In this chapter I explain why I chose to end my hunger strike a week early.

11. Advent – Expectation … and Surprise
David Weiss, December 15, 2010 (The fast is over!)

Advent is a season of paradox. In Latin adventus and futurus differs in how they join the present to the “not yet.” Think of it like this. Futurus describes the “not yet” as what we reach when we get there. It’s at the end of the tunnel that we’re digging toward tomorrow. It is the sum total of our present moments. Adventus, however, describes the “not yet” as what breaks into the present, unexpectedly, arriving not by cause and effect but by grace (what Jacques Derrida calls “the gift” in his post-modernist philosophy).

So when Christians call the season marked out by the four Sundays before December 25^th “Advent,” it is a somewhat hapless way of reminding us that Christmas—our conviction that in Jesus God chose quite unexpectedly to dwell wholly in our midst—arrives not by what we do on this side, but by what God does on the far side of “not yet.” God comes to us. And I say “hapless,” because, of course, as soon as we mark it on our calendars, we move toward Christmas like clockwork. We may not be ready with our cookies, presents, or holiday spirit when it arrives, but we know exactly when it will reach us. The word still tries to evoke waiting and wonder, but we mostly manage the expectation away at the primal level.

I began my fast on the first day of Advent to wrap myself in the primal part of Advent, to sit in the company of those who, quite apart from any calendar calculations, live in hunger for that which can only come from what is “not yet.” Advent is the dwelling place for those whose hope—whether for justice or peace, healing or reconciliation—has no foothold in the present.

I settled into the hunger, letting it slowly swallow me over the first few days, like a rising tide. Like a sand dune inching its way along and burying me in its stillness. By the third day the grumbling hunger in my gut gave way to the deeper hunger in my whole being. I became hunger. Not as a restless frantic longing but as a quiet determined waiting. I became the want for justice. And from within that want I wrote my tale. Expecting nothing … and expecting everything all the same.

On December 8 it happened. My stomach, by then already taut through ten days of foodless holy rest, tightened still further when I saw the envelope from the Court. The judgment from the September hearing had finally arrived. I had promised Margaret months ago that I would not open court mailings except in her presence. I would not expose myself to these toxic documents without tethering my soul to hers. So for the rest of that day I WAITED.

Advent taunted me with expectation—though mostly in the form of abject fear. I had lived for ten weeks now under the shadow of that fall hearing, knowing that I had lost and waiting only to learn how much.

I attended our Wednesday evening Advent worship, leaning into the liturgy with heartfelt longing. Hungry and hoping without hope. Doing my best to keep the dread at a distance. Afterwards Margaret had choir practice. It was after 9 p.m. before we settled onto the couch in our family room side by side, heart by heart, hope by hope. We paused for a moment of prayer, anchoring ourselves in the trust that nothing in this envelope could define who I was as a father or determine the value we held in my daughter’s life as a family. And then we opened the flap and allowed the whirlwind to envelope us.

That’s when Christmas arrived in a rush of chaos, confusion, and joy.

I read a few judicial “pot shots,” introductory comments aimed my way by a judge who couldn’t help but frame my frenzied efforts to be heard as the needless wasting of words. But this is what arrived in the substance of the Order: from among the three proposals in front of her, the judge chose to adopt my proposal for my daughter’s placement over the next four years almost in its entirety. I attained almost everything on my dream list of objectives that my last attorney considered so unattainable that he chose to withdraw rather than pursue them.

• The judge rejects my ex’s hope for a four-year calendar of dates set this far in advance. And she rejects the GAL’s proposal that he schedule my placement time year by year. Instead she affirms my voice as having priority in selecting my school year placement time year by year. I need to work within the constraints of my daughter’s of my daughter’s Orchestra commitment, but within that I have the freedom to schedule my nine school year placement as I see fit—as I had requested.
• The judge rejects my ex’s (implicit) hope to continue the calendar errors of the last four school years which have cost me 2 days each year. Instead, she finally attends to school year calendar in a way that allows me to make full use of days off to create longer weekends whenever possible. Although without either acknowledgement or apology, she fixes these errors in the new Order.
• The judge rejects my ex’s desire to further reduce my daughter’s summer placement with me, and she rejects the GAL’s proposal to simply continue it at “50% plus four days” with no compensation for time lost during the school year. Instead, she awards me “50% plus six days”—and puts in place a formula that will figure this time accurately each and every summer. I had hoped for more than this; my last proposal had been for “50% plus eight days,” but I had been bracing for much less. The correction will increase my placement time in practice by five days each summer. Although without either acknowledgement or apology, she fixes the error that has cost me two weeks of summer placement over the past four years.
• The judge rejects the plan by both my ex and the GAL to eliminate my daughter’s opportunity to participate in the Young Authors Conference. Instead, exactly as I had proposed, she guarantees my daughter the chance to attend for as long as she wishes.
• The judge incorporates a process into the Order that insures unforeseen changes to the placement schedule time will happen by exchanging placement time on day-for-day basis. (In the past I sometimes simply lost days if something came up in Wisconsin and my ex or the court found it too cumbersome to offer “make-up” placement later on.) This was also part of my proposal.
• The judge outlines a conflict resolution process that makes it impossible for my ex to simply stall on a decision and turn time into her weapon. This was also part of my proposal.

Some of the language in the Order is paternalistic where it has no need or reason to be so. There are some aspects of the logistics it proposes that strike me as less than ideal. But the bottom line is that this new Order, while not perfect, is at last an Order in which I can recognize the presence of justice. It addresses almost everything I named as non-negotiable this past summer, and in every case it addresses these things almost entirely to my favor.

Sitting on the sofa side by side, Margaret and I were stunned. Good news was the only thing we had not braced ourselves for. Had I received this Order back in October when I expected it to come, I would not have started a hunger strike. It now seemed unthinkable to continue immersing my body in hunger when this Order—astonishingly—finally gave me the measure of justice I longed for.

I cannot explain the Order. There is no way to show a direct line from my experience in this judge’s courtroom over the past four-and-a-half years—especially my experience in her courtroom this past September—to the words in this Order. None. And in many ways, the gift of justice it bears can in no way offset the price it has cost me over the years. But I accept it nonetheless.

In the end, after speaking with my (new) attorney to confirm that this new Order was really in force now, I chose to ease my fast by drinking juice over the past weekend, on days 13 and 14. By then I had lost 17 pounds altogether. Sunday evening and on into Monday I slowly began reintroducing solid food even while I continued to tell my story. Tuesday I began eating regular meals, though decidedly smaller portions. And I completed my story.

I began the hunger strike determined to see it to completion. And I took for granted that completion meant 21 days without food, immersed in lament and witness. But I found myself more fully in Advent than I could have anticipated, because half-way through my time of hunger and waiting Christmas—some good measure of justice and wholeness—arrived unbidden but undeniably real. Completion came—this time at least—by way of joy.

My hunger strike did not in any way trigger this new Order. Not only does the judge know nothing of my fast, but her Order was written and signed on September 27, 2010. Then, for reasons I may never know, it sat in her office, unsent to any of the parties, until ten weeks later on December 7.

Moreover, it is not the case that everything is suddenly “fixed” now. I did lose forever at least 21-28 days with my daughter over the past four years. Those days will never be returned to me or to her. I will probably be paying off my legal debts until I start paying for her college tuition four years from now. The energy that got diverted from our family life into this legal battle has cost everyone dearly. And the strain this has put on the relationship I have with my daughter has been noticeable over the past year. Much healing remains to happen.

Getting a measure of justice now does not undo the costs of injustice that my family and I have experienced over the years. Nor does it weaken my commitment to use my voice on behalf of others for whom the injustice continues. There is much to do, and I have an appetite for the work that awaits me.

I have a couple more pieces that I need to write yet in the next few days. They will complete this round of reflections on justice and family court. They “belong” to the fast, but I will write them on a full stomach. Filled not just with food, but with joy.

* * *

This entry is now the eleventh written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

In this chapter I relate the last sequence of events that led me to begin my hunger strike.

10. Nothing Left but Hunger
David Weiss, December 14, 2010 (The fast is over! Watch for my next post to explain why.)

Late in the spring of 2010 my daughter was overjoyed to announce that she had been accepted into the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra (WYSO). I was excited for her. It was quite an honor: WYSO uses an audition-based selection process. I was also a bit apprehensive because I knew WYSO had a pretty rigorous Saturday morning rehearsal schedule and that it would provide her mother with one more reason to view time with dad as an unneeded and unwanted interruption in her daughter’s life.

Still, as we moved into summer of 2010 I was heartened by the new guardian ad litem’s (GAL) choice to actually lift up my daughter’s voice during the spring. It suggested a new approach, in which her wishes might finally get heard in the conversation. This was especially important because the 2006 Order (and hopefully all of its errors) would lapse at the end of this summer. This would be my window of opportunity to seek a new Order that governed my daughter’s high school years with far more wisdom than the Order of the past four years.

I was less heartened by my own attorney. After promising to vigorously pursue my cause, he now seemed increasingly reluctant to champion my rights and desires as a dad. He seemed uneasy pushing for justice; I began to suspect he was wary of angering the judge for whom he served as a court commissioner by pressing her about errors she had clearly made and refused to either acknowledge or correct in my case. Instead of working to press my position, he began to suggest that all teenagers want less time with their parents and their families in high school and that I should just “make peace” with less time.

In early June the breath of fresh air ushered in by the new GAL suddenly turned foul. His proposal for my daughter’s placement through her high school years was a complete disaster. Over the last four years I’d seen my school year placements trimmed from 15 (2003-2005) to 12 (2006-2009) per year. He proposed not only trimming them back further—to just 9 per year, but he wanted only 6 of them to involve trips to Minnesota. The other 3 would require me to spend the weekend in a motel in Wisconsin and “exercise my placement without disrupting her Wisconsin routine.” He scheduled each of the 9 placements for me, as though I was not even a fit enough father to exercise my own choice of time. He worked around WYSO rehearsals meticulously, several times gerrymandering long weekends in senseless ways.

His proposal offered no extra time over the summer to compensate for the further erosion of school year time. And it erased my daughter’s continued participation in the Young Author’s Conference (she’d been invited to start serving as a mentor to younger students now) without a word, although I knew she remained vocal about her desire to keep attending.

The greatest insult in his proposal was what you couldn’t see: any of my daughter’s Minnesota family. Over the four pages of his recommendation he mentioned WYSO sixteen times, identifying month-by-month the impact of his proposed placement on her WYSO rehearsals. Seven more times he explicitly referred to his goal of promoting her participation in her high school activities. But not once did he even mention the blended family that she had been part of for more than a decade now. Over the past two years my daughter has become an aunt three times to her great delight. But preserving her relationships with parents or sibings—or promoting these new relationships with niece and nephews in Minnesota wasn’t even part of the equation. Rendered entirely invisible, you’d never guess she had anything more than a bachelor dad who “lived out of a van down by the river” (to echo Chris Farley’s SNL phrase).

The entire proposal was crafted to prioritize everything in her Wisconsin life, mention not a single facet of her Minnesota life—leaving it invisible and without value—and then schedule her placement time with this ‘home-less/family-less’ dad in a way that least interrupted one life and entirely ignored the other as though it didn’t exist. This was his effort to promote my daughter’s best interests. I could not believe it.

In mid-July, after another round of mixed signals from my attorney I sent him a pointed message making clear my “bottom line” non-negotiables:

• If WYSO was indeed going to cost me the loss of another three school year placements, then by God, as the dad with precious little time left during the school year I was going to be the one to schedule them. No other person, man or woman, lawyer or judge, was going to act as though I couldn’t be trusted to plan out time with my own daughter.
• Except in very rare cases these placements would happen in Minnesota, fostering as best possible the ongoing relationships with her entire Minnesota family.
• My daughter’s participation in the Young Author’s Conference would be guaranteed for as long as she so desired.
• We would finally receive significant extra time over the summer. The 2006 Order’s “50% plus four days” had proven, in fact, to be a sham of about “50% plus one day” each summer. I would ask for two-thirds of the summer, and negotiate from there.
• I wanted clear explicit recognition of the value of her Minnesota family. We would not allow them to be invisible any longer.
• And I wanted to press for the inclusion of a family therapist in any future conflict resolution process.

That was my “dream” list, but I made clear that I was going after these things with a vengeance and I expected him to be on the same page as me. My letter concluded: “I am pissed. My daughter’s welfare—and her relationship with me and her blended family—have been utterly disregarded by the whole family court system these last few years. And [the GAL] has signaled his readiness to carry that even further. Whatever it takes, I will challenge this ... I need to know, are you on board or do I need to look elsewhere?”

