http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/business/the-divorce-hotel-a-true-weekend-getaway.html

It seems an entrepreneurial young man from the Netherlands, Jim Halfens, (who, we learn, has never been divorced himself) has resurrected the Reno Divorce in concept if not exact practice.  He proposes that people seeking to divorce pay between 2-10k to shack up (separately) in a hotel, meet with some lawyers and mediators over a weekend, hash out the details of their divorce, and return home papers in hand on Sunday evening.  Fabulous!  As we know, everything new is old and this concept has a sexy history grounded in Reno, Nevada and other odd places where the divorce laws were lenient.  I am a huge fan of stealing a good idea and improving on it.  Destination divorces like destination weddings.  Hot, hot, hot.  Except, I can’t quite accept that it’s a good idea.

Let me start by querying: is there ANY form of divorce more romantic, more appealing, or more convenient than the Reno quickie?  Hell, no!  Wasn’t that what young starlets and people of means did when they were over their spouse or hot to marry Liz Taylor before she found another husband-elect?  Jump in a plane?  Set up residency in one of Reno’s hotels and wait out the six week residency requirement?  Come on – that is delicious.  (And, please, hook me up with one of those pill box hats with the little, itty, bitty veil in front because it’s just awesome and I’m sure essential to getting a Reno divorce.)  I bet one could even find something to do while hanging in Reno and basking in the decadency of impending freedom.  I don’t need to tell you that Reno had some other efficient solutions to legally complicated behavior.    So, Mr. Halfens proposes that as we try to McIffy everything, why not start with one of the most painful, tedious and self-consuming things, shove it into a hotel suite and hope it emerges from the luxury emotional grinder neatly packaged for legal consumption by a court of competent jurisdiction?

At the turn of the twentieth century, divorces were hard to come by (divorces are still hard to come by, but now what is required is patience, not proving your spouse did it with the nanny/neighbor/bestfriend/chiropractor in open court so you could meet the requirements of adultery grounds).  Whisking off to Reno made way more sense than enduring years of tedium, or a big court battle.  But, as anyone who has been through it will tell you, the longevity of the divorce process does provide the time to not make a complete ass of yourself and to pull yourself together.

In New York and the greater metropolitan area, it takes a divorcing couple about 18-24 months to go from filing of Complaint to Divorce Decree.  This time is essential, I argue, because:

1) You need time to have an affair with a personal trainer or other ridiculously hot but ill-suited person while you are still technically married and cannot do something completely stupid like marry him/her.  You’re all rolling your eyes, but I suspect the numbers are pretty high on this one (what I need is data, folks, so if someone can shoot me some data that would be rockin’).  Even moi – bright, intelligent, not ugly, and emotionally pretty stable – had to get it on with a hot dude for a spell after I separated from my husband.  In plain terms, a person is too undersexed, too emotionally needy and too desperate not to fall into the wrong bed….I mean, arms.  Although my particular post-split twit was a nice guy, he was completely inappropriate for me in every way.  He was ….. drumroll….. a personal trainer (yeah, baby), a former Olympian, smoking hot and he had surf boards as home decor.  (Nope, I am not making that up – some things are too good and true.)  He had somehow (echo part about surf board decor) made it to 48 without marrying, had no kids and thought it was cute I had a couple.  His day revolved around his workouts and watching ski and surf videos.

The brilliant part about enjoying this little moment while still married is that I was not stupid enough to introduce him to my kids or move him in, mostly because though separated I was still someone else’s wife (thank God!).  I was positive that I was in love with Post-Split (ok, maybe it was just his penis), but, of course, I wasn’t.  Under the Reno model, the six weeks in the desert with proximity to fast and loose women (and/or men) probably took care of this problem very nicely.  By the time you flew home, divorce decree in hand, you’d probably already scratched that long-suffering itch.  Mr. Halfens underestimates the need to scratch while unable to marry.  Think of what it might have done for Liz…

2) You need time to sob until the snot rolls down your face and contemplate what the f*ck you’re doing.  Going back to my claim that I’m emotionally stable (Lexapro helps), I can confirm that the sobbing was ugly, snotty and protracted.  Especially on the nights I didn’t have my kids when I would return to my way-too-big-for-just-me rental house and sit in the middle of the room and just sob.  (And keep in mind, I was the one who filed for divorce and moved out.)  I wanted the divorce badly.  I wanted myself and my life back and I wanted out of my marriage, but I did not want to lose my family.  It’s the collateral that you cannot contemplate when you file for divorce.  Divorce seems like a neat and effective solution until you’re sitting alone in a house that isn’t your home.

