Amity Gaige - Schroder

“We are?” I said.

We may no longer remember that until the mid-nineteenth century, children and their mothers were viewed as a man’s property. When marital strife led to that carnival we now call divorce , the child was whisked away to the father’s arms, leaving the mother sobbing in the street, without recourse. We have all read, or been told abridged versions of, Anna Karenina , yes? But it did not take long, you see, for the custody pendulum to swing in the other direction. By the late 1800s, a maternal preference in divorce cases was supported by the “tender years” doctrine. This doctrine held that children of “tender years”—that is, younger than eight — should be raised by their mothers. Therefore, men who wanted custody of their children appeared not only misled, but also slightly skeevy. But the issue of custody did not arise much, because divorce itself was fairly rare.

Well, time passed and for reasons I will not go into here, divorce lost its edge. Somewhere in the bowels of the 1970s and ’80s, some people started to see divorce as an act of empowerment, for stifled men and women alike. Marriage became the problem, and divorce, the solution. Soon, everybody wanted one. Divorces became much easier to obtain. They might as well have passed them out on street corners. You could get divorced on a boat, or on a train, or in a mall, or in a box with a fox.

Coterminously — and I’ll be done with this soon — those decades lent the field of divorce litigation some new and exciting ideas. For example, the no-fault divorce, in which a marriage was alleged to have malfunctioned somehow on its own, independent of its participants. And even though the concept of a divorce with no fault is oxymoronic, and a better term might have been fault-fault divorce, as a legal category, it caught fire. The upshot to no-fault divorces and my point at present is that they presumed neither maternal nor paternal preference in matters of custody. What’s more, when parents were encouraged to settle custody disputes prior to a hearing, via the quieter process of mediation, divorce lost its inherent staginess. Gone were the exciting, perjured testimonies of one family member against another. This enabled a legal preference (in twelve states) for the concept of joint custody .

You and I picked a hairy little folknik as our mediator, an MSW from Cornell who wore shorts and huaraches even in cold weather. You sat across from me at his table, your eyes downcast, your shyness on display, the lonely, bookish girl beneath your righteous exterior, as you struggled to defend your desire to deep-six our union.

Is it damaging to my case to say that I looked forward to seeing you at divorce mediation? I shaved, I aftershaved, I picked out shirts you had once bought for me. The mediator worked out of a cottage near the thruway. In the backyard he’d created a pleasure garden full of autumnal dahlias, and two chairs tilted hopefully toward one another on a slate patio. Our separation was still very fresh. I still didn’t understand why we were separating, and I’m fairly sure you didn’t either. We’d been living separately for a couple of weeks, and this apartness gave our meetings an air of courtship. I missed you, OK? Even though you had been granted temporary custody of Meadow, you always let her come to see me at my whim or hers. It felt like we were still on the same team. She would arrive to my new place in North Albany in the backseat of your father’s immense black Chevy Tahoe, looking rather glamorous through the tinted window. Your father’s friendliness contributed to my sense that the situation was, like the custody arrangement, temporary . If I handled it well, you would come to your senses.

If ever there was a man who deluded himself with dreams of reconciliation, I was that man. How much legal leverage I lost in the effort to win you back! I chronicled your talents as a mother, as well as the faithful way Meadow loved you back. When allegations were cast my way — that I was insensitive, that I had ignored numerous warning signs, that my behavior was occasionally “erratic” and my parenting style “unpredictable,” that my research interests were “esoteric” and finally just tedious and maybe even make-believe — I accepted these criticisms and heaped a couple of fresh ones atop the pile. You’re right , I said. You’re so right. I wanted to persuade you that I was flawed on purpose. Because if I was flawed on purpose, then I was just as capable of being perfect as I was of being flawed. I was in total control of who I was. I was capable of change.

You blushed and barely looked at me. I see now that you were embarrassed for me. You were embarrassed for me that I knew so little of the cold nature of the law. Only after I found myself the noncustodial parent did I realize my error, my wasted sacrifice.

In one of our final meetings, when I finally sensed the sour turn my fate had taken, the mediator assured me that if I had objections in the future — if I were to change my mind — I could do so within the court of law, during a hearing. In the meantime, it seemed to him that there was a lot of good in giving one parent sole physical custody and that this arrangement would still provide me with a bounty of visitation rights. For some children, especially young ones like Meadow (our hippie said), it was better to live in one home. My new place could be Meadow’s sleepaway home. An exciting change of scene.

With this parental “agreement” in place, thereafter you and I worked through the mail. Without the hit of seeing you, our correspondence took on a chill. The fact that I was getting screwed dawned on me slowly. The many visitations I was initially promised were scratched down to every other weekend. These impersonal negotiations unsettled me and began to absorb restless nights.

I took a stand and arbitrarily demanded that in addition to my weekends, I’d get Meadow every Wednesday. After this request was received, Meadow was curiously unable to make it over to my place for an entire two weeks. I called many times; no one answered. I visited our hippie; he was powerless. And then I returned to my new home — the water-damaged ranch I was renting off New Scotland Ave. — and sat paralyzed, listening to the sump pump labor away in the basement. It was the sort of week in which the clock’s ticking seems recriminatory ( Look how you’ve been imprisoned by your unwillingness to kill yourself! ). I drank, but that failed to bring about worldwide revolution. So I sat at my kitchen table to think, and I thought until my mind became raw from thinking, and for the first time in years I became aware of my essential conundrum. I was Eric Kennedy. I knew it, and I had decided it, and it was true. It had been true for too long. But whenever I ventured out into emotional and physical joint space — that is, society — my identity became predicated on some sort of collective agreement. In other words, I was Eric Kennedy only inasmuch as I could secure a consensus that I was. And suddenly I saw that achieving a total consensus, a unanimity, was a campaign for which my life was too short. For example, I had no legal recourse. I couldn’t get mixed up in a custody battle! It would be only a matter of days before someone went digging for old records, looking for someone who knew me in high school — hell, looking for Twelve Hills on the map. After all, I had written my life story at the tender age of fourteen. It wasn’t a very sophisticated one.

You may be surprised to hear that until then, I rarely worried about being found out. Maybe I didn’t worry about it because I am insane (as most people who’ve read about my case now assume). But I’ll tell you: I think that I didn’t worry about it because I had become Eric Kennedy so long ago and with such appreciation that I was, years later, truly and squarely him , more than I had ever been anyone else. More than most people are themselves. Because where other people are accidentally good or bad or upbeat or pessimistic, I got to shoot for a deliberate self, a considered, researched self. And that self was a good guy — I really thought so, and a lot of other people did too. And I assumed he would be granted the rewards and allowances given to good guys (e.g., Clebus & Co. Realtor of the Month, February 2007). But during that stretch of days, denied access to my daughter, sleepless, unshaven, dehydrated, the true flammability of my life became clear to me.