I heard nothing from him for three weeks. His response came when I received my copy of his Motion to Withdraw as my attorney. His two-sentence explanation ran as follows: “In correspondence [Mr. Weiss] advised me that I should not continue as his counsel if certain objectives were unattainable. I consider the objectives requested by Mr. Weiss unattainable.”

In late August the court heard his motion. I had no desire to force him to stay on my case. I didn’t need to be battling my own attorney alongside my ex’s. So I let him withdraw and I scheduled the hearing to determine the last four years of my daughter’s placement for late September. I would represent myself again. I would no doubt lose again. I had no hope left, only hunger for justice. But I would hold onto that.

On September 21 I rose before dawn to drive down to Wisconsin for another beating. Margaret’s work schedule prevented her from making the trip with me, so I would be driving down alone. There are no words to describe the heaviness in my soul. I had prepared arguments and exhibits. I was sure of my position. And I was sure I would never get a chance to actually make my case. I would fight the long defeat for as long as I had energy, but I had all but given up on that far-fetched fantasy called “hope.”

I carried with me hope’s cousin, “love,” in the form of a piece of construction paper on which Margaret had written in colored markers the names of family and friends who held me in prayer that day. The paper was overflowing; it was as beautiful as it  was desperate: well over a hundred names whispered themselves to me, evoking yet others for whom there was no room. A whole cloud of witnesses. When I reached the courtroom this was the first piece of paper I set out before me. I remembered Father McGonigle’s words (a seminary professor of mine): “You are capable of doing almost anything if you believe you will loved while doing it.” Even losing on behalf of your daughter one last time, I thought to myself ruefully.

The hearing ran about two hours. I do not even want to remember it. I was in the pinball machine all over again. I managed to present my carefully crafted proposal for the next four years: it was my effort to put the manifesto I had sent to my attorney into language that was less impassioned but just as clear. Everything else I tried to say was squashed by objection left and right. I, the wordsmith, the public speaker, the teacher, was left mute. Although my body stayed in the chair, my psyche was curled up in a fetal position somewhere deep inside.

I listened as the GAL presented his proposal that belittled me as a father, erased my daughter’s blended family from sight and from her life, and carved out crumbs in my daughter’s life and called them “placement time.” I listened as my ex’s attorney presented her proposal that reduce me to little more than an occasional guest in my daughter’s life. Her plan sought to lessen my time even more than the GAL’s, to repeat all the errors of the 2006 Order, to map the dates out and chisel them in stone four years in advance, but then give my ex unilateral authority to further “adjust” the schedule as needed to promote my daughter’s involvement in her Wisconsin life. This nightmarish proposal would completely devastate me.

I listened as voices swirled around me presenting a portrait of a father who couldn’t accept the court’s authority, who couldn’t be trusted to manage his own affairs as a dad, who clearly had a host of unresolved issues and was worthy at best of pity, but was pretty clearly being offered not much more than contempt. I remember wondering at some point, “Who are they talking about—and realizing just as quickly as the thought appeared: me, of course.”

I have been through some rough situations, some awkward encounters, some embarrassing moments, some occasions in which I have felt deep shame. But never in my life have I felt so dehumanized as I did that day in court. At the end of the hearing the judge thanked everyone for their time and told us she would issue her decision in a few days.

I was in a daze as I packed my things up. The last three things I remember are hearing my ex laughing with her attorney and her sister as they left the courtroom; the GAL wishing me a safe drive home as he stepped over my beaten self pretending not to notice how badly I’d been battered; and the names on the page that, true to their word, still whispered love to me through watery eyes as I slid them back into my briefcase.

I drove home trying not to replay anything in the courtroom. Four hours is a long time to not replay the beating of your life. I had phone conversations with Margaret and with my parents. I told them it didn’t go well, but I didn’t get into visceral details while driving. As I recall Margaret had meetings for a large chunk of the drive home and was unreachable by phone. At some point the anguish began to eat me alive. I called one close friend; no answer. I left a short message. I called another close friend, a woman who had been like a daughter to me for a decade; no answer. I left a message that ended in tears. She called back minutes later and we wept words of love to one another. I told her I needed someone to tell me I was a good dad because I felt for all the world like I was worthless and horrible. And she spoke gospel to me while I drove home through the greatest stretch of the middle of nowhere in my life.

The next day my Facebook status read “This is the nature of structural evil: it destroys lives without malice. Therefore it is at once morally innocent and purely evil. It is bureaucracy become psychopathic.” I don’t expect anyone in the courtroom other than me had any difficulty sleeping the night of the hearing. I’m sure for everyone else it was business as usual. No one had acted with malice. The system could grind people up, could shred lives, without ever getting angry or raising its voice. It was just doing its job. And its job just happened to be destroying lives while murmuring always about the “best interests” of the children. I’m sure most of them thought about the day, “job well done.”

I had nothing left but hunger. I had told both Margaret and my parents even before the hearing, that if the results were as I expected I was prepared to do a hunger strike. I was clear that this wouldn’t have any outward impact on the court; that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to finally allow my body to claim as fully as my soul the hunger that has gripped me for so long. And to symbolically mark out time to tell my story.

Eventually I mentioned it as well to a handful of my closest friends. No one was “excited” by the idea, but my palpable dread before the hearing and my somber resolve afterwards kept anyone from trying to talk me out of it. This was my grief and I think everyone knew they better not seek to console me lightly.

I first picked 27 days as the length, because I could make a strong case for having lost 27 days of placement time over the past four years. Many friends voiced alarm at the length. I said, I didn’t pick it to be easy, I picked it to match the ache of the days I’ve lost. But eventually, to ease their concern, I settled on 21 days since I could make an entirely objective case, a descriptive case really beyond argument at all, for having lost 21 days since the 2006 Order went into effect.

I never looked forward to doing this. It has brought me no joy. But it has proven to be a way to integrate the brokenness of my spirit into the bodily narrative of my life. When my spirit had nothing left but hunger, the fast allowed my body to say to my soul, “I hear your pain, I feel your ache, I know your hunger.” It has been a strange way to become whole. But as I have allowed hunger to move to all the corners of my body I have touched the strength I needed. And I have created a space, both in my gut and in my heart, to let the words of my story gather and arrange themselves to be heard.

Speaking the story goes a long way toward exorcising shame. Even apart from “shame,” the sheer hiddenness of this tale has kept my anguish from being known and held up in care by many. Hardly any of my friends have known this whole tale, and until today no one has seen it in print. But now I have told it. This is the why behind the sorrow that sits so often in my eyes. This is the what that weights the lump in my heart with every beat. This is the who that bends my shoulders some days, not because she is so heavy but because she is my daughter, and I have loved her since before she was born … and I will love her no matter how difficult it becomes.

Speaking the story sets its truth free. And allows its truth to touch the truth in your lives as well. And then, held between us, it becomes holy. It makes us all a bit more whole. Thank you for listening.

* * *

This entry is now the tenth written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. In the next one I explain the truly good news that prompted me to end the fast early. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

In this chapter I offer a litany of my failed attempts to rectify the error-ridden Order of November 2006 as well as other mishaps and injustices that continued to sow seeds for my hunger strike.

9. Fighting the Long Defeat
David Weiss, December 14, 2010 (The fast is over! Watch for post #11 to explain why.)

This isn’t a complete chronology of the past fours years of struggle. It’s more a brief collage of dashed hopes, bitter disappointments, further injustices, and nearly comic tragedies that have peppered the years from November 2006 to May 2010.

In thinking about these years and my unremitting grief I am reminded of Tracy Kidder’s moving portrait of Paul Farmer’s work to relieve suffering and promote health in Haiti (Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World). Kidder recounts Farmer’s own description of his work as “fighting the long defeat.” Farmer’s point is that, in full recognition of the systemic forces that will almost surely render his efforts for the people of Haiti futile in the long run, he chooses, nonetheless, to “make common cause with the loser.”

For these past four years, as I watched the family court system shred my hopes and dreams I have been reduced to this: the pledge to myself that I would always be willing to lose one more time rather than give up altogether. That is a thin thread of hope on which to hang a father’s love. But is has proven strong enough.

Injustice … Chiseled in Stone: Motion to Reconsider – Denied

I would call them errors, had they been admitted. But when “defended,” albeit with specious claims, by someone with virtually unchecked power, errors become injustices. And these were as good as chiseled in stone.

My attorney-mentor was as aghast as I was by the judge’s carelessness. She worked pro bono to file a Motion to Reconsider, seeking to have the laundry list of errors corrected. The guardian ad litem (GAL) had an opportunity to weigh in on the motion. He was particularly well-positioned to do so: he didn’t make any of these errors in his proposal (he had at least paid attention to the school calendars and had done his summer placement math correctly). Plus, I had sent him a letter just days after the Order arrived pointing the errors out to him, and reminding him that he hadn’t made these mistakes himself. Despite his legal obligation to be a “zealous advocate” for my daughter, he chose to express no opinion about the merits of my motion. Justice for my daughter was no longer a convenient priority for him (if it ever had been).

The judge dismissed the motion outright, claiming that I had “misread the decision.” She was so quick to dismiss my motion that her own dismissal contained not less than six more errors or misreadings itself! The attitude she showed in the courtroom, suggesting she couldn’t imagine a lay person daring to press a case in front of her, spilled over into condescending language and a repeat of the same sloppiness that marked the original Order. Every error I identified was an error—every single one. But because we were on opposite sides of the bench—and she was on the side where power rested—my best reason was impotent to challenge her worst arrogance. The Order held.

Court of Appeals – Denied

My attorney-mentor, the only person I encountered in my saga who has actually cared about this travesty of justice, worked pro bono again to file an appeal with the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. She commented at one point that she now understood my earlier reference to feeling like the character in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where a man is arrested and tried for crimes never revealed to him. It is a maddening account of power that is accountable to no one. Seven months later my appeal was denied. The basic decision affirmed the wide (some would say the maddening and unaccountable) discretion that judges have in deciding what it means to apportion placement time according to a child’s best interests. And the decision chose to not even respond to the assertion that she made outright errors in calculating and mapping out the placement time. With a daughter’s time with her father resting on the scales, the Court of Appeals decided through its silence that the judge had the power to make the ruling she made—whether or not it contained errors.

First Orchestra Concert – Denied

In May 2007 my daughter, now 11 and a fifth grader just starting to learn violin, played in her first middle-school orchestra concert. Margaret and I made plans to go. Indeed, because she had selected violin to play largely because her brother had played violin in middle-school himself years earlier, we drove from Minnesota to Wisconsin by way of Iowa to pick up my son so that he could join us for the concert. We drove six hours to get there.

I alerted my ex four weeks in advance of our plans and asked to take our daughter out afterwards for an ice cream cone. I was told they already had plans afterwards. We arranged our drive to arrive early enough to take her out for supper before the concert, and I inquired about that. I was told, No, there would be no time to see her at all. I asked the GAL to intervene of my daughter’s behalf, but he again decided it was not his place to be her advocate.

As it turned out we managed about a 2-minute hello on the sidewalk outside the school and a 2-minute farewell in the crowded gymnasium after the concert. The moment she had finished playing the first person she sought out in the seats was my son. I think it was the first time in his life he fully realized how much she adored him. We drove back to Minnesota that night, glad we had made the ten-hour trek, but stung that for our efforts we had been granted the sum total of 5 minutes of time with my daughter. This poem (an acrostic: it spells out “Orchestra Concert” down the left margin) remembers that day:

May 17

Outside we waited anxiously,
ready to greet you,
calling your name and then
hugging you so tightly
excited to be here but having
so little time for hello after
traveling so far and you were
rushed inside to get ready
and we could only watch you go.

Craning to catch your eye afterwards
over the swarming crowds; I was
nearly bursting with pride and you
climbed into my waiting arms
even as I knew you would be
rushed away again despite our having
traveled so far … only to watch you go.

Summer Terrors … and Therapy Denied

Over the summer of 2007, as though her “victory” was insufficient, my ex decided to read the new Order as providing me a 3 p.m. pick-up at the start of each summer placement but providing her a 2 p.m. pick-up at the conclusion of each placement. Not content to know that her silent complicity with the Order’s error was helping to “steal” 3-4 days of placement time each summer, she hoped to trim another hour off of each placement. She showed up outside our home an hour early four consecutive times that summer. I tried to persuade her otherwise, but she wouldn’t listen. I contacted my ex’s attorney, but she wouldn’t do anything. I tried to get the GAL involved, but he wasn’t interested. Twice my daughter spent the last hour of her time with me curled in a fetal position scared that her mom would be angry at her for not coming outside at 2 p.m. (Eventually we just found places to be away from the house until 3 p.m., but even those outings were marred by the anxiety of the car that would be waiting for us when we returned home.)

