Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It
When telling the story of my divorce, at some point I say: I was lucky that when my spouse and I separated, the news was spotlighting the Collaborative Process. A news article led us to find the lawyers who helped us transform our lives and get us back on track.
When I discovered my spouse had filed for divorce, I was in a terrible emotional state. I spent my days anxious. What would become of our children, and us? Where would we live? How would we survive? Some days I seriously wondered if I’d make it to the next one, half-convinced I might have a heart attack from the stress alone. Our seven-year-old and four-year-old sons picked up on it all. Our eldest broke out in cold sores and started isolating himself from the rest of us. Our youngest had frequent breakdowns, more screaming, more hitting than we’d ever seen from him.
After my first consultation with the lawyer who’d go on to become my Collaborative lawyer, I actually considered hiring a bulldog instead. But everything I kept reading said the same thing: children suffer most when their parents have a high-conflict divorce.
Choosing the Collaborative lawyer was a hard call at the time, because I genuinely believed I was right, and that I’d win if I took my spouse to court. I didn’t understand yet that when one spouse wins, the children lose.
I also didn’t think a Collaborative lawyer could actually get my spouse to engage honestly and productively. What I didn’t understand was that the law itself is fairly black and white here: the default financial separation is fifty-fifty on assets and income. Policy and case law have built a family law process specifically designed to leave both spouses starting from roughly the same financial position afterward. A bulldog lawyer might have made my spouse look bad in front of a judge, but it wouldn’t have moved the financial outcome much at all. It would have cost me thousands more, and bought nothing but more conflict inside my own family.
Our lawyers helped us reach something we could both grudgingly live with, and helped keep our conflict away from our kids.
Today our children are sixteen and thirteen. We just celebrated our eldest’s birthday together: pitch and putt, dinner at his favourite restaurant.
Parenting is one of the hardest jobs there is, and juggling full-time parenting on a part-time basis has never been easy. My ex and I have navigated plenty of hard parenting decisions over the past nine years, but fortunately, we navigated them together, for our kids.
I’m grateful we happened to find lawyers who understood that the real work of separating is keeping the family together while the finances come apart.
And I’m doing what I can to make sure luck stops being the deciding factor for families going through this. It shouldn’t come down to chance. The default family law system needs to put families and children first, as a baseline, not as something you happen to stumble into.
