Enduring parental conflict places the odds against all children, in all families. Knowing that is a big advance on where some parents start from now.

There's growing agreement among researchers that it's not their parents' separation per se that affects children, but how parents deal with it.

Before the advent of no-fault divorce in 1975, lawyers were needed to prove the grounds for divorce. Nearly 30 years on, the legal bent of divorce is still dominant.

There is a lot of money to be made from family law disputes, and those making the money will defend their turf.

Some find help in friends and family who understand marriage breakdown from the inside; others seek out mediators; others stumble upon lawyers who can think outside the square.

Divorce research consistently shows that the main reason why marriages fail is because of communication problems (ahead of incompatibility and infidelity).

Ideological principles that exhort parents to "put aside hurt and blame" are a prescription for failure or very limited success,

While the principles of family law are that children's interests and well-being come first, lawyers aren't trained to resolve the complex emotional issues that cloud parents' minds.

Co-parenting, the most difficult of options for estranged parents but the best option for children in almost all instances, is most successful when ex spouses can separate marriage issues from parental ones. Reaching this level of emotional detachment takes time, sometimes years.

Divorce research consistently shows that the main reason why marriages fail is because of communication problems (ahead of incompatibility and infidelity). If ever there was a need for good communication skills, it's when you're co-ordinating parenting from two locations. Forget the different sets of values. Just getting to netball training or a parent-teacher interview can be fraught, never mind sorting out who pays for what. Still, some people do it, and do it well. Many more, in fact, than we hear about.

Ewan Gemmell and his ex-wife Maria Monger, who broke up three years ago, share the care of their children Calum, 10, and Bridget, 8. These days, they're on such good terms that he has a key to her house (which was once their house) at Bowral in the Southern Highlands of NSW and lets himself in to see the children several times a week. At the end of last year, Ewan was doing a massage course, and because Maria had a sore back, he gave her a massage once a week. They've come a long way since the screaming matches that punctuated the last six months of their marriage.

Just that week, she'd filled out the divorce papers. "I sobbed and sobbed ... it was a sadness that something I felt was forever…." She stops. Ewan has told me, and Maria confirms, that the trigger for their breakup was an affair he'd had when she was three months pregnant with Calum. Although their relationship was deeply damaged by the affair, they'd gone on to have a second child. ("You do things at the time thinking that it's going to work out," he says.). They went to counselling, both after the affair and when they could see the writing on the wall four years ago. "I would have preferred to stay together, but you get to the point where it is just wishful thinking, and there is no point in pushing it uphill any more," he says. It wasn't a jolly old separation. There was pain and a sense of betrayal, Maria says. Ewan has since got back together with the woman involved in that long-ago affair, and accepting her involvement with the children is difficult. "But I'm trying to rise above it."

They both say they would happily shake hands, wish each other well and never see each other again. "But we can't, so the next best thing is to work at getting on well," Maria says.

Neither of them knew much about the process of separation and divorce. Both went to see lawyers separately, on the advice of their counsellor. Both told me the same story. In Maria's words: "We both came back from the lawyers, and said it was unbelievable. I just found the process really abhorrent. I'm not some bloody saint, but I didn't want to take Ewan for everything he had. If I have a roof over my head and food for the children, it's all I want. Life is really short … We just want to raise two happy, well-adjusted, secure kids. That's my number-one priority, and Ewan's."

Ewan moved out. "I basically decided that it wasn't worth fighting over property, that it was better if she kept the house and I started again. The money that's deducted from my salary by the child support agency pays the mortgage. It's still in joint names. We have this arrangement that when the kids have finished primary school we'll sell the house and divide it up then." He rents a cheap house beneath a television transmitter, half an hour from Bowral. He says it has the best view in Australia. "You still do have residual resentments, but you're not adding to them," he says of the path they've chosen.

If something feels different about this couple, there's one piece of information you should know. Ewan was ordained as a Buddhist monk at 19, and lived for four years in a Thai monastery. It may be drawing too long a bow, but I reckon you need some extra assistance - maybe not God, but someone godly, or spiritually inclined - to find your way to such an ending from such a beginning in the prevailing climate.

This is not to say that all lawyers are delinquent, as Bob is inclined to describe them. It is simply to acknowledge that the legal system is adversarial, and that lawyers are bound to their clients to maximise their advantage. "It's a fallacy to think that the adversarial process starts in court," Green says. "It starts so much before."

Trevor Bock, a former teacher and commercial pilot who now works with Green, has been divorced twice and seen more of the inside of lawyers' offices than he cares to remember. He's sitting in the kitchen of the outer-suburban home he shares with his third wife and her son. "They set you up for this huge fight, and then they expect you to sit down and talk about shared parenting," he says. Absent from his life in a practical sense are his two daughters, one from each of his previous marriages. His first daughter, now a mother herself, grew up largely without him, but that was circumstantial more than the result of legal conflict. His second daughter, aged nine, lives with her mother in Brisbane and visits him every six weeks. Reaching that point involved two years of legal battle. "Your hands are tied to a large extent," he says. "Once the legal fight starts, you can't elect not to play the game. If you don't go to court, you lose the game." He's convinced that mediation should be mandated.