I asked my daughter if she wanted to speak with a counselor about the fear and anxiety she was experiencing. She said yes. I contacted two different family therapists in Minnesota. Both would have been willing to meet with her—but neither would even schedule an appointment without both parents’ consent. I informed my ex of my desire to seek counseling for my daughter. She responded not with concern for our daughter’s wellbeing but by filing an Ex Parte Motion preventing me from seeking counseling without her express consent.

As the summer was drawing to close I finally persuaded the GAL to meet with my daughter to assess the sincerity of her desire to meet with a counselor. He agreed it would be wise, and then spent over a month trying to negotiate the terms of this with my ex and her attorney. I finally received clearance to make an appointment with a family therapist in Wisconsin (her turf again) in late November 2007.

On a Sunday afternoon, three days before the appointment my ex cornered my daughter at home and grilled her about what she had told the GAL and why she wanted to talk to a therapist. She told my daughter in no uncertain terms, “You don’t need to talk to a counselor! If you need to talk to anyone, you can talk to me!” The interrogation continued until my daughter wilted and parroted back, “Okay, Mom, you’re right. I don’t need a counselor. If I ever want to talk to anyone I can talk to you.” To which her mom said, “That’s better.” And on Monday she called her attorney, said that her daughter had changed her mind about wanting counseling and that she was withdrawing her consent. The appointment was cancelled.

I learned all this from my daughter when I picked her up that Wednesday for Thanksgiving break. On Monday I called the GAL livid. I reported everything to him. This was his response: he called my daughter’s school counselor and asked if she seemed to be doing okay in school. Reassured that her home life wasn’t leaking into her school life, he never investigated this any further. I do not know if he was truly so reluctant to get involved, if he was so intimidated by my ex’s attorney, or if this appointment was so much more work than either bargained. But for four years he neglected to do anything that looked even remotely like zealous advocacy for the interests of a child he was entrusted to represent.

The counseling never took place. Eventually I filed a formal complaint against the GAL for failing to do his job. I was told by the Office of Lawyer Regulation that because the substance of my complaint wasn’t about “ethics” per se but about his “statutory obligations” as a GAL under the law, that I needed to file my complaint with the judge who appointed him. The judge who already had me at the top of her shit list. I never saw the point in that.

Motion to Correct – Denied

In March 2008, after trying repeatedly (but without success) to get the GAL to address the errors in the Order, I filed my own motion. I provided painstaking detail both to substantiate my claims and to rebut the judge’s earlier rejection of them (in my Motion to Reconsider in December 2006). She again denied my motion. Part of her argument this time was that “the specific governs the general.” Applied to the Order it meant this: since the days circled (without text or explanation) on the calendars appended to the Order didn’t match the clear reasoning provided in the words of the Order itself, the specific circles governed the general words. In other words, it was impossible that she circled the wrong days. How dare anyone question that they failed to carry out the meaning of the words. And if they did, then she must have meant to override the words by her circles. This was injustice … chiseled in stone.

Lawyer – Disappeared; Second Motion to Correct – Denied

After the Appeal was denied, my attorney-mentor said she’d done all she could for me and that I really needed an attorney right there in the county where the case was to pursue matter any further. She gave me the names of several family law attorneys and I called one and made an appointment (sometime in the summer of 2008). When I arrived I found myself meeting not with the recommended attorney but with her junior partner. She reassured me that she met regularly with the senior partner and that I would get the best of both of them. For six months this junior partner worked to prepare for my next attempt to address the Order’s errors. But she was increasingly unresponsive to my phone calls and evasive about my questions. Then one day the senior partner told me that her junior partner was no longer with her—and that she herself was too swamped to take over my case. She refunded my entire retainer and apologetically passed me on to a colleague of hers in a different office. (I learned later that the junior partner had suffered a nervous breakdown, literally disappeared, and had left a couple dozen clients like myself unrepresented and unprepared.)

So in February 2009 I met with a new attorney. He assured me he would get me a fair hearing with this judge; he claimed to recognize the errors and thought they should be relatively easy to get straightened out. When I told him about my poor track record with the judge he told me not to worry, that he served as one of her court commissioners and was on very good terms with her. Then he asked me if my ex was “independently wealthy.” I said, “No, why?” He replied, because her attorney’s reputation has been built by representing the likes of neurosurgeons in very high-priced divorce-custody battles. She’s known as one of the area’s most aggressive and highest priced attorneys!”

He represented me without any success in several minor court dealings from February 2009 until summer 2010. He never got me the justice he promised. Several times he gave me advice that backfired. The motion he filed to correct the Order was dismissed just as quickly as my own had been; in fact, I lost two more days of placement time on his watch. His efforts to get the GAL to do his job met with no more success—though perhaps they did play a role in getting the GAL to resign his post in March 2010.

Finally A Breath of Fresh Air

For whatever reasons the GAL who all along had wanted to do as little as possible on behalf of my daughter finally asked the court to do nothing at all. In March 2010 he asked to be released from his appointment and it was granted. A new attorney was assigned to be my daughter’s voice. His first task was to mediate conflict over my (now 14 year-old) daughter’s desire to successfully navigate a tricky couple of weeks in late May and early June.

My daughter was hoping on weekend number one to join Margaret and me in traveling to Iowa to meet her grandparents and my son’s other parents (his mother and step-dad) and see him graduate from college. On the second weekend she wanted to bring a friend from Wisconsin with her to participate in the Yong Authors Conference. And on the third weekend she was hoping to attend her eighth grade dance in Wisconsin then make it to Minnesota the next day in time to be a bridesmaid in her step-sister’s wedding. It was less than ideal that these events fell on three consecutive weekends. But the depth of her desire to be present for all three indicated the extent to which her connections to Minnesota remained strong despite all the forces conspiring to weaken them.

Although I had proposed trading away my April placement time to secure the additional placement weekend needed to make the three-in-a-row possible (I knew there was no way I would just get extra days for free) her mother was adamant that our daughter needed to choose which of the three Minnesota events mattered the least and skip that one. When it became apparent that her new GAL was going to support my daughter’s desire to be part of all three events her mother went to Plan B. She asked to either drive my daughter three hours to Iowa to arrive just in time for her brother’s graduation ceremony and then to whisk her away back to Wisconsin immediately afterwards—or to do the same thing two weeks later on the day of the wedding. She would facilitate my daughter’s presence in the most minimal way, making sure she knew how marginal she was to this Minnesota family by forcing her to the edge of one event or the other.

Thankfully, the new GAL ruled in my daughter’s favor, allowing her to participate fully in all three weekends. (This had been my position as well, but his decision was clearly to support my daughter’s desires as valid and reasonable.) No matter, it was a victory I never expected. It had been years since anything at all had gone in my favor. Each weekend went wonderfully, providing its own set of special memories. But the breath of fresh air brought in by a new GAL would turn foul within a month …

The Other Ex Factor

I should say something about the “other ex” in my life. My first wife and I divorced in 1987 after being married less than a year. It was not an easy divorce for either of us. Our son was two months when we separated. We had our share of hurt feelings and bitterness for the first year or two, though we never let those things impede our care for our son. More importantly, before long we became strong co-parents, both of us active in our son’s life—and both of us fully supportive of the other’s role in our son’s life. We have each moved, remarried, and became parents to other children over the years. We have negotiated a lot of change, and we have managed to do so while honoring our son’s place in each of our lives.

When he was in high school his mother came to visit several times, staying in our home on at least one occasion and in a nearby motel on the others. She and Margaret enjoy spending time together, each of them appreciative of their respective places in my son’s life. When he graduated from high school she co-hosted with us the open house to celebrate his day. She and my mother (both my parents, really) remain very close; in fact, her present husband considers my parents in-laws as well.

When our son graduated from college last spring, his mother and step-dad drove up from Oklahoma. My parents drove out from Indiana. Margaret and I drove down from Minnesota, going by way of Wisconsin to pick-up my daughter along the way. And the seven of us took over a bed and breakfast for the long weekend. We spent our days sight-seeing together. We spent our evenings playing games and sharing stories. And our son knew the joy of seeing all four of his parents side-by-side, proud of him and happy to share his day. And my daughter must have watched it all with a deep envy, knowing that her parents would likely never be smiling in such close proximity.

I share the anecdote only to make this point. Animosity does not need to rule the roost after a divorce. The other ex in my life “proves” that I am more than capable of co-parenting, more than willing to work at the communication—and build the trust—necessary to jointly raise a child. Indeed, far from “managing to make it work,” we have fashioned a post-divorce partnership as parents (and step-parents) in which our son has only ever been “in the middle” of shared support, never of entrenched conflict. I would have wished for the same for my daughter had her mother been willing to imagine it possible.

Reflections …

This section of my struggle has been abbreviated for both our sakes. The litany of conflicts, both petty and profound, could have been significantly expanded . But it is too exhausting and deflating to itemize in its entirety. By now the theme is clear: like most every institution, family court is more concerned to preserve the court than the family. Errors, oversights, even bias and arrogance receive almost complete protection once they occur. Obviously, appeals occasionally succeed, and the worst offenders are occasionally held to account. But only enough to perpetuate the myth of the system working. In my case, it has failed repeatedly.

In truth the family court system is badly broken and while one parent might benefit in the short run, the other parent and the child (often unknowingly) are served little or no justice at all. And in the long run everyone stands to lose in a system that insists on creating winners and losers rather than thinking outside the box to create post-divorce families. With my “other ex” I am living proof that this is both possible and preferable.

Granted, we managed that outside the system. We mediated our initial decree with a professional mediator; we mediated our revised stipulation with a pastor; and we never hired attorneys. But the system could recognize the benefits of reducing adversarial encounters; it could support the parent who is open to mediation rather than privilege the one with money to burn on a high-priced attorney; it could affirm either parent’s desire to strengthen the child-parent relationship in ways that don’t disadvantage the other parent. But at present it remains wed to the notion that attorney-gladiators are the best stewards of our children’s best interests. And, sadly, I am equally living proof that this is both preposterous and impossible.

* * *

This entry is now the ninth written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. In the next one I explain the truly good news that prompted me to end the fast early. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

In this chapter I recount the disastrous day in Court in October 2006 and the subsequent Order that first sowed the seeds of my hunger strike four years ago.

8. An Un-Hallowed Eve
David Weiss, December 13, 2010 (Day 15 of the fast)

My daughter was with me the weekend immediately before the hearing. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and we carved pumpkins amid the fallen leaves on the grass alongside our home before she was picked up.

Two days later Margaret and I followed her to Wisconsin for our day in court. I was as well-prepared as I could be, but I was apprehensive nonetheless. I had continued to meet occasionally with my attorney-mentor, and under ideal conditions I might’ve done a respectable job as a daughter’s hero. But I faced conditions far from ideal, and had my daughter been a fly on the wall, she would’ve wept with grief at what she saw.

I had arranged six weeks earlier—with the judge’s approval and the consent of both my ex’s attorney and the guardian ad litem (GAL)—to call several witnesses by phone in order to attest to the richness of the family life my daughter enjoyed in Minnesota. I had a family member, two church friends, a next-door neighbor, the father of a playmate, and the pastor of our church, all waiting by their phone for a call from court.

When I asked to call my first witness the judge suddenly decided she wasn’t interested in making phone calls that day. In a humiliating and disorienting series of exchanges between the judge and my ex’s attorney, I was asked what each person was “supposedly” going to say. Each bit of authentic testimony to our family’s goodness was reduced to a second-hand sound byte and accepted into the record without objection since it had now been trivialized as mere “opinion and hyperbole.” Not fifteen minutes into the hearing I found myself being toyed with by these “professionals” as if to remind me I was thoroughly out of my league and I had no business hawking my wares—loving my daughter—on their turf. I managed only to get permission for Margaret to be excused from the courtroom long enough to call all of the waiting witnesses to tell them that their testimony would not be sought.

From there on I was rattled in everything I attempted. I felt like a ball in a pinball machine knocked from one bumper to the next.

The only “expert witness” was the therapist. She framed the issue as a need to reduce the stress that the transitions back and forth put on my daughter. This wasn’t the issue; the issue was my daughter’s desire to have more time with me. That was my motion. But my ex’s attorney managed to entirely shift the frame to take full advantage of testimony that was neither honest nor fair to either me or my daughter. Any stress caused by the transitions was largely the product of an ex-spouse who had wished me dead years ago and who remained unhappy that I was still not only part of our daughter’s life but held an honored place in her heart. But that testimony never came out because all the “therapy” had been carefully shielded from me. I pressed her on points as best I could, but I sensed that my ex’s attorney was going to have a field day. And she did.

