail polish. She talked in a very sweet tone and told us that she wished they’d had Focus classes when she was divorcing many years ago. “I would’ve done a lot of things differently,” she nodded. “But, live and learn,” she added cheerily. Sue told us that we were welcome to stand and stretch if we needed to, or to use the bathrooms as long as we returned afterwards. She confided that they’d had to ask for special permission for us to bring food into the courtroom and asked us to please clean up our mess. She told us we would have a break at 8:30 and the class would end promptly at 9:30.
A hand shot up in the second row. A woman, maybe eighteen years old, with fine blonde hair said, “I thought it ended at nine. I have a two-month old at home who is still nursing.”
“No, it’s always nine-thirty.” Sue leaned back on the left heel of her tealpump and listed the girl’s options. “You can get your form signed at break and come back next week for the second half, you can stay for the whole thing, or you can leave now and reschedule.” I was reminded that next Thursday the seats would be filled by a whole new crowd of divorcing parents.
The young woman stayed in her seat.
Sue asked us to raise our hand if we thought we were attending a parenting class. We could tell by her tone that raising our hand would be the wrong answer. None of us did, but I wanted to shout out, “I hope so.” I could use a parenting class. I’d read all the childcare books about pregnancy and the first few years, but recently I’d gotten behind and had begun to feel that I’d lost where my sons were developmentally. As long as I was here, I’d love to hear some of the practical parenting advice that I used to find comforting in books written by T. Berry Brazelton. Something grounded in research and common sense.
But Sue told us that she was not here to tell us how to parent our children, that we knew how to parent our children because—and here she dropped to a whisper—no one loves your children like you do. I looked around at the group of us that Sue knew were good parents. We looked like a crowd you might see at a train station. Normally when you take a class there is a certain social group you’re mingling with, people who are into computers or kayaking or crafts. But here, nothing unified us, exceptmaybe an air of distance, a stoicism we carried into the courtroom. All of us would have rather been somewhere else.
I would have rather been sleeping. I reminded myself that some of my cynicism had to do with the ache in my back and my head buzzing with fever. A few students took Judge Karen’s encouragement to heart and contributed. One woman, for instance, introduced herself as the Jerry Springer Lady. She then explained the story that we, by circumstance, were court ordered to listen to: Her soon-to-be ex-husband had a second family, a secret family he had started with the foster child he and the Jerry Springer Lady had taken in as a troubled teen. Now the troubled teen was no longer a teen, and he wanted a divorce so he could marry her and raise their two young children not in secret. The Jerry Springer Lady’s own sons, ages seventeen and twenty-three, were angry—six months behind bars and fifteen grand in legal fees angry. This middle-aged woman crocheted rapid-fire fast during the class. She raised her hand often, sometimes to rant, other times to drop platitudes meant to help those of us younger and less wise.
A wiry man wearing a tank top let us know, in a gravelly voice, that he’d already been here once, but he had to return because his ex-wife wanted more money. “She found out my new wife has a good job,” he said. “Now she’s getting greedy.”
The nursing mother talked about her parents’ divorce rather than her own. I remembered that when I was a teenager and I was around a group of older adults, I identified with their children rather than with them. Her shifting to that role here was unsettling. She told us that when she was six, the judge put her on the stand. She liked making the decision; it made her feel important. She said this as one of the bullets on the screen highlighted the DON’TS of Divorce … DON’T ASK THE CHILD WHERE HE WANTS TO LIVE.
Sue always agreed with a contributor in a way that offered closure. She said, “Sometimes teenagers are very angry; sometimes ex-wives are greedy; sometimes the child does know best,” nodding. Then she’d move on to the next bullet, and I was left feeling a bit embarrassed for the contributor who, after all, was taking to heart Judge Karen’s invitation to participate.
I sipped from my water bottle and then stared straight ahead and stayed quiet like most of the other fifty or sixty parents in the room. A few people checked watches and text messages and papers in leather brief cases, paying Sue as much attention as the average airplane passenger pays the flight attendant during a safety talk.
I used peripheral vision to spot people who I thought I might like if we met somewhere else, say, at a play group or even the grocery store. The woman two rows up with soft brown hair curled under, a lime green sweater, and a silver locket around her neck. The man three seats down wearing a flannel shirt and wire rim glasses who looked bookish and outdoorsy at once. The woman across the aisle wearing jeans and nice dark brown leather shoes with a small buckle on the side. Sighting these people briefly made me feel better. As if somehow natural fiber and a sweet locket meant that we would return someday to being our genuine selves. We could just as easily have been from happy families. Intact families, I’m supposed to say. The LL Bean Kids catalogue was still likely to come to all our homes.