Four out of five people who separate seek legal advice. While the principles of family law are that children's interests and well-being come first, lawyers aren't trained to resolve the complex emotional issues that cloud parents' minds and prevent them from doing that. Lawyers are trained to disengage people from their emotions, and get them to see reason.

Even an emotionally literate family lawyer like Robyn Sexton, who is committed to keeping the process civil and open, is up against it. She has dealt with some very dysfunctional people, as have all family lawyers. "I tend to look at the end point and say, where do you want to be. But a lot of people can't see it at all. It's just a fog to them, and I see it as my job to help them cut through it."

The fog does lift eventually, but when I listen to Fiona's story, I'm reminded again of how surreal the post-separation landscape is, and how difficult it is to see your way through it with any clarity at all.

On her 49th birthday, her husband David told her, without warning, that he was leaving. He was gone two days later. She is still gingerly picking her way through the ruins of a 26-year marriage nine months later. She's regained the 10kg she lost last year. Her lips are no longer numbed, and her heart, which felt so heavy she thought it would fall out of her body, seems to beat still. She still doesn't sleep well, about four hours a night now that she's off the sleeping pills. "It's in my mind all the time ... I wake up thinking about it ... I go to sleep thinking about," she tells me.

This time last year she was having the best summer of her life. "We were in a very comfortable financial position, the two older girls were married, the two little ones were grown. We'd given a big party for my parents for their 50th wedding anniversary. I was on a high. Everything seemed absolutely brilliant. I looked really good. I felt happy and contented and healthy and loved. We had a great social life. Everything seemed terrific."

She's an engaging woman with an easy smile and kind eyes. On this particular day, a stinker in January, she wears a conservative navy dress, a plain gold chain and sapphire pendant around her neck, and no wedding ring. She's held the same senior administrative job for 18 years in a community organisation and when we eat out a corner cafe, staff and other patrons greet her by name.

"I went down badly, but not badly enough," she says wryly. "I didn't miss one day of work …. He'd always done the grocery shopping. I had to do that, and the lawns, and the pool, and go to work, get the kids to after-school activities, cook, bring in the washing. I made this huge effort to keep doing it, to get up every morning, and get my hair done and my makeup on so that I looked all right."

None of the couples in their wide circle of friends had split up. She lived in a married world. But people rallied. Everyone close to you gets caught up in a marriage breakup. She knows that now. For months, she needed to talk. She consciously refrains from bringing it up. Now she's entering a different phase. She found out about a counselling group for separated parents run by Centacare. That's helped her hugely. She's regrouping. "I have to be organised by next winter," she says. "My winter social life has revolved for 18 years around my husband's soccer team. I have to find something to do in winter on a Sunday."

She and the younger children, aged 12 and 14, are still in the family home, and nothing has been settled in a legal sense, either in relation to the children or their property. At first the children had lots of questions, about where they would live, where they would go to school, what would happen to the dog. Questions about their life. "They didn't ask questions about us as a couple," she says. "I told them I would do my best to keep their life as normal as I could. Once they knew about the other woman they never asked him whether he was coming home."

The fog is still fairly thick, although she says that since Christmas she's started to feel weak rays of warmth, as though there's a sun out there.

I haven't given you both sides of the story because no one, not me, not a counsellor, a mediator, a lawyer or a judge (with respect) will ever know the truth of what happened to this marriage. Fiona has her story, and her husband will have his, which may be similar, or it may be unrecognisable. That happens. The relevant facts, however, are that Fiona and David have two children, aged 12 and 14, who still need their parents' care and love.

At the moment they don't look like candidates for shared parenting. She hasn't spoken to him since September 30, she tells me, and she doubts she will ever speak to him again in her life. I doubt that this is true, but I accept that's how it looks from inside the fog. And I wish her well in her journey.

As for myself, I am out of the dark place now and I'm reluctant to look back. It is good out here on the other side, although family life is not simple. My ex-husband and I continue to live in the same suburb, the suburb the children have grown up in, and we share their care. We are not the best of friends, but we do OK. Our past lies fairly close to the surface and occasionally bursts through, but sometimes we surprise even ourselves. Last Christmas Eve, because that's the way it happened, we celebrated with our children, his wife, my partner and his two teenage children who also spend part of each week with us, and part with their mother. We enjoyed ourselves because the kids were so obviously enjoying themselves. It was amazing to me.

My ex-husband's story about our separation will always be different from mine. But we've worked at what came next, all of us, and keep doing so. At some point, our children may tell us whether it has been worth the effort. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll just say, get over it. Maybe that's the best thing they can say.

Some names and identifiers have been changed.

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