The GAL was little help. He presented his proposal, which was far less destructive than my ex’s, but he didn’t present it very zealously. He made no argument against the dire cuts in time proposed by my ex. But then, how could he? He hadn’t spoken to my daughter in five months and he’d never spoken at all to any of the references I’d given him six months earlier. He had a proposal to present but nothing more.

I stammered my way through the hearing, but with the stakes so high—I knew four years of placement time was hanging on every word I spoke, or misspoke, every argument I made or failed to make—I was a nervous wreck. I tried yet again to say that all this history of conflict over placement had roots in a history of violence, but the judge said that was irrelevant. Too long ago. Not worth hearing about. Instead, she pegged me as a father trying to insert myself unwanted into a child’s life more to be a nuisance to the mom than because I wanted to love the child. She had refused to let any of my witnesses speak, yet she decided she knew exactly what type of dad I was: an unneeded one.

The judge was worse than dispassionate; she was openly impatient. She seemed overtly peeved that someone would dare to try and represent himself in her courtroom, and she let me know it. By the end I was emotionally overwrought. I had tried to be my daughter’s champion, and I had utterly failed. The judge said she would issue her Decision and Order in a few days, but I knew I had lost. All that remained to be seen was how much I had lost. Margaret and I drove home in near silence. We got back late at night. I wrote this poem the next morning, wet with sorrow like dew reluctant to let the new day begin:

The Year the Jack-o-Lantern was left unlit

Sunday in the sun,
amid the crinkling leaves on the lawn,
we carved star after star after star
on the pumpkin
you had proudly picked out
weeks before at the apple orchard.
Finished and perched
on our front steps
our Jack was an echo
of heavenly lights
just waiting to be lit.
But coming home late on
All Hallow’s Eve,
our street dark,
trick-or-treaters long since gone,
and sadness in my soul beyond measure,
it seemed only right
that this would be
the year the Jack-o-Lantern
was left unlit.

I moved through the week listless, waiting for the Order to come. I was not a moment without anxiety, like a low-level panic attack that stretched over a week. The next Sunday in church, at the point in the prayers where the people are invited to offer their own petitions I prayed. I was sitting by myself because Margaret was singing in choir. I remember my first words were something like, “God of justice—.” Every word after that was uttered between sobs. Never one to wear my emotions on my sleeves, this morning they ran down my cheeks and splashed onto the church pew, they broke in my voice, they shook in my shoulders. My grief was more public than I ever meant for it to be. But when we passed the Peace that day, I received more Peace than ever before. My need was so obvious and people were generous with hugs that held me long and hard.

On November 10, 2006, I received the judge’s Order the way you receive a hard kick to gut. It knocked the air out of me, left me doubled over, and once I caught my breath, I sobbed long into the night.

This is what I read. For starters, my school year placements were to be reduced from 15 placements averaging 42 days per school (from 2003-2005) to 12 placements averaging 36 days per school year (from 2006-2009). The Order gave written assurance that, while fewer trips were necessary for my daughter’s “well-being,” each of these fewer trips would make full use of adjacent days off from school to insure longer trips whenever possible. Still, my daughter and I would lose on average six days per school year, more than erasing the four extra days we had just gotten during the summer. Eight months earlier I had gone to court to honor my daughter’s tearful pleas for more time with me and after everything we would actually lose time together.

Then as I read the Order in all its detail things got even worse. Despite its explicit assurance to lengthen weekends by joining them to days off from school whenever possible, the judge’s calendar did not do this. Four times over four years she simply failed to notice days off from school adjacent to weekends assigned to me. Three more times, also in contradiction to the words in the Order itself, she placed my daughter with my ex for more than half of her Christmas or spring break. She was with me less than 13% of her school year; you might think that over her two longer breaks I would at least get the benefit of the odd extra day whenever these breaks couldn’t be divided evenly. But the judge hadn’t even applied her pledge to do so consistently on the list of dates provided. Over four years I would lose on average 2 days each year simply due to judicial carelessness regarding the school calendar.

Summer was a cataclysm all its own. The Order affirmed that I would still have my daughter for “50%-plus-four-days” of her summer vacation. Perhaps understandably, given the conflict between us, the judge did not want my ex and I having to tally up and then divide each year’s summer vacation. She chose instead to declare a “typical summer” as 76 days, divide that by two (38), add four (42), and schedule my daughter for four summers of 42 days each with me. BUT—!

But over the preceding five years a typical summer wasn’t 76 days long. In fact, my daughter’s previous five summer vacations (all data easily available to the judge) had been 87, 80, 82, 82, and 88 days long. 76 was NOT a typical summer vacation. Had the judge averaged the five available years, she would have found that a typical summer actually had 84 days. By that objective measure—and then dividing 84 by two (42) and adding for (46)—her decision to award me 42 days of summer placement each year in truth entirely erased the “plus four” that the Order promised. Call it calendar-incompetence or arithmetic-error or judicial-injustice, by whatever name, the judge managed to preserve “50%-plus-four-days” as an idea in the order while simultaneously emptying it of any content each and every summer.

There were a handful of other “minor” errors in the Order, but that covers the main ones. I could not believe my eyes. I could not wrap my mind around the magnitude of the mess. I would contact my attorney-mentor in the morning to begin the process of correcting the errors. But that first night I simply allowed myself to weep. I didn’t even the energy left for rage.

Reflections …

Given the courtroom I experienced that October day I had no business being in there without a lawyer at my side. But I still balk at that. Everything that happened in the room that day was a game of chess played by two attorneys, one judge, and one dad. My ex never spoke except while on the stand. It was a game played by professional game-players in which time with my daughter was reduced to an abstract idea: the prize. If this is really “family court,” why is it that every family member is expected to be a spectator while their respective “hired guns” go at each other? Does anyone really think that’s the best way we can assure some semblance of justice for families?!

To be sure, the words “best interests” were used again and again in the courtroom. But to any parent they were a mocking jest. In the entire seven years since the divorce in 1999 (and despite my persistent pleas), not a single person with training in family therapy, family systems, child psychology, marriage dynamics, or domestic violence had been consulted about how to help this family function on the far side of divorce after a violent marriage. Not one. (Except, of course, the therapist who had betrayed both father and daughter to the whim of an insecure and manipulative mother. And the FCCS director, who despite her mandate, couldn’t find the time to even speak directly about these things with me or my daughter.)

So “best interests” was a pretty empty rhetorical phrase for me by then. The people in the room that day did not care about the best interests of any real person. The were playing a game, jockeying for position, competing for a prize, or (in the GAL’s case) just logging their time, and it was my daughter’s life that was left bruised, banged, and perhaps irreparably torn in the process.

It would be possible to build a system within family court that at least tried to respect the best interests of the child. But it would need to be a system that took those best interests out of an adversarial context where “winning the case” is the only goal, where legal rules are employed to gain leverage not to pursue justice, and where the testimony of “experts” is just a fancy way of naming mercenaries called on to twist the truth one direction or another. The system we have now is abusive to both parents and children. And, in my experience, it is more than content to remain so.

* * *

This entry is now the eighth written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. Next I offer a litany of my failed attempts to rectify the error-ridden Order. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

In this chapter I recount the events of March-September 2006.

7. The Calm before the Storm
David Weiss, December 13, 2010 (Day 15 of the fast)

All school year long, but especially as spring begins to hint at another summer, my daughter continues her regular requests, “Isn’t there some way I can have more time with you?” She even says she wishes she could trade her primary homes—going to school in Minnesota and splitting her summer between her two households.

Driven by a blend of anger and frustration, love and hope—fueled as well by her tears and her persistent pleas, I asked for the moon. In March I filed a motion seeking four things: (1) her attendance at the Young Authors Conference; (2) to increase her summer time with me from half the summer to one-half-plus-eight days—from 50/50 to about a 60/40 split; (3) to change her school year placement to Minnesota—in which case I said the 60/40 summer split would favor Wisconsin; (4) to change her custody status to sole custody with me.

It was not a very realistic set of requests—except to a father who had experienced repeated unreasonable interference with his custody rights over the years. I reasoned, if my ex could not be trusted to be share custody with me, then it should be awarded solely to me. And that if my daughter truly wanted to have her school years in Minnesota, she deserved to have that opportunity. An attorney would’ve pressed me to make a more modest request. But, by the irony of judicial bureaucracy, my motion was stamped on my daughter’s 10^th birthday. What father would not seek the moon for his own child? A hearing was scheduled for late May. Because the “misogynist” judge from August 2002 had since retired, the case was passed forward to the judge who had replaced him.

In April I worked to prepare myself. I found a young family law attorney who practiced in Wisconsin about a thirty-minute drive from the Twin Cities. I hired her to tutor me in how to represent myself at the hearing. We reviewed the data and my arguments together. She gave me a crash course in legal protocol. I began to sense the constraints of legalese that produce at best the thinnest form of justice and at worst allow monstrous injustice to masquerade under a false name. But with my motion I had put my ante into the game, purchased a peasant’s place at the gambling table. And had bet the moon.

That month the court appointed a guardian ad litem (GAL) to be my daughter’s legal voice (in Wisconsin the GAL is a licensed attorney charged with representing a minor’s best interests). Three names were proposed. I recognized all of them because I had found ways to ask about well-respected GAL’s in the Wisconsin county where the hearing would be held. I agreed to any of the three persons proposed. None of them could take the case because the hearing was only a month away. So another person was appointed GAL, someone that no one I had inquired of knew anything about. No wonder. Most GAL’s are family law attorneys by trade. This man was a social security disability lawyer who did a little GAL work “on the side.” It was not his area of expertise, interest, or passion as I soon came to realize.

At my attorney-tutor’s suggestion I gave him the names of several family, friends, and pastors to attest to the goodness of our home life here in Minnesota. He never called a single person. He interviewed my ex and my daughter in person, but declined my request to drive down for an in-person interview, saying that a 20-30 minute phone conversation would suffice. He would make a recommendation bearing on the next four years of my daughter’s life without ever meeting me in person—or speaking to anyone besides me about her life in Minnesota.

I told him about the patterns of abuse that lingered into our placement conflicts. I told him about my ex’s efforts (reported to me by my daughter) to intimidate her into silence. I told him he would hear very different input from our daughter depending on which parent had driven her to his office and was waiting just outside the door. I said he had no idea of how pervasively controlling my ex could be, with her intimidation reaching right through closed doors to stifle my daughter’s words. And I told him about the therapist’s inappropriate treatment of my daughter for fifteen months without my knowledge or consent. He listened with polite indifference to everything I said, thanked me for my input, and then ignored every alarm I tried to sound.

The only thing “accomplished” in our conversation was that I agreed to take my requests for sole custody and trading school year placement off the table for the May hearing and focus solely on the Young Authors Conference (YAC) and summer placement. This left me with two very modest reasonable requests. I added to these the hope for a clarified and strengthened “conflict resolution” provision that my ex couldn’t so easily ignore as she had the one in our 2003 stipulation. And that, ideally, because my daughter growing relationships with her siblings and had made a few friends at church, it would be nice to see my school year placement increased from 15 to 18 times during the school year. Despite my discontent with the GAL’s desire to treat this as merely as “territorial spat” (his phrase), I went into the May hearing feeling confident.

My parents drove up from Indiana, ready to testify on my behalf. My pastor was available by phone. Three members of my church drove four hours to be present as witness to the goodness of our home.

When Margaret and I arrived the GAL was waiting for us, hoping to broker a settlement before the hearing. He presented a proposal drafted by my ex’s attorney. It allowed my daughter to attend the YAC and gave us four extra days of summer placement—half of my request. In this respect it matched the GAL’s recommendation.

It also added in language that the GAL would be assigned to draft a school year calendar that would “minimize” my daughter’s transitions between households. I saw red. I objected that such language would be exploited to decrease time. He said, “don’t pay any attention to the wording, it doesn’t bind me to do anything at all.” We went back and forth. I was not pleased with the language. It had been crafted by her attorney, and it felt like a Trojan horse. He promised repeatedly that he would “not take a single day” of placement time away from me and my daughter. And he warned me that I had no idea who my ex’s attorney was, that I did not want to go into court against her—that I would be wisest to settle on this and let him do his job over the summer. I agreed to settle.

It felt like a hollow victory. I got some of what I wanted: YAC and extra summer time. Not as much extra summer, but I got extra nonetheless. I got language that made the GAL a “default” mediator, but also language that basically said for the next four years nothing was going to change. School year placement remained the big unknown. I would never know if I settled too soon. I felt pressured into the deal, and even if it was a good deal, the pressure didn’t feel right. I felt like the GAL himself was intimidated by my ex’s attorney, and his fear was a bit contagious. The summer, while spent in another round of fun activities, had the uncertainty of the fall’s schedule hanging over it. That summer was indeed “the calm before the storm.”