We all need time to come to terms with divorce.  Some people can’t even contemplate that divorce is a possibility.  I had a girlfriend (‘had’ being important part of the story), who accused me of having an affair with her husband.  (I hadn’t – I probably spoke to him more than she liked, but obviously things were rocky and I didn’t know it.)  As she was having her little princess meltdown, suggesting I’d been not only unfaithful to my husband, but had served the dual role of home-wrecker, she bellowed, “I won’t give him a divorce!”  Big, pregnant pause.  Ohmygoodness…. sister/girlfriend still thought it was 1880 and she could just say, “no.”  Wow.  I could almost see her stomping her foot in front of some judge: “I said No!”  This is only to suggest that we all need some time to wrap our heads around not being married.  And sometimes the time it takes to actually get divorced aids the other party, which aids you.  Getting everyone to a comfortable place is clutch to getting happy again.

3) You need time to digest that the person you married is not the person you thought, is capable of being a completely insane maniac with no scruples or moral compass and then … you need the time to get over it.  Divorce does not bring out the best in people – in fact, other than a worldwide complete lack of food, turning us all into one big Hunger Game, it might be the worst moment ever.  Try to imagine my shock when my mild-mannered, sweet, charming, publicly supportive and benevolent husband turned into a raving lunatic filing motion after motion about my bad mothering, horrid family and loose ways.   (That’s the record scratching sound in the distance.)  Claims went from I didn’t serve enough protein to the boys at breakfast to my father was a statutory rapist because I was born when my mother was 17 years old.  (Look, we all have some white trash fabulosity in our family tree, but the reality was my parents were married for almost 20 years and raised three competent, educated children.)  I was having affairs with neighbors (our only neighbor was a 300 lbs farmer with a handlebar moustache, so that was a little concerning) and I ‘abandoned’ our children when I moved out of the house (even though I’d seen them according to a normal 50/50 parenting schedule ever since).  He was Regan in the Exorcist and my holy water was not strong enough (and his head got stuck backward when it rotated and had evidently been launched up his ass during one of his ‘spells’).

I was shocked.  But once I realized the judge was just about as interested in my husband’s claims as the size and shape of the cuticles he was always picking at during hearings, I calmed down.  No one cares.  I repeat (you do it too): No one cares.  No one cares.  It took me a while to figure out that other than me, who had to answer his insanity, and his lawyer who had to draft it, no one else cared (and after a few months we didn’t care either).  The vetting of our grievances and the realization that no one else cares is part of the divorce process – an important part.  It’s like when you’re best friend in 5th grade turns on you.  She tells your darkest secrets, says nasty things, tries to destroy you with the other kids and after a few days everyone stops caring…  You are shocked and hurt, but even you forgive her for her bad behavior after a while.  Because we all can behave badly when we’re upset.  My father (you know, the statutory rapist) said the most brilliant thing one day as I was delineating the 50 crappy things my husband had said about me in court documents that day: “He’s just grieving.”  That’s it.  Divorce is a time to grieve.

My concern is that when we take the time out of the divorce process, we strip ourselves of the opportunity to work through it.  Family part judges seem to totally get this.  They don’t get worked up over filings unless there is something truly unsettling (a child at real risk, the squirreling of assets, death threats) because they have seen and heard it ALL.  And I mean ALL.  Your story is nothing, but it’s your story and you have to work through it in order to get to the next chapter.  And they’ll listen to you both yammer on because it’s their job and they happen to know that though annoying, it helps both of you.

Mr. Halfens, though he suggests he chooses couples ripe for this weekend-at-bernie’s approach to divorce, may be doing his clientele a disservice.  My ex and I could have set off to the Hotel Reno 2008 and we would have left with papers, but the sobbing and fuming would have continued unaided, without the time and space needed for acceptance (and I might be married with surf boards throughout my house).  Divorces are not so much financially complicated (there are formulas for most of that) or troubled with custody issues (again, formulas and basic realities) as they are emotionally complicated.  Emotions can’t be carted off to a nice hotel for the weekend and reduced to paper.  But, wouldn’t that be fabulous?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/05/23/new_study_showing_children_make_you_happier_is_less_persuasive_upon_closer_examination_.html?wpisrc=sl_iphone

Children Make You Happier If Someone Else Does Most of the Work by Amanda Marcotte