Sue told us about the legal process. The blue screen in front of the courtroom read: Filing Focus Class Mediation Trial. Greg and I had finished the mediation over a year before, and I couldn’t figure out what made these four simple steps seem so complicated. We seemed to have confused the stages of grief with the legal process—Anger, Denial, Marriage Counseling, Rage, Mediation, Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Denial, Rage, Focus Class. Now, even my closest friends said, “I thought you already were divorced,” when I told them the court date was set for the next Wednesday.
Some people brought their new partners to the class. Sue asked all the visitors to raise their hands and when they did, she commended them. “It says something when you are willing to pay thirty dollars to take a class you don’t have to take,” she said.
I was not in a serious relationship. I had just started something that I called, when I was in a joking mood, Relationship Lite. I could keep it confined to the weekend nights that Greg had the kids. I thought of how children change everything, even things you’d never predict. Here I was feeling morally superior to all the people in the room who brought their new significant others, because I had chosen a relationship based on sex instead of love.
It wasn’t all that different than one based on love. I smiled when I thought of him. Like zirconium, it had the same glow, the same sheen as the real thing. Only it wouldn’t be as painful when it slipped down the drain.
I thought about calling him when class was out. Even though my kidneys hurt and the last thing I wanted wassex. No, I thought, not the last thing. The last thing I wanted was to feel anything.
Sue was trying to make us feel. “There is this little girl in the video you’re about to see who says her parents got divorced because she wasn’t obedient. It’s just so sad.”
The little girl resembled Jon Benet Ramsey without make-up. She looked three but talked as though she were seven. Next, a teenage boy with freckles, wearing a wool sweater, told us that parents don’t realize the pain divorce causes their kids. He said with the sincerity of a student class president, “Adults need to listen to their children.”
After the video Sue asked, “Did you notice the little girl who thought her parents got divorced because she wasn’t obedient?” She seemed to have forgotten that she brought her to our attention before the video, reminding me that Sue taught this class three Thursdays a month to three courtrooms of divorcing parents.
“Children think they cause divorce. It’s just how children are,” Sue whispered. “Divorce breaks their little hearts.”
I began to realize that what we were attending was the divorce version of the STD film in high school health class; the images that flashed before us were the boils we could expect to see on our children’s psyches. We were hearing the metal doors clang shut during Scared Straight, or seeing the mutilated car in front of the school during DARE week. We were the adolescents bracing ourselves against it, chins jutted forward, eyes unresponsive. We were busy not letting the images do their work. I blamed the tears that crawled up my nose and throat on the kidney infection. I pounded them down.
I remembered being in labor, sitting in the hospital lobby with its Starbucks coffee stand and tan chairs, mauve fake flowers on the cube coffee table, waiting for Greg to park the car before we would walk up to labor and delivery. I’d never known pain like that before, but there I was in a public place with people whirring in and out of the doors, all acting normal and professional. I’d stifled screams. I’d sweated through them, felt my eyes glaze over. My twin pregnancy had made me look like I should have delivered months ago. Still I’d tried to breathe quietly, not to double over when a contraction hit, to sit and look nonchalantly at the fake flowers, the elevator doors, the clock above the information desk.
It had occurred to me, either then or later, how many people were at the hospital because someone they loved was sick or dying or giving birth. Traumatic things take place in hospitals, life-changing things, and there we all were following the decorum of a business conference.
Sue flipped the blue screen to Visitation.
I’d left the marriage so I could feel alive again. The irony was that I’d had to deaden myself to survive the process, at least temporarily—I hoped temporarily. I no longer read poetry. I listened to talk radio instead of music. I chose a relationship based on sex instead of love because I could not bear to go too deep, but I didn’t want to be alone all the time.
We practiced safe sex, as though there were such a thing.
The woman in the lime sweater asked Sue if she had a good way to refer to the two houses. “I don’t want to keep calling them Mommy’s house and Daddy’s house. She’s only two. I want her to know they are her houses.”
“Try, ‘You will be home with Daddy this weekend,’ ” Sue suggested, then she looked at her watch. “Time for a break,” she said. “Candy machines on the basement floor, pay phones next to the bathrooms.”
I was living with the constant dilemma of having to pee badly, but knowing it was going to burn like hell when I did. I decided I couldn’t put it off until the end of class. When I returned, people loitered around the literature table in the hall for the final six minutes of break. No one bought any of the books, written by psychologists and social workers, but a few of us took the free pamphlets that bulleted six warning signs of childhood depression or explained how to help youngsters adjust to stepfamilies.
After break, I detected universal relief that the seat where the nursing mom had sat was empty. Divorce from a Child’s Perspective, the screen read.