Going into the summer I again stressed to the GAL that it would be good for me to bring my daughter to him to hear her wishes for school year placement. That he would hear different things said if I was the parent she had “to face” when leaving his office. He decided that summer that he didn’t need to hear anything at all from the child he represented. He crafted a school year calendar for four years without a word of input from her.

He released his proposal in August. It didn’t include the 18 placements I had hoped for. It didn’t even preserve the 15 placements I’d had each of the past four school years. Each year I lost 2-4 days of placement time during the school year. Not much. But it virtually erased the extra four days I had just gained over the summer. Neither my daughter nor I were trying to shift a couple of days from school year to the summer. We were seeking more time. And he had given his word, emphatic and clear—“not a single day” would be taken away during the school year.

With the GAL’s recommendation filed with the court, but not yet finalized, I felt I had to object: it almost entirely undid any actual increase in time. My ex objected that it was far too generous. She indeed wanted to exploit that word “minimize” for everything it connoted, which in her mind meant she was entitled to propose fewer weekends and fewer days. Her proposal was for 10 school year placements, trimming 10 days off my previous school year time with my daughter—and her summer proposal removed the 4 extra days each summer! Altogether her proposal asked to reduce my time with my daughter by two weeks, to trim back by more than 15% the precious little time we had together—the time she knew her daughter wanted increased. With her proposal, the writing on the wall was clear for all to see. She was out for blood. And the calm before the storm was giving way to the storm itself.

A hearing was scheduled for October 31, 2006. It was a festive day for many families. Not so much for me. By nightfall it would be “Beggars’ Night,” and I would be reduced to a beggar.

Reflections …

There have been moments in my life when I have acted with arrogance, but this spring and summer are not among them. My actions were framed by too little money and too much hope. To this day, I believe I had all the ingredients for a winning case. Not just YAC, but all eight days of summer placement, and, at a minimum, a preservation of all my school year time. What I didn’t have was the money to hire an attorney. And the foolishness to believe I could persevere and win without one.

Despite knowing that the child psychologist who treated my daughter had done so without my consent, she was the only health professional he consulted about my daughter’s best interests. The therapist who had pin-pointed her “behavior issues” as related to anxiety about “making another trip to see dad,” but had never found it worthwhile to ask dad about it or to include me in any “treatment.” Had the system been interested in fairness or justice, had it wanted to really understand either the dynamics driving the parental conflict or the desires in my daughter’s heart, the GAL had the power to do so. He had plenty of resources he could draw on. What he lacked was the interest to do so. The child at the center of my heart was just a little money on the side to him. And she would remain that for the next four years. (I, on the other hand, would become a thorn in his side, though even that would never get him to actually advocate for my daughter.)

* * *

This entry is the seventh written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. Next I recount my day in Wisconsin Family Court, the day that defined the next four years of my life. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

In this chapter I recount the failure of the 2003 Stipulation and my return to court in 2006.

6. A Tempest Brewing
David Weiss, December 10, 2010 (Day 12 of the fast)

With the new stipulation freshly in place, the summer of 2003 was like a dream. Compared to the twenty-eight days of placement time in 2002, each of them purchased dearly with blood, sweat—and plentiful tears, in 2003 my daughter and I enjoyed 40 days together. And I mean enjoyed. We gardened, traveled to visit grandparents and friends, swam, took in the Minnesota Zoo, the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and the State Fair.

My daughter (now 7) attended a pottery class, from which the seascape clock she proudly fashioned still ticks with playful (and timely) beauty in our dining room. She spent hours jumping rope (perhaps for joy) and playing on her swing set (one that her brother and I had made in Iowa and disassembled to bring with us to Minnesota). Our family has always been a game-playing family and 2003 will be remembered by all of us as the summer of Life®. It was not the only game we played, but it was by far her favorite. And each day ended with a near sacred ritual of father-daughter bedtime stories. These were grand days.

We moved through the coming school year without incident. Negotiating the school year schedule was not easy, but with the aid of her pastor it happened—and on time. Summer 2004 arrived, with another luxurious expanse of time (this year 41 days), and we moved into it with abandon.

This summer featured Vacation Bible School and being in a summer musical, more books and games, another trip to visit grandparents in Indiana, and a glorious family vacation to the Grand Canyon that included her brother and one step-sister as well. But perhaps most significantly, this is the summer she learned to ride a two-wheeler.

This was a huge accomplishment and needs a word of explanation. My daughter was born with a congenital defect in one optic nerve; it leaves her functionally blind in one eye. She can see light and dark and general shapes, but she cannot focus on anything—at all. It means that she has no true depth perception. Over the years her body—and brain—have learned to compensate using other cues. But as a young child, every attempt at bike-riding was a terrifying experience of moving from one two-dimensional frame into the next into the next. She couldn’t accurately anticipate bumps or branches, and every little wobble must have felt like crashing from one plane into another.

For the three previous summers I had worked endlessly with her during our time together. I had occasionally fallen with her as well. My knees—banged by both pedals and pavement as I ran behind—were more than ready for success. And her hope was fading. But that summer, somehow, she found her balance. She became the bike. And her smile was as wide as the sidewalk on which she rode with sheer joy. To this day, bike-riding, for both of us, remains a labor of love.

Now 8 years old, she began to ask persistently, over each placement, why she couldn’t have more time with me during the summer. She reasoned, fairly enough, that since she was with me so little during the school year, why shouldn’t she have more of the summer with me. I knew that wouldn’t fly, so I chose to encourage her simply to relish the time we had together.

However, that desire to have more time with me apparently manifested itself back in Wisconsin as well. Not in verbalized questions, but in sullenness for a day or two after returning there, and in outbursts and occasional tantrums in the days before I picked her up. I never saw these. They were not part of her repertoire in Minnesota. I never knew they were happening. I did know that my ex had a two-person household with plentiful rules and a child over which she reigned supreme—not harshly, but with expectations about everything. In our home, with four teenagers and two parents who lived with great intention, but also with flexibility and a high regard for joy, she savored a freedom that was hardly reckless, but tasted delicious to her childlike wonder.

I do not know, but I suspect that the sullenness that troubled the other household was rooted in the turning off of that freedom each time she re-entered her Wisconsin home. And I suspect that it was her mother’s anticipatory edginess over an approaching pick-up, an edginess—a sharpness I knew for years—that could easily trigger outbursts in a child feeling her growing excitement met with maternal disapproval.

In any event, without my knowledge, my ex took our daughter to a child psychologist that summer for these “behavior problems.” She suggested they were the by-products of visits to her father’s house. And she asked the psychologist not to tell me that she was treating my daughter. Within three months the psychologist had decided that the behaviors were indeed “triggered” by my daughter’s anxiety over making another trip to her father’s—but she never sought to include me in any way in her “therapy.” For more than fifteen months my daughter was treated, without my involvement, consent, or even knowledge, for behaviors diagnostically “tied” to my household. Her outbursts were framed to the therapist entirely by the mother who had a history of such outbursts herself, and my daughter had no voice besides her own small 8 year-old voice to offer a broader perspective.

These months of therapy were a crime against her, if you ask me. She was “treated” for making what seem to me to be legitimate responses to the strange bifurcated world in which she moved. But because my voice, my insights, and my awareness of her history (and her mother’s) were entirely excluded from consideration, the therapist can only be said to have mis-treated her in the worst way. She was utterly disempowered by these two adults, her mother and her therapist. She was taught to feel blame for her legitimate responses, to suppress them, and to feel good about squeezing herself into a world far too small for her spirit.

The school year (2004-2005) passed without any major disputes, but a tempest was brewing.

The four summer placements in 2005 were filled with joy as usual, but were also marked by bitter tears at each ending. My daughter wept, claiming each time, “But I’m not ready to go back!” She desperately wanted more time with me, with Margaret, with the brothers and sisters who had fully become her family here. She was thriving on what our family offered her and she couldn’t understand what was wrong with wanting more. At some point, neither could I.

Initially, I told her that I didn’t believe this was something her mother would ever agree to. In her innocence she reassured me, “Mom always tells me that she just wants me to be happy, and if I tell her that I’d like to have more of my summers here, I’m sure she’ll say ‘Okay.’” I said it was more complicated than that. Undeterred, she asked her mother straightforward about it sometime in August 2005. Her biting reply, “Well, then maybe we should just pack up all your things and take you to your dad’s and drop you off. Is that what you want?” frightened my daughter back into line. Back into silent submission. And gave her another lesson in the “complexity” of parental love.

In the fall of 2005 I asked to begin a conversation with my ex about two matters.

One seemed simple enough. Since 2003 I had been an invited teacher at the annual week-long Twin Cities Young Authors Conference. Held on a local college campus at the end of May, the conference brought over 1000 middle-school and junior high students in by bus each day to participate in writing workshops with gifted authors. I taught poetry workshops. My daughter knew this and was eager to attend as my guest for a day next May. It would mean pulling her out of class for a day in Wisconsin, but in Minnesota nearly 5000 kids were pulled out of class each year to attend. It was a single day, a worthy extra-curricular event, and a special treat to do with dad. Although my ex framed her response in these terms, “I’m not convinced it’s a good enough reason to pull her out of school for a day,” I would guess it was that last aspect, “a treat to do with dad” that made her nix the idea.

The other matter I knew would be contentious. But for my daughter’s sake, to honor the tears she wept so fiercely all summer, I broached the idea of increasing her summertime with me. This request was met with dead silence. My phone calls were hung up on. My letters went unanswered. My ex would not discuss either the Young Authors Conference or summer placement at all. The issues weren’t simply closed. In her mind they simply weren’t.

When I reminded her that our stipulation now obligated us to use mediation to address conflicts we couldn’t resolve on our own, she replied, “We don’t have anything to mediate. We have a stipulation that tells you exactly what times you have her. There’s nothing more to discuss.” Click.

As the fall wore on I dreaded a return to court, but I dreaded even more consigning my daughter’s desires to that damningly familiar dance of avoiding her mother’s insecurity and anger. I gave notice that I would file a motion to hold my ex in contempt for not going to mediation. She did nothing. I filed the motion in early December and she responded by hiring a new attorney to represent her.

Prior to the January hearing date her attorney explained to the court commissioner that this was all a misunderstanding. Her client wasn’t even aware that there were any issues to be mediated. (This was a flat out lie.) But that, of course her client would be willing to join me in mediation if that was needed. So the hearing was canceled and the court gave me the name of a well-respected family mediator to schedule an appointment with. I was actually making this stipulation work! And unawares I was basking in a purely pyrrhic victory.

We met with the mediator in February. I entered hopeful. I left dismayed. My ex made one-sentence responses to every question asked. Her body was present, but nothing more. Any conciliatory desire to reach agreement had been left out in the car. Or back at house. The mediator suggested that we seek some input from our daughter (now a month shy of turning 10) about her desires. My ex vetoed that idea immediately. The mediator proposed that we might receive such input indirectly via her therapist, and that we could meet with her together to hear her thoughts. In the only animated display of the session, my ex make emphatically clear that she would NOT be in the same room with the psychologist and me. And that further, she would not agree to allow the therapist to provide a written report, and that finally, she would not even commit to listening to anything the therapist might have to say on the matter. “It isn’t her role to tell us what she thinks our daughter wants.”

Throughout the two-hour session she stated repeatedly, “We have a stipulation. If we all just abide by it, everything is okay. There’s nothing more to discuss.” She asserted that nothing in the 2003 stipulation allowed for any changes to happen (ever?), and that the conflict resolution provision only dealt with issues within the stipulation itself, so it couldn’t be used to discuss changing placement time.

At the end of the session the mediator said we should consider what (little) progress we had made in understanding each other’s positions and then decide if we felt a second session would be beneficial. By the time we reached our respective cars in the parking lot my ex had duly considered the question. I said, “I’ll be in touch in a week or so and see where you’re at with things.” She replied, “You don’t need to. We tried mediation. It didn’t work. If you’re not satisfied with things the ways they are, I’ll see you in court.” I have no doubt that her attorney had coached her to do exactly this: “Attend one session; meet the minimal requirement of the stipulation; then let it go to court, and I’ll clean the bastard out.”

Sadly, I didn’t think that at the time. I was just the bastard waiting to get cleaned.

Reflections …

I don’t know how you “document” the goodness of a family. I suppose you could make a long list of all the family activities and who was present and how they participated, or you could capture a bunch of scenes of laughter on home movies. But the first is just a bunch of words, and the second is just a bunch of images. Both see only the outside. We were a family blending. Two families becoming one family. And with the delight of a wood nymph settling into a new grove, my daughter thrived in our becoming. She was exuberantly the darling of the family. Out of the distant terror she had known (and perhaps largely forgotten) as a toddler, she was relishing the full blown joy of two parents (myself and Margaret) who loved each other without reserve, and whose love wrapped round her as well. And the attention of four older siblings who engaged her in a multitude of delightful ways. But these things are known from the inside. And, as her attorney would remind me in the months ahead, they were “all a matter of opinion and hyperbole.”