The article focuses on a new study demonstrating that parents are ‘happier’ than non-parents.  To most of us, this sounds intuitive (come on!  widgets are fun!), but many previous studies suggest the opposite: that having children sucks us dry (and some of our happiness along with it).  Ms. Marcotte makes the obvious point that the findings of the new study are skewed because men’s happiness increases after fatherhood because they’re not *gulp* carrying their own weight.  I am SHOCKED.  Just SHOCKED.  (insert big, languid eyeroll here).  Child-related unhappiness comes from parental fatigue (ie we’re spending our time pandering to the happiness of small people rather than our own – unassailable for anyone who’s spent hours at children’s sporting events, extracurriculars, doing laundry, cleaning behind dirty ears and searching for sneakers as the bus is pulling up).  I’m not terribly interested in either summation because having kids is a soul and time-sucking obligation that you pretty much signed up for…  And if your partner isn’t pulling his/her weight, there has either been a severe lag in training or a poor calibration of expectations going into what should be a joint endeavor.  (I, of course, am not addressing instances of abandonment, etc.  I’m just talking about your run-of-the-mill two people trying to raise some kids and not screw them up for life scenario.)

And now I will divulge a dirty, little secret that smug married people have trouble swallowing: parenting post-divorce can be easier; indeed, if all goes well, it should be easier. Hella lot easier.  In fact, it’s damn near liberating if done correctly: every tedious, annoying parenting task almost becomes pleasurable.  You can laugh at the missing sneakers because you’ve only searched for them four times that week, not seven.  Hear me out (especially those of you obsessed with marriage as the most perfect petri dish for child-rearing…):

I was lucky enough to struggle through my divorce for the requisite two years of blood-letting, sword-swipes and drama (I divorced an Italian, after all) relatively unscathed.  This does not mean there was no tumult, only that my ex and I are decent enough people (many thanks to him) and that once it was over, we pretty much returned to 1st year marriage pleasantries without that one time we had sex (I don’t quite remember the incident, but a child walks among us from that year).  Separate houses helped.  And, we both worship our children in all those ways most parents are completely bazonkers about their progeny.  Also helps.  And we both sincerely like parenting.  Big, big help.  So, despite a few attempts on his part — in the fury of divorce — to rant and rave about my parental inadequacies (he didn’t mean it), we co-parent 50/50.

The maternal presumption is dead in law (this antiquated doctrine said that mother is the most appropriate caregiver of a divorcing couple’s children) and now fewer and fewer divorced couples follow the customary child custody arrangement of daddy gets the kids every other weekend and has dinner on Wednesday nights.  Now, a court presumes that each parent has an equal right (and ability) to parent and care for the children.  Unless there are major schedule issues, parents will split custody 50/50.  Joint legal and residential custody is the new norm.  If you want sole custody of your kids post-divorce, you’d better hope the other parent has some serious snorting-coke-in-the-lobby-of-the-elementary-school-while-soliciting-the-principal-for-prostitution issues because short of those things coupled with some after-school-special child abuse, it’s not happening.  (Some dude on a date was once bragging to me that he was such a good parent he’d gotten sole custody of his babes….I just looked at him and said, “Drugs and/or alcohol or child abuse?”  It was major alcoholism.)  Courts no longer look at a parent and think that one folds the laundry better and always gets them to school on time.  June Cleaver is dead and family law judges never trusted her anyway.

Now, take any obligation/task/effort/chore in your life and half it.  Take a 24/7 week and half it.  You have 24/3.5 parenting.  This is AMAZING!  Think about it.  Just when I have hit the end of my wits and I am literally thinking about reaching in and ripping out my fallopian tubes so this NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN, daddy shows up at the door and whisks off our little dumplings for a few days.   But the sense of relief and recharge requires some trust and suspension of disbelief.  This utopia is completely dependent on the other parent gleaming like a rockstar in your eyes, meaning only that you have to appreciate them.  You have to value and trust the parenting commitment they make when they have the children or you lose the benefit of co-parenting.

