- One father's story of a 50-50 arrangement
- By Karl Quinn
- The Age
- 27/06/2003 Make a Comment
- Contributed by: admin ( 75 articles in 2003 )
It takes hard work. But if shared care can be achieved there are rewards for everybody involved, writes Karl Quinn.
When my 11-year marriage ended in 1999, my first impulse was to flee. I had just left a job I'd hated, my ex and I could barely speak to each other, and she seemed destined to get all our friends in the settlement. I had family in England, friends in Asia - and both places promised better work opportunities and more emotional respite than I was likely to find in Melbourne.
The only thing keeping me here was my son.
Four years on, I can see that not going was the best decision I ever made. Had I left the country, who knows when I would have come back, or even if? Who can say what sort of relationship I would have had with my son, or if there would have been any relationship at all? Staying was hard, but leaving, thankfully, was impossible.
My boy is eight now and very much part of my life. He has his own room in the house my partner and I bought last year, and sleeps in it (when he's not trying to sleep in our bed) on Thursday nights of one week and on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights of the next. These school holidays he'll spend most of the time with us, though his mum can't bear the thought of being apart from him for two weeks straight, so he'll be seeing her somewhere in there.
We have, I guess, something like the sort of shared-care arrangement that John Howard seems to want to encourage.
Getting to this point hasn't been easy, and even as I write about it I fear jinxing it. My ex was always in favour of my maintaining good and frequent contact with my son, but exactly how frequent and what constitutes good has been a continuing source of discussion.
I used to have my boy three nights a week, plus one afternoon. It was as close to a 50-50 split as we've managed, but it wasn't without problems, a major one being that it was predicated on my working arrangements, and when they changed, so did the care split.
My ex thought she should have more say than my workplace in deciding how we worked things out. Which is - give or take a few dozen hours of heated phone calls and fiery email exchanges - how we arrived at our more or less amicable arrangement.
Child protection advocate and former Family Court judge John Fogarty said this week that the proposal to introduce the starting premise of equal parenting for divorcing parents was "just not workable". "The only cases where it would work is where the parties are on very good terms after the divorce," he said, "and those people don't need . . . the courts really."
I'm not sure he's right. While we never stopped communicating with each other, we were both angry (and continue to be in some conflict over money) even as we tried to do the right thing by our son. And I feared that if things got really ugly I could lose access to my son at the hands of a Family Court that I believed, rightly or wrongly, to be biased against fathers.
Had there been a more solid starting point - an assumption that shared care was where we would start from, not where we would finally arrive after all that grief and conflict - perhaps we could have worked through our resentments as a side issue rather than letting them become entangled in the question of parenting.
But maybe Fogarty isn't entirely wrong. Maybe there does need to be some common ground to start with.
Certainly my ex has never tried to deny me access to my son, nor has she ever sought to punish me financially for the failure of our marriage, and so we were never as far apart as many of the other sparring ex-partners out there.
Our son and his best interests (or so it has always seemed to us) remain the focus of our discussions over shared care. He has never become a weapon or a reward. He just is.
The past is still with us, and one day my ex and I will have to find some way of burying the lingering pain and disappointment forever. But sometimes the future really shines through.
Last Friday my partner, who is eight weeks away from giving birth to our first child, and I took my boy back to his mother's house. He had been with us for eight or nine nights straight, while his mother had been at "sleep school" with her six-month-old baby.
The three of us entered the house that my ex and her partner have bought, and chatted with my little boy's stepfather and my little boy's grandmother while my little boy's mother put her other little boy to sleep. Then she came downstairs and we all chatted some more before my partner and I - my little boy's stepmother and his father - left.
As we drove away, a kind of euphoria washed over me. My son frequently talks about us all as his family (the dog makes it into the clan as well), and for that brief moment it really did feel possible that we could co-exist in some kind of extended harmonic state.
"That felt fantastic," I told my partner. And it really did. But I don't want to jinx it.
Karl Quinn is a staff journalist. kquinn@theage.com.au
When my 11-year marriage ended in 1999, my first impulse was to flee. I had just left a job I'd hated, my ex and I could barely speak to each other, and she seemed destined to get all our friends in the settlement. I had family in England, friends in Asia - and both places promised better work opportunities and more emotional respite than I was likely to find in Melbourne.
The only thing keeping me here was my son.
Four years on, I can see that not going was the best decision I ever made. Had I left the country, who knows when I would have come back, or even if? Who can say what sort of relationship I would have had with my son, or if there would have been any relationship at all? Staying was hard, but leaving, thankfully, was impossible.
My boy is eight now and very much part of my life. He has his own room in the house my partner and I bought last year, and sleeps in it (when he's not trying to sleep in our bed) on Thursday nights of one week and on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights of the next. These school holidays he'll spend most of the time with us, though his mum can't bear the thought of being apart from him for two weeks straight, so he'll be seeing her somewhere in there.
We have, I guess, something like the sort of shared-care arrangement that John Howard seems to want to encourage.
Getting to this point hasn't been easy, and even as I write about it I fear jinxing it. My ex was always in favour of my maintaining good and frequent contact with my son, but exactly how frequent and what constitutes good has been a continuing source of discussion.
I used to have my boy three nights a week, plus one afternoon. It was as close to a 50-50 split as we've managed, but it wasn't without problems, a major one being that it was predicated on my working arrangements, and when they changed, so did the care split.
My ex thought she should have more say than my workplace in deciding how we worked things out. Which is - give or take a few dozen hours of heated phone calls and fiery email exchanges - how we arrived at our more or less amicable arrangement.
Child protection advocate and former Family Court judge John Fogarty said this week that the proposal to introduce the starting premise of equal parenting for divorcing parents was "just not workable". "The only cases where it would work is where the parties are on very good terms after the divorce," he said, "and those people don't need . . . the courts really."
I'm not sure he's right. While we never stopped communicating with each other, we were both angry (and continue to be in some conflict over money) even as we tried to do the right thing by our son. And I feared that if things got really ugly I could lose access to my son at the hands of a Family Court that I believed, rightly or wrongly, to be biased against fathers.
Had there been a more solid starting point - an assumption that shared care was where we would start from, not where we would finally arrive after all that grief and conflict - perhaps we could have worked through our resentments as a side issue rather than letting them become entangled in the question of parenting.
But maybe Fogarty isn't entirely wrong. Maybe there does need to be some common ground to start with.
Certainly my ex has never tried to deny me access to my son, nor has she ever sought to punish me financially for the failure of our marriage, and so we were never as far apart as many of the other sparring ex-partners out there.
Our son and his best interests (or so it has always seemed to us) remain the focus of our discussions over shared care. He has never become a weapon or a reward. He just is.
The past is still with us, and one day my ex and I will have to find some way of burying the lingering pain and disappointment forever. But sometimes the future really shines through.
Last Friday my partner, who is eight weeks away from giving birth to our first child, and I took my boy back to his mother's house. He had been with us for eight or nine nights straight, while his mother had been at "sleep school" with her six-month-old baby.
The three of us entered the house that my ex and her partner have bought, and chatted with my little boy's stepfather and my little boy's grandmother while my little boy's mother put her other little boy to sleep. Then she came downstairs and we all chatted some more before my partner and I - my little boy's stepmother and his father - left.
As we drove away, a kind of euphoria washed over me. My son frequently talks about us all as his family (the dog makes it into the clan as well), and for that brief moment it really did feel possible that we could co-exist in some kind of extended harmonic state.
"That felt fantastic," I told my partner. And it really did. But I don't want to jinx it.
Karl Quinn is a staff journalist. kquinn@theage.com.au
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