During these years my income was precarious at best. I pieced together three part-time college teaching positions to fashion full-time work without full-time pay and without any benefits. I had managed to hold my own on custody matters from the fall of 2002 until now, but I needed legal counsel three years later. And while I could hardly afford it, I desperately needed it … but I didn’t see that until too late.

I should’ve filed a contempt charge the moment I learned of the counseling (something my daughter mentioned in passing in November 2005). It was an enormous violation of joint custody. It was harmful to my daughter. And it would later be wielded against me. But instead I tried to make the best of it by inserting myself far too late into a therapeutic process that was anything but therapeutic. I was a fool.

And I should’ve mortgaged our home all over again to hire the best attorney I could in March 2006. But I still believed at the time that being an articulate person, as well as a loving and devoted father, would mean something in Family Court. I still believed my daughter’s desire would be sought out and listened to. I still believed in happy endings back then. Was I ever in for an education.

* * *

This entry is the sixth written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. Next I recount my continuing experiences in Wisconsin Family Court. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

In this chapter I recount my journey to Family Court Counseling Services and on to a new stipulation.

5. Family Court Counseling Services to the Rescue—NOT
David Weiss, December 10, 2010 (Day 12 of the fast)

In the fall of 2002, as the summer of hell slowly cooled to ashes, our dysfunctional divorce was remanded to Family Court Counseling Services (FCCS) for a “placement study.” We were required to attend a parenting class on the importance of good communication, etc. following a divorce.  We filled out a detailed questionnaire and were asked to have a few references write letters about our character as I recall. And we were told to clear our calendars for two entire days in mid-October for sessions that would include a joint interview, individual interviews, and a session with our daughter.

The FCCS handout pledged that the study would be “a thorough process,” aimed at gathering information and making assessments to resolve placement disputes in a way that honored the best interests of the child. It would include an effort to help the parents reach an agreement that could form the basis of a new stipulation.

The same handout explained that the FCCS “must consider” a series of factors outlined in state law. These included (Wisc. Stat. 767.24(5) at the time, the numbering has since changed):

• the mental health of each parent;
• the cooperation and communication between the parents and whether either parent unreasonably refuses to cooperate or communicate with the other;
• whether each parent can support the other parent’s relationship with the child, including encouraging and facilitating frequent and continuing contact with the child, or whether one parent is likely to unreasonably interfere with the child’s continuing relationship with the other parent;
• whether there is evidence of interspousal battery or domestic abuse.

Although exhausted from the summer’s battle, I was quite hopeful going into the fall. I was confident that my past requests and my present hopes for placement time were more than reasonable. (I was seeking every third weekend during the school year and 5 weeks—not quite half—of the summer.) I had asked repeatedly that my ex and I meet with a mediator to assist with placement negotiations and she had always refused. Now the court order of August 2002 required her to join me in this process. Unfortunately my hopes proved to be naïve.

After doing our parent education class in the morning we had what felt like a rushed, one-size-fits-all interview and work session with our counselor—the director of FCCS. She spent virtually no time trying to assess the dynamics that were driving the conflict but went immediately to work trying to nail down the nuts and bolts of a new agreement. After three hours at this, she announced, “Well, we’ve made a start. We’ve reached at least some points of agreement. I think you can finish the rest from here. We’re done.”

I asked about the one-on-one interviews that we’d been told to expect. “Oh, I don’t always think those are necessary.” I asked about her interest in meeting with Susanna, for whom the anxiety of the summer was still quite fresh. “Oh, I don’t think we need to bother her with that.” I was afraid in my ex’s presence to explain why I thought both of those pieces were so important. If I angered her now, it would surely be vented at me—or my daughter—through placement difficulties in the weeks ahead. Besides, I had been clear in my questionnaire that the abuse dynamic was alive and well post-divorce and needed to be addressed. She knew this. And the system had “promised” a one-on-one interview and a session with the child. But suddenly the system wasn’t interested in that anymore.

Two weeks later the FCCS recommendation, based on its “thorough” placement study was released. It was basically what I had asked for—only more generous: it offered me every third weekend during the school and fully one-half (about six weeks) of summer. However, FCCS recommendations are not binding on the parties. They are reported to the court, but it remains up to the parties (through attorneys or otherwise) to negotiate and file a new stipulation.

I had released my attorney after the summer debacle and was now representing myself. I immediately announced my readiness to accept the FCCS recommendation. The placement time was very good in my mind, and while I had quibbles while some of the logistical details, I knew it was a better deal than my ex would agree to in separate negotiations. It proved to be more justice than she was willing to agree to at all.

In late November she rejected the FCCS recommendations outright, putting us back to square one. Because the FCCS never actually “studied” anything, the report made no mention of the legacy of unreasonable interference with placement, the history of domestic violence or the ongoing abusive control issues—all things the statutes required FCCS to consider. Absent that, “square one” was exactly where I had been more than six months earlier. The only difference was that now there was a court-mandated deadline: a hearing would be held January 13, 2003 if we had not reached a new stipulation by then.

I negotiated toward this with my ex’s attorney. It was slow going, and we made very little progress until just days before the hearing when my ex agreed to several key points and I informed the court that a stipulation was imminent and the hearing could be canceled. Four days later, on January 13, the day of the now-canceled hearing, she withdrew her assent and everything fell apart.

In early February I wrote to the court and to FCCS, explaining that negotiations had fallen apart and asking for a hearing to be rescheduled. My letter to FCCS director in February read in part:

The dynamic of spousal abuse that was present in our marriage continues to manifest itself in these custody matters. [My ex] has an unhealthy need for control and has learned a set of unhealthy behaviors by which to seek it.  … this pattern continues to distort our discussions of custody and placement issues whenever there is disagreement over what constitutes [our daughter’s] best interests. Indeed, [my ex’s] desire to negotiate an agreement with less clarity and less accountability is reminiscent of an abusive spouse seeking a modicum of reconciliation lest the whole abusive dynamic be unmasked and terminated. I am not interested in a modicum of reconciliation. I am interested in a stipulation that is fair and just and one that safeguards my rights as a joint custody parent.

My letter to judge indentified the remaining issues:

We have reached agreement on many points, but remain in disagreement over language that would:

• insure reasonable telephone access to [my daughter];
• allow me, in extenuating circumstances, to designate an alternate driver for a placement pick-up;
• set specific guidelines under which either of us could request mediation in the future.

The absence of language to address these concerns is unacceptable to me. Our marriage was marred by a dynamic of emotional control and physical abuse on [my ex’s] part. I have continued to experience this dynamic in [her] attempts to exercise near absolute control over my access to [our daughter] since our separation nearly four years ago. It was that dynamic that precipitated my appearance in your court this past summer. And I believe it is that dynamic which now makes disingenuous offers of conciliation only to reassert a pattern of control as soon as possible.

As soon as a new court date was set, my ex renewed negotiations, while blaming me for trying to rush us back into the court system. She proposed that we use her pastor—meeting in his study—as a neutral third party to broker the remaining issues. I doubt that many persons would have considered this a “neutral” person or a “neutral” site. But I accepted the offer, determined to use every hope that was available to me.

We met for a difficult but productive session of negotiation. I crafted a draft document based on the agreements reached in our conversation, agreements we reviewed point-by-point from my notes before leaving his office. Forty-eight hours later she rejected it practically before the ink was dry. She also released her attorney about this time. But somehow, just one week before the court date, we did sign a new stipulation.

It covered all the points I regarded as essential. It gave me 14-15 school year placements each year and one half of the summer. It provided clear timetables for creating exact schedules on a year-by-year basis—and a “fall back” schedule if we couldn’t agree on new one. My daughter couldn’t be held hostage by my ex’s unwillingness to agree to proposed dates any more. And we were now legally bound to use mediation in future disputes.

On March 7, 2003, we filed a new stipulation. And I got something of a new lease on life. I never saw it in the fine print, but apparently it was designated as a “30-month lease” because that’s about how long it held up. But that’s another chapter.

Reflections …

Both in my paperwork filed before my FCCS interview and in a letter sent to the FCCS director immediately after it, I made pointedly clear my concern that the dynamic of abuse in our marriage was now trampling my joint custody rights as a father. I reiterated this months later in my February 2003 letters to both the FCCS and the court. This was the sum total of their response: .

Once more, my efforts to bring the dynamic that was undermining my placement time into the open within the system failed. Instead I found a system that was entirely deaf to my concerns. Unable to imagine them as real or unwilling to deem them relevant.

The only positive role that Family Court played in making the agreement I reached in March 2003 possible was providing the deadline of an impending court date, which motivated my ex by fear or dread to come to terms. Beyond that everything I accomplished, from the bargaining table to the word-smithing, I had to do on my own. Family Court had multiple opportunities to be supportive of my attempts to have predictable and abundant time with my daughter. They did nothing to insure this happened.

As I would discover in 2005 and 2006, even what I had accomplished would not last.

* * *

This entry is the fifth written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. Next I recount my continuing experiences in Wisconsin Family Court. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

In this chapter I recount “the summer from hell” (2002) including my first unhappy experiences in Wisconsin Family Court. I do not know whether other states do better (or worse) than Wisconsin, so I can only tell my story as clearly as possible.

4. The Summer from Hell
David Weiss, December 8, 2010 (Day 10 of the fast)

I find that I procrastinate starting these blogs now. The story must be told. But I dread venturing again into this narrative of powerlessness. It is hard—no, it is impossible—not to relive the feelings I recount. I am mucking about in shit, and trying to do so with poignant eloquence, which means I need to linger over wording when every impulse is to run away as quickly as possible. Thus far I have narrated the most terrifying chapters of my story. From here on, things get rather banal.

But I mean “banal” precisely in the way that Hannah Arendt did in characterizing the Nazi bureaucracy as demonstrating the “banality of evil.” Earlier this fall, after my most recent courtroom experience, I put it this way: This is the nature of structural evil: it destroys lives without malice. Therefore, it is at once morally innocent and purely evil. It is bureaucracy become psychopathic.

That has been my experience in Wisconsin Family Court.

My crimes have been multiple. I have been guilty of holding out foolish hope for reason to enter the room. Of waiting too long for some measure of civility. Of having too little money to buy myself a “place at the table” early enough. Of delaying past what turned out to be prudent before seeking aid from the court. And then of thinking that Family Court had any interest in offering aid at all.

2002 was the summer I effectively lost my rights as a joint custody parent … and I have not yet regained them. No court decision has ever confirmed this, but the practice of the court, from June 2002 though November 2010 has been to ignore, minimize, dismiss any claim I have to an equal (or even a recognized) voice in shaping the time I have with my daughter.

In 2002, three years after the divorce and one year into a new marriage, I was preparing to blend households with my wife, Margaret, up in Minnesota. After a courtship of more than a year and a long-distance marriage over the past year, our families (my son and daughter; her three daughters) were well acquainted. Despite the requisite territorial anxiety that comes with blending households—especially involving four teenagers—there was overall real eagerness for the move among all our kids.

I’d provided my ex with two-months advance notice of the move dates and my intent that our daughter be present and participate in this important rite of passage for our new family. But as the move approached (and perhaps driven by envy-anger that this move would now make my daughter fully part of a blended family household) my ex simply balked at everything.

Ultimately she refused to allow me to pick up my daughter at the appointed time a day before the move. I drove 3 hours to Wisconsin, only to find the house deserted—intentionally to avoid any pick-up. Thankfully, I had asked a dear friend to ride along, so I drove home without my daughter, devastated, but not alone. In the days around the move my ex refused to allow me even to speak to my daughter by phone, except for one conversation in which I managed to tell her that I loved her, but that I would not be able to pick her up to join us in the move because her mother didn’t think it was a good idea. She wailed and asked, “Why? Why?” through her tears until her mother hung up the line. Although not physical, the decision to exclude my daughter from the move is probably among the greatest acts of violence her mother has committed against her.

That summer, because time was not on my side, it became her weapon of choice. All summer. I saw my daughter five times over those three months. At each good-bye, neither she nor I knew when we would see each other again. My ex never agreed to any placement time with me without a specified end date, so every time she said good-bye, she knew—to the hour—when the next “hello” would come. But at my end, every good-bye was shrouded in uncertainty and anxiety.

I hired an attorney three weeks before the move. That’s way too little time to make an effective legal response, and I need to take responsibility for holding out hope too long. But my attorney waited another eighteen days before even filing a motion, effectively silencing the very claim I had hired him to make.

