Not this shit again! part 6

Wednesday I spent an hour on the phone with Lawyer, bringing her up to date and getting some information from her.

• You recall that I had sent her Friend's e-mail and she was appalled at it. So on the phone, I asked her, with all the divorces she has handled over the twenty years she has been in practice, how a letter like this fit into her experience? In what kinds of situations had she seen this kind of thing before? She said she had never seen anything like it before.
• Then I explained that Friend is now not returning phone calls and has dropped out of sight at the prospect of Wife visiting. I added that this may mean the drama is suddenly and completely over ... and from one perspective (even if only one) that makes any motion for divorce now look kind of beside the point.
• On the third hand, the fact that it could happen at all indicates a chronic level of denigration and bad judgement that is simply toxic.
• On the fourth hand, a divorce won't stop e-mails. If Friend or Boyfriend 5 or the Man in the Moon wants to e-mail Son 1 and Son 2 they can do so after a divorce as well as now.
• And I explained that both boys denied ever getting such an e-mail.
• As you can tell, this line of talk started to get pretty tangled.

But Lawyer gave me some information I hadn't heard before. She said that in her experience, children are more likely to speak up about what they are feeling or what is going on after the paperwork is filed and the wheels are in motion. Before then they don't want to rock the boat. Before then they can worry that if they say something then maybe they caused the divorce. But after it's already happening, then they are freer to talk. I hadn't heard that before.

She described again some of the process of the paperwork.

She had a couple of comments about custody.

• First, the boys are old enough to express an opinion about where they want to live. (I worried that Son 2, e.g., might say he wanted to live with Wife in order to parent her. She told me that the court can appoint someone to talk to the boys privately, and that it's amazing how freely kids will talk about what they really need once their parents are out of the room.)
• Second, if the boys are in private school then "custody" means "custody when the child is not at school." The percentages used to feed into the calculation of spousal support are percentages of non-school time only.
• Third, I told her I'd heard somebody say that unless one of the parents is a convicted axe-murderer, courts nearly always award custody 50/50. Her immediate response was "Yes." Then she qualified it with, "Maybe you don't have to be an axe murderer ... I've seen a couple of other cases." But basically yes.

I did not end the call by giving her any clear instructions. I said I wanted to digest this information. A couple of times I mentioned having discussed the topic with "my friend D." So she asked, "What does your friend D think you should do?"

I answered, "My friend D thinks the situation has been toxic for years and wonders what the heck is taking me so long."

She said, "Well I'm not here to tell you what to do. You tell me what you want. But I kind of agree with her ...."