I looked at the sea of parents holding blue folders on their laps, staring at the monitor or the ceiling or the floor. I tried to see who responded when Sue told us that children often demonstrate regressive behavior. “Johnny will wet the bed though he has been potty trained for months, Susie will start biting her playmates. These are normal responses to divorce.” I looked to the woman two rows up in the lime green sweater with the silver locket. Shouldn’t we be wailing? I wanted to ask her. Shouldn’t she and I and the woman behind me who keeps asking questions about teenagers and anger be doubled over with sobs?
With labor, I thought, there is at least a fitting end, blood and soft skin tearing, tiny lungs coughing out mucus and drawing air for the first time. Screams are expected, and there is a slippery cord wound tight with veins for the doctor to sever. At least the mess to clean up is tangible andsloppy. And afterwards … afterwards you are left with something to hang onto. Their skin looks transparent, their eyes wet and searching, but they are stronger than strong. They have survived darkness and suffering and their world collapsing. The warmth you hold against each breast has a beating heart.
But now, I would return to this courtroom on Wednesday afternoon and sit in the oak box next to a judge—a man I’d never met before who would remind me of an old Irish appellate court judge I took a class from back when I wanted to be a lawyer. Greg would be at work. My sons would be in kindergarten. I would spell my name and the names of my sons for my lawyer. He would ask me a string of questions, and I would answer yes, or that is correct for variety. Then, as we walked down the courthouse steps, my lawyer would hand me eighteen sheets of twenty-pound paper covered in New Courier font that dictated the dissolution of my marriage, who got to keep the house (me), who got to keep the savings (Greg), and where my children would sleep each night.
Suddenly, I knew the answer to the lime green sweater lady’s question about what to call the houses. The street name, I thought. We referred to houses by which street each is on, saying to our sons, “your Devonwood house” or “your Maple Court house.” I raised my hand without considering that I’d now be one of the contributors.
Sue paused for a moment and then looked to me apologetically. “We really have to keep moving if we’re going to finish on time. But I’ll be around for a while afterwards to answer questions.” I shrunk back into the wooden seat.
Sue clicked past the screens ondomestic violence, substance abuse, the stages of grief. She stopped on the frame for child support guidelines for the state of Idaho and said she’d promised us an explanation of the code. She flashed through a series of alternatives—joint custody, sole custody, a 70/30 split, ratios of income and who has the children more overnights. She did the math on the screen and came up with a series of support payments ranging from $73 to $840. Then she told us that all the information was in the blue folder if we’d like to go over it in more detail.
At 9:30 she told us we were free to leave. “Hang on to the yellow sheet of paper,” she reminded us. “It’s your proof of attendance. Drop the evaluation form in the box on the way out.”
I forgot about the evaluation form in my blue folder and had to sit for a few minutes after Sue released us, checking the middle box—”somewhat helpful”—without reading the questions. The last question was whether we resented coming here. I lied, checked the no box, and walked out the double mahogany doors, down the three flights of marble steps, dizzy from fever, feeling the ache in my back on each step, shoes clicking quickly, like skittering stones, like glass.
I walked away from the bright light above the entrance, across the courthouse lawn to my car parked in the dark under a long tunnel of trees. I answered the message on my cell phone from my friend, whom I don’t know what to call really, who would have candles lit when I arrived, who would love my body if not me until morning.
It was Thursday, but two blocks south of the courthouse, the city streets were aglow with light and motion like a weekend. I remembered the radio DJ announcing the treelighting ceremony downtown. Above the city, atop the U.S. Bank building, strands of yellow lights draped over a giant cone, forming the highest point in the city. The sidewalks were full of people walking back to cars, holding hands, brushing shoulders, walking arm and arm. Sometimes their children ran up ahead.
I drove away from the lights to the darkened streets on the north end. My head ached. My chest and back and abdomen throbbed. I thought of my twin sons asleep by now and of how it was too late to call them at their father’s house to say goodnight. I thought of Christmas coming and wondered how I would find the energy to get a tree this year. And if I did, how I’d manage to unwrap the ornaments from old newsprint and hand them to my sons to hang without seeing them myself, without feeling the weight of loss hanging from a hundred branches.
Author’s Note: I feel compelled to mention that these classes include lots of important information and are probably a good thing (or at least better than nothing) when it comes to giving parents tools for helping kids through divorce. What is clear to me now is that judgment (including my own) is still an inextricable part of divorce in our culture and that it can stymie the grief process. We spend lots of time studying whether divorce hurts kids when we already know the answer. Divorce happens anyway. In my ideal world fewer people would ask divorcing parents why they are getting divorced and more would bring over the metaphoric casserole. This essay was written at a time when my old methods for avoiding grief fell apart. Eventually it dawned on me that if I was going to help my kids, I’d have to feel the loss too.
Laura Stavoe’s essays have appeared in Ladies Home Journal, Prevention, Parenting, Parents, FamilyFun, Mothering, BrainChild, among other publications.
Brain, Child (Fall 2005)