I was clear with him from the beginning that I had left an abusive marriage three years earlier, and that I had been struggling ever since to have the minimal placement that the stipulation provided me as a joint custody parent. I emphasized the extent to which the dynamic of control and abuse in our marriage had now transferred itself to the placement arena. And I specifically warned him that my ex would do whatever possible to delay or subvert any resolution. I might as well have been speaking to the wall.

I should be more gracious. He had 25+ years experience in family law. He came highly recommended. I paid him over $2500 in legal fees. But he was utterly useless to me at best, and dismissive toward me at worst. Whether he could not fathom a husband as the victim of violence, or simply chose to hear everything I said with undue skepticism, I don’t know. But he represented me in ways that allowed my ex to frustrate my placement time all summer. He never took my concerns, perspectives, or insights seriously. He pursued a strategy all summer without ever consulting me—or even informing me of it. He repeatedly left me out the loop as he negotiated for my time with my daughter. I hired an attorney thinking it was the only (and regrettable) way I could be empowered in the situation, but the truth was that because even my own attorney wouldn’t listen to me, I had less power than ever.

I would have gladly replaced him, but from June 10 – June 30 it seemed like every day mattered as the move approached, and all I could do was hope that this attorney was doing everything he could on my behalf. By the time that June 30, and the move, arrived without any agreement, the rest of the summer was whizzing by and to start over with a new attorney would have been to forfeit any hope for justice that summer. I didn’t so much “choose” to stick with him as I felt I had no other choices available.

As the summer unfolded it became clear that there was no joint custody here. Every day I had with my daughter was negotiated by two attorneys. Of the four placements that happened after attorneys got involved, not one was for the dates I proposed; not one was “mutually agreed upon”; each one was dictated to the date and hour by my ex. She claimed all the power, and the system allowed her to have it.

I watched as the lie of joint placement was revealed. It meant absolutely nothing. Not to my wife. Not to my attorney. Ultimately not even to the court. I could not understand how it could take so long—sixty-three days—to get a hearing on an expedited (time-dated!) matter like summer placement. I learned much later (I believe after the hearing had happened) that the real reason for the long delay was not that there were no openings in court, but that my attorney—without consulting me—had passed up multiple openings on other judge’s calendars because he wanted my case heard only by one particular judge. Why? Because the one judge he wanted to hear my case was the only one in family court with a reputation for being misogynist! His exact words.

Never mind that my entire summer had evaporated while he waited for a misogynist judge to have time to hear my case. Never mind that I would have said immediately, “I’m not looking for misogyny, I’m looking for justice!” I chose to do one of my candidacy exams in graduate school on the insights of feminist theology because I’m persuaded that the experiences, voices, and wisdom of women have been unjustly silenced in our world. As a feminist man I was deeply committed to extricating myself from the “privileges of patriarchy,” and in this matter I did not need—or want—misogyny on my side. I only needed justice.

On August 13, 2002, the judge heard my case. Two days later his order was finalized. He refused to rule on anything of substance—except to say that it was clear that I had lost placement time over the summer, but that there was not sufficient time left in August to compensate me for it, and to confirm a set of dates for the last two weeks of August and for several months into the fall. Stunningly, he took no position on my ex’s irrational argument that the onset of kindergarten was intended to reduce my summer placement time. He gave me permission to seek to compensatory days for the ones I lost in summer 2002, but made no provision to mandate that I receive such time; I would need to fight for it in a separate court battle if I wanted it. And he passed us on to Family Court Counseling Services, to let them sort everything else out.

All told, despite a 1999 stipulation that clearly provided me with 34 days of placement time each summer, from June 1 to August 31—and its three year-old promise of increased summer placement as our daughter grew older—three years later and my ex had successfully trimmed my placement for summer 2002 back to 30 days. And made it a nightmare to secure every one of those days, for both me and my daughter.

The first time we spoke after the move my daughter’s plaintive question, recorded in my journal for July 3, 2002, was, “Daddy, do you know yet when you’ll be able to come pick me up?” Imagine her sense of confusion at being caught in this limbo at age 6. I could only tell her, “No, sweetheart, I don’t know yet, but I’m working to make it as soon as possible.” A week later we finally saw each other, but now thoroughly caught up in the damning uncertainty of a parent-child relationship hijacked by a court system, my daughter’s anxiety was palpable. I wrote this poem on July 11, 2002. (Charlotte was a favorite stuffed companion of hers.)

Tonight you ran
to me
from the door
giddy with glee,
a giggle bright
on your face
and Charlotte tight
in your arms.
But when we hugged
your grip was fierce
and fearful
as though the ache
of these days,
the anguish
of our mutual absence
has etched fear
on your soul
as well as mine.

Reflections …

This chapter is less about my ex’s continued attempts at control than about the system’s impotence to stop these attempts during this summer … an impotence for which my own tardiness is partly to blame. But not solely.

For a second time I encountered an attorney who simply could not hear the way that a legacy of domestic violence has the power to distort post-divorce relationships. In fact, as the summer drew on, and it felt increasingly like my daughter was indeed being held hostage by my ex, my attorney chided me for my growing “hysteria.” I do not know what ‘training’ attorneys get in this area of abusive relationships, but the inability of my attorney to sit up and listen when I alerted him to this dynamic cost me dearly that summer.

Beyond this, I experienced the extent to which this attorney, at least, was not really interested in listening to me or including me in his strategy. Despite my intelligence and insight—and despite this being my case and my daughter—I was almost entirely excluded from any communication about the why of the steps being taken. Some of this happened with my knowledge; some of it happened despite my persistent questions. Altogether it served to insure that I was less empowered than ever once I had hired someone to empower me.

Finally, I also discovered the extent to which the “justice” system is really about playing the game. All of the jockeying for the “right” judge served only to insure that I never got justice.

Again, while this is my story, every parent and every child deserves better.

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This entry is the fourth written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. Next I recount my continuing experiences in Wisconsin Family Court. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

In this chapter I relate the missteps made in the divorce itself and the ensuing conflicts around placement time that led to my first foray into Wisconsin Family Court in 2002. I do not want to burden my readers with excessive detail, but absent a certain amount of detail, my story is just general claims. So I try to walk a fine line there. Again, I leave my ex-wife and my children unnamed.

3. Missteps from the Start
David Weiss, December 6, 2010 (Day 8 of the fast)

From here on I expect my hunger will frame my writing. I’m eight full days into the hunger strike now, and I’ve lost a little over ten pounds—and a fair bit of my energy. My metabolism is definitely slowing down. I’m no longer physically hungry. But living in a home where food continues to be made and shared at mealtime, I find that the aromas jumpstart, not my stomach, but my mind and heart. I think about food, and I yearn for the social/emotional fullness of the meal. I drink my tea and join in conversation, but there is an ache. That ache is my dwelling place these days, and it’s out of that ache that I write.

During March and April of 1999 I retained an attorney and negotiated the terms of a divorce and custody agreement. Here are a few things I learned too late.

I should’ve documented the violence somehow (filed a police report, taken photographs), but it’s not surprising that I didn’t. Between the deep desire to deny just how bad it’s gotten and the smothering sense of shame, it’s much easier to hope it all goes away than to document it for posterity.

My attorney told me I could seek to list domestic violence as grounds for divorce—but he strongly cautioned against this. He said that such an allegation would throw everything up in the air. And that while I “might” be awarded full custody as a result of it, that was far from certain, and if I wasn’t able to sufficiently establish the claim, I could lose much more and build up bad blood between me and my ex for years to come. He encouraged me to go for “joint legal custody” and not mention the violence. So I kept silent.

I wish I had pushed harder. I was still partially in a state of denial. But I have lived now for a decade with the bad blood of an abusive ex who has never been held accountable to anyone, least of all to herself for the violence that happened to me. I believe she maintains the “bad blood” disposition toward me because it keeps her from having to deal with the abuse. My silence gained me nothing. And since 2002 Wisconsin Family Court has refused to even consider the role that a legacy of violence has played in our ongoing conflicts —regardless of the toll that legacy took on my daughter’s ability to have a relationship with her father.

I had retained a local attorney recommended by a friend. I specifically did not want an aggressive attorney—I did not want to “go after” my wife, I just wanted out of the marriage as quickly and painlessly as possible. In retrospect, I needed more aggressive representation, and probably an attorney with specific experience in domestic violence cases.

The divorce was financially crippling; I gave up our only car and took on all $24,000 of our shared debt. (That debt represented half of my $48,000 student loan debt, so it was ‘legally’ all mine, but we’d borrowed the entire $24,000 from 1996-98 for the sole purpose of meeting my wife’s desire to not to go back to work after our daughter’s birth. It was not debt to pursue my education but to allow her to be a stay-at-home mom.) I will likely be paying on that debt well beyond my daughter’s own college years. I was so eager to get myself and my son out of the marriage, that I was willing to take the short end of every deal just to be done with it.

But it was in the details of how our “joint custody” would work that I really needed far better representation. My wife moved three hours away, back to Wisconsin, within a week of having signed the stipulation. This was expected. What was unexpected—but should have been foreseen—was the power that having primary placement of our daughter at such distance would give my ex … and her readiness to use that power in abusive ways.

Initial placement was straightforward: every other Thursday I drove to Madison to pick our daughter up; her mother came to Iowa to get her the following Sunday. She was with me 3 out of every 14 days. We had a few extra days together every other year at Thanksgiving and Christmas—and 14 extra days over the summer, to be scheduled by “mutual agreement.” These days were few because of her young age (she was only three), and the stipulation specifically stated, “Both parties agree that the amount of summer placement time with David may increase and be shared more equally as [the child] grows older.” So we initially had about 94 days together each year, and we saw each other pretty much like clockwork, every two weeks. The only other “forward-looking” comment said: “At such time as school commences for the minor child, David will pick up the child at 6 p.m. on Friday” (rather than Thursday).

Here’s what was missing:

• No process/mechanism to actually schedule the extra summer time with me; as though “mutual agreement” would just naturally happen.
• No process/mechanism for how or when to increase my daughter’s summer time with me, virtually insuring that this would be another battle just waiting to happen later on.
• And absolutely no mention of conflict resolution should we disagree on either of the above things or on anything else. The stipulation was set up from the start to provide for only two options: either we would divorce and live happily ever after, or we would hire attorneys to battle out our disagreements again and again. Did no one foresee that it might be wise to build in an obligation to use mediation as needed to resolve disputes in the most child-friendly way?

Over the next three years this missing stuff, coupled with the distance between us and her holding primary placement, created opportunities for my ex to continue exercising her need for control in ways that abused me and my relationship with our daughter. She insisted that she alone knew what was in our daughter’s “best interests” in every facet of her life, including any time spent with me. Thus, every disagreement became an occasion for her to call me a dad who didn’t care about what was best for my own daughter.

The every other weekend routine went well, except for each year when maintaining our respective Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday assignments inevitably disrupted it and we needed to trade weekends to accommodate the schedule. I was never permitted to have my daughter back-to-back weekends, so any disruption meant that I lost a weekend in the process. And each summer became a nightmare to negotiate, with my ex asserting that “mutual agreement” meant that she could veto any proposal for my extra placement time, as often as she liked, for any reason at all, and not allow me to have any of the extra days until she agreed to my proposal for all of them. She rarely provided any reasons or alternatives and always refused to meet with a third party for mediation, whether professional or informal.

I should have gone to court immediately, but saddled with $48,000 of debt, I could not imagine adding to that. So we went back and forth repeatedly, until after months of haggling, usually in early June, I got an agreement on how to schedule the precious little extra summer time that my daughter and I had together.

But as summer 2002 dawned things fell completely apart.

Because our daughter had started kindergarten the previous fall, my 3-day weekends during the school year had ceased, effectively trimming 19 days off our time together. Imagine my surprise when, during our “negotiations” for summer 2002, my ex announced that her reading of the stipulation was that I now also lost my 3-day weekends over the summer—even though these weekends had no impact on her school attendance. Despite language that clearly provided the opportunity for more summer time together as she grew older, my ex was adamant that in 2002 I was due to lose 7 days of summer placement time. It was past time to go to court, but by now things were complicated.

I had gotten re-married to Margaret in 2001. She was a former college sweetheart with whom I reconnected over the last half of 1999. She had three teenage daughter at the time, so my daughter now found herself the darling of three older sisters (in addition to her older brother), and she thrived in her place in our blended family. I had remained in Iowa teaching for one more academic year after our marriage, but in the summer of 2002 we planned to finally blend our households.

So the other piece of summer negotiations was to insure that my daughter would be with me the weekend that we loaded the U-Haul to move our Iowa home up to our new Minnesota home. I put that on the table as early as March, and by April I gave my ex the exact move date at the end of June. But negotiations to finalize placement time were going nowhere.