My ex-husband is a GREAT father.  He does NOT, however, parent how I do…. in some ways he’s better – certainly he exhibits more patience explaining things to two little rambunctious boys – and in some ways he’s worse – it is not unprecedented for them to wear the same clothes all weekend.  But about two years into our separation/divorce I stopped expecting him to do what I would do.  And then I was able to concentrate on what I expected myself to do as a parent to make me and the children happy.  My parenting has nothing to do with him.  When a couple is still married or together, that is a really hard concept to implement.  You are parenting off another person and the other’s priorities, both for the children and the family unit as a whole.  It’s tough and a constant negotiation.  After-divorce it’s hard to let go of the fact that the tussle is no longer underway.  But, it’s over. You are two autonomous units who hopefully get your shit together enough to collaborate on the important stuff (like calendar commitments, appointments, music lessons, vacations, etc), but everyone puts away their own laundry how they want it done.  (or not at all as the pile on my ex’s dryer suggests…)

So, trust your co-parent and mind your own business.  And I would suggest, somewhat in line with Ms. Marcotte’s article, that there still has to exist a division of labor.  The courts can shirk the maternal presumption all they want, but I am just better at some things and happy to do them.  I still make all the kids’ appointments.  I then email them to my ex.  Whomever has the kids takes them.  I still keep things at school organized – meetings, field trips, picture day, teacher gifts, the school garden.  My ex goes and does whatever I say (and in a delighted way, I’ll add) but he’s probably never going to be as obsessed with Teacher Appreciation gifts as I.  When the kids are in summer camp, their nasty, disgusting gear gets left in my laundry room.  I am the only one not fearful of employing the necessary amount of bleach.  On Monday am it’s folded and ready.  Because I like to do that.

I would argue this somewhat sexist division of labor is not sexist at all.  We have organically let the division fall where it was comfortable for us.  My ex-husband slowly but almost completely has taken over the odious task of Cub Scouts (Kill. Me. Now.).  I served as a den leader the first two years, when we were barely speaking and getting them to scouts was more important than the fact that I was one of the only female den leaders, but as a former Eagle Scout, he is now all over that.  (Though I still haven’t managed to get him to wear that outfit.  Check my FB page for that total awesomeness if it ever happens.)  My ex LOVES buying gifts for the boys, obsessing about each video game, lego set and bomb-making kit, so he buys the gifts.  I wrap them (a bottle of wine and a wasted christmas eve full of paper cuts is a fine trade-off for battling lines at three different Game Stops.)  Making the man bake organic brownies for the school seems a little unnecessary when we can all agree my brownies are better.

This in no way means my ex couldn’t make a mean brownie, schedule each and every appointment or over-see the glittery blobs that are teacher appreciation cards.  He can do it all and I know that, which makes it somewhat more delightful for me to choose to do it.  I bought tickets recently to a hellacious boy band concert that my kids love.  I called my ex and laid down the deal: I’d buy the tickets if he took them out to Hershey Park with his earplugs.  He agreed.  I would hate the whole chocolatey, pimply teenagery mess of it.

I am, for the time being, in charge of sleepovers.  We never agreed on this, it just seems to make sense.   My ex falls asleep on the couch without the slightest provocation (our favorite family dialogue: “daddy’s alseep? Hmmm… it’s only 8pm.  Is his mouth open or closed?”  ”Open, Mom.”  ”Ok, you’d better wake him and let him know that you’re still awake.”  Am I freaking out because the poor man is asleep while the boys dismantle his house?  No.  He’s tired.  They’re exhausting.  I get it.  Even though we’re divorced, in some ways it’s still us against them.  (We’re losing, by the way, but having a pretty good time trying to gain some advantage.)

And, listen, I am not being righteous about this.  Post-divorce parenting is not perfect.  My ex and I almost had a smack down in his driveway over private school the other day (alright, I almost smacked him down).  But, we would have had that even if we were married.  And when a kid is throwing up all over your bedroom, it would be really nice to toss some towels at your husband and go sleep on the living room couch.  Worse, sometimes the kids have a four day spell with daddy and I absolutely ache for them.  Sometimes I travel for work and I miss them so badly I could curl up and cry for hours.  And sometimes I even tell my ex I’m feeling that way.  My phone will ring or my skype will buzz and it’s the boys.  He’s my ex-husband (with all that implies) but he’s got my back and he knows the three day ache.  He even knows (even if he never says it) that I’m a good mother.

Much like a married couple, it’s that generosity of spirit and understanding that makes post-divorce parenting work.  The serious up-side is that you are always delighted to be with your kids because you don’t suffer the amenity-less luxury of all-day, every-day.  You don’t mind sitting down to math homework because it’s only a few nights per week.  You’re excited to see what’s going on because it’s not your everyday toil.  Every once in a while the boys return from daddy’s house and I’m pretty certain they’ve grown three inches in as many days.  The downside of post-divorce parenting is the fear of missing something.  But the pleasure of enjoying everything has benefits too.