She remained adamant that my 3-day weekend “baseline” was gone—year round. She wanted to re-open all of the placement schedule, asserting that my move to Minnesota (increasing the miles between our homes from 160 to 250) meant that my entire time with my daughter should be decreased. (She didn’t acknowledge that it was her initial move in May 1999 that put the first 160 miles between us.) My response was to propose reducing my school year placement to every third weekend and to suggest that in 2003 we share her summer time equally to compensate for the loss in our school time together.

On June 2, 2002 I finally received a written proposal from my ex. It was for 24 days of placement time (10 days shy of what the stipulation provided!) and it specifically excluded the days of the move to Minnesota. I made several frantic attempts to reason with her by phone. I explained the importance of including our daughter in both packing up her Iowa home and driving to and unpacking in her new Minnesota home. The stipulation clearly provided me with days to use for this. There was no pressing conflict in Wisconsin. But my ex responded by saying, “Moves are hectic times; they’re no place for a 6 year-old child; she’d only be in the way or neglected. I don’t think it’s in her ‘best interests’ to be with you for the move, so I won’t allow it.”

Absent any conflict resolution measure, I was helpless to do anything except go to court. My local attorney recommended I move the case to Wisconsin myself lest my ex further stall by making that motion after I filed in Iowa court. So, on June 10, I retained a Madison attorney and asked him to file an “expedited motion for enforcement” of my placement.

The “expedited” hearing finally took place sixty-three days later on August 13. By then the move was long over, and my only memory of my daughter’s part in it is the howls of tears at the other end of the phone the night I had to tell her that I wouldn’t be picking her up before the move after all because Mom didn’t agree that it was a good idea, and so it wasn’t going to happen. I’ll say more about the “summer from hell” in my next entry.

In thinking about these years (1999-2002) I identify the following insights:

+ There’s nothing wrong with wanting an amicable divorce, but when the feeling isn’t mutual, you at least need a divorce that protects your finances and your rights as a parent. In seeking to avoid tough issues, I left myself very unprotected.

+ Even in the “best” divorces, if there are kids involved you can’t just go your separate ways; there will be conflict. So it’s best to be very clear, both about the details of placement time and about how you intend to use a third party to resolve issues down the road without escalating the anger or legal fees all over again. Had I insisted on a “mediation clause,” at least some of my problems would’ve been addressed outside the toxic dynamic between just the two of us much sooner.

+ In fact, if Family Court were really pro-family, it would insist on mediation at every possible step. It would build it into the pre-divorce process as well as into the stipulation. Instead, because lawyers (and judges?) profit more from conflict than from conflict resolution, the process favors legal “solutions” that heighten adversarial posturing both during and after the divorce—and that help neither husbands nor wives, fathers nor mothers, and most of all, not children.

+ Especially in cases of domestic violence, the abused spouse will be very tempted to leave as quickly as possible, without attending to the details necessary for long term safety and security. In these cases, it is imperative that lawyers become more active advocates. In Iowa there was no failsafe measure that anticipated future difficulties regarding placement—but all the signs were up in blinking fluorescent letters on the wall. I wasn’t in a good position to read, but someone should have. And that failure in the system has cost both me and my daughter dearly.

+ It is no excuse for the system to say that it can’t provide help the parent doesn’t ask for. Taking seriously the dynamics of domestic violence means that extra care needs to be taken to break the cycle of abusive behavior rather than just transfer it (like an abusive priest!) to the post-divorce arena. The moment my attorney heard me say the words “domestic violence,” the system should have brought a social worker (or other health professional) into play so that I could negotiate the legal departure from the marriage with guidance about the emotional stakes—and mistakes—as well.

+ Society has a vested interest in promoting the health of families overall—and in minimizing the damage when families fall apart. Beyond simply minimizing the times that divorced couples end up back in court, the Family Court system needs to acknowledge that when families are in crisis they need more than just attorneys at the table. When a “family” goes through a divorce it means kids are present, and if the Iowa Family Court system didn’t owe me any extra help, it surely owed my daughter a far better start to her young life as the child of divorced parents than it offered her. It could have done that. It didn’t. And my guess is it still doesn’t.

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This entry is the third written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. Next I recount my first experience in Wisconsin Family Court. You can learn more about the fast, including ways to support me, at http://davidrweiss.com/hungry.

Each vignette in this piece could be its own chapter, but I don’t want to dwell on the pain in the marriage any more than is needed to set the context for what has happened to me in family court. These glimpses into the final months of my marriage are a humble confession of how bad things got before I managed to leave. Again, my wife and my children remain unnamed. They are obviously as central to this story as I am, but it will be their choice someday whether to add their names and incorporate these events into the narrative of their lives, too.

2. The Year of Living Dangerously
David Weiss, December 2, 2010 (Day 4)

Over the summer of 1998, although I could no longer deny that I was in an abusive marriage, I had neither the voice to say this to anyone else nor the wherewithal to take steps to end the violence or to leave. My life became its own little parallel universe. I persevered in my graduate work in Christian Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. I interviewed for and was offered my first job teaching religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. And in August I moved my fragile family to the middle of nowhere.

Decorah is a wonderful small town, and my years at Luther became some of the defining years of my life and now hold some of my dearest memories. But it was “the middle of nowhere” when we moved there, in that it put all of us hours away from any support systems. My wife’s need for control was triggered most by entering unfamiliar terrain—the first escalation happened when we moved from Wisconsin to Indiana for me to start graduate school, the second occurred when she ventured into motherhood in 1996. Now this move to rural Iowa triggered anxiety, insecurity, and violence to a new degree.

Until now most of the fighting and all of the hitting had been hidden from our kids. We had managed to make sure they were out of earshot or asleep before things got really ugly. But by late September all pretense evaporated.

“Mommy, stop …”

I forget the cause of the argument—there were so many, and very few had significant reason behind them—but she came at me, fists swinging, while I was in the living room on a Sunday afternoon. Our daughter, just 2½, was seated in her high chair at the dining room table facing the other direction. Craning around to see what was happening, her first words, all too innocently spoken were, “Mommy, stop playing with Daddy like that!” And a moment later, her first plea have been futile and her innocence now lost, she repeated, “Mommy, stop hitting Daddy!!” I hollered to my son, 11, holed up against the tempest in his bedroom, to grab a few things because we needed to leave. I went into the bathroom to get something and found my exit blocked by my wife, glaring at me, “Don’t you see, if you didn’t make me so angry I wouldn’t have to hit you?!”

My son and I escaped to a colleague’s home for the afternoon. He was the first person ever to see the bruises because I hadn’t changed clothes before leaving the house and I hadn’t realized how quickly the welts on my arms would turn black and blue. My terror was no longer a secret.

“Teaching feminist theology”

But in the classroom I did my best to be confident and full of insight for my students. That fall, I taught a course in Feminist Theology. I was passionate in teaching my class of mostly women that while the Christian tradition has often characterized the root of sin as pride, in a patriarchal culture the root of sin for women has usually meant self-erasure, too little of themselves. I helped them see that if God so loved them, their quiet complicity to a system that constantly invited them to become doormats for the men in their lives was a betrayal of God’s invitation to live into their full sacred worth. And I taught those insights wearing long sleeve shirts in the lingering autumn warmth … to hide the bruises on my arms that bore witness to the doormat that I daily chose to be to the woman in my life. The irony was not lost on me. If I was a healer to any of them, it was surely a healer of the most wounded sort.

“Speaking my first tentative truth”

Early that fall I began seeing my own counselor in Decorah. I cautiously tried to put my quiet desperation into words that still preserved some semblance of “dignity” for my increasingly undignified life. At some point—because my careful wording created a huge hole in the picture of my marriage—she asked a pointed question seeking to better understand the desperation she heard in my voice that didn’t mesh with the careful picture I set before her. Frustrated and impatient to be understood, I yanked up my sleeve, exposed the bruised truth of my life, and said—as the tears came raining out—“This is what I live with! And I don’t know how to anymore. Listen, I’ve done lots of political protests. I’ve stood in a quiet composed line at an Air National Guard facility where I had hecklers taunting me in threatening ways, and I managed to find a place of inner calm. But I don’t know how to do that in my own marriage. Can you help me?!”

She declared in no uncertain terms that a marriage was not a place to learn to live with violence and threat, but a place where either we found a way to end the violence or found a way to end the marriage. Those words, so starkly spoken, were “gospel”—good news—to me that day.

“Death wishes … justice hopes”

Because we shared a single vehicle and rented a small apartment a little outside of town, I often biked back and forth to campus. I don’t know that I ever heard the words “have a good day” as I left. But I remember mornings when I pulled my bike out of the garage only to hear these parting words, “I’ll be praying that you get hit and killed today so that I’m finally rid of you.” And then I biked off to college to teach about how Christianity has at its center a message of astonishing good news with real implications in this world—apparently just not in mine. Weeks later when I flew to Florida for a conference, my wife’s farewell words were, “I just want you to know I’ll be praying for your plane to crash, so that I can move on without you.”

It was within this maelstrom that I became more visibly and more vocally than ever before an Ally for LGBT persons. During these dark days, when I could claim neither justice not joy for myself, I somehow kept faith by claiming these for others. I am reminded of the gay men who, in the 1960’s, worked fervently—and from within the closet—for civil rights for African Americans. They transferred their passion for justice to an arena where they felt they could give it expression. My work as an Ally has roots that run much deeper than the injustice and sorrow that framed my marriage, but I do believe that this work for justice offered me a spring of clear water from which to drink when the well in my own home had grown so toxic.

“The three magi”

In November, I flew to Orlando (my plane did not crash) for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, where I joined several thousand of my academic colleagues for a few days discussing religion in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom. I did not feel very magical, and of the thousand colleagues there, only three mattered. We attended academic talks during the day, but late at night, up in our hotel room, these three magi—wise men who hailed from various points on the compass—brought me gifts much needed: listening, encouragement, and challenge. It was by all accounts, an “intervention.” Having heard me both name the broken terror of my daily life and also say, “But I can’t leave the marriage,” they pushed back. Hard. I remember their challenge, offered gently but firmly and from multiple directions around the room, “David, the marriage left you months or more ago. You’re not leaving a marriage at this point. You’re leaving a war zone, and—for your sake and your kids—it’s time to get out.”

These three friends pledged their unconditional support and love to me in the days and months ahead. I learned more in that hotel room than in any of the academic sessions I attended. I learned the power touched when you dare to be vulnerable in the presence of those whose love is trustworthy and sure.

“A Lego® fortress”

Now I come to the darkest chapter of all. Up to now I have named the madness in which I found myself. It is time to speak the nightmare in which my son lived that fall. An 11 year-old “legomaniac,” he adored his little sister. He read to her. Entertained her endlessly with all manner of antics. And most of all he delighted in fashioning Lego® creations that he would then display and explain to her wide-eyed wonder. But while my wife never hit him, that fall he became the target of her incessant criticism (her passive anger) every afternoon when he arrived home from school. Most especially he was criticized for every effort he made to play with his sister.

I learned from him later that within a month of moving to Iowa he had entirely forsaken the joy of his sister for the safety of his small bedroom until I was around again. Each day he came home and closed himself into an 8×10 room where he built Lego® starships that were in truth a fortress against the anguish that he had no words for—only feelings that threatened to swallow him whole.

That Christmas we embodied the fracture in our family as my wife took our daughter with her to her parents in Wisconsin and I took my son with me to my parents in Indiana. We celebrated the holidays in a subdued fashion, I’m sure. Just how subdued I learned a day or two before it was time to head back to Iowa.

You need to know that eleven years earlier, when I had told my parents about my decision to divorce my first wife, while both were hurt and disappointed, my dad was overwhelmingly so. His life was framed by multiple stresses and mine was simply too much to bear; he disowned me. I was forbidden to visit, call, or even write to him. It lasted “only” four months, and the wounds have long since healed, but as 1998 drew to an end—and, with it, hope for my marriage—I did not know how I would survive if he reacted the same way to me for ending this marriage.

One of our last nights in Indiana my parents asked to talk. This holiday was the first they had seen my son since we had moved to Iowa in late August. They were alarmed—frantic in their concern—at how withdrawn and listless he had become in those four short months. They barely recognized their first grandchild, except outwardly. Inwardly he seemed to have simply drifted away. They openly worried that he was deeply depressed. They asked if I thought he might be suicidal.

This is perhaps the most humbling truth of all: that when pain clusters deeply enough inside yourself—as it had in me—it can lessen your ability to notice or respond to the depth of pain in others. I knew my son was hurting. I ached for him each day. But as we descended into the darkness of that fall I had not noticed how deeply he hurt and how precarious his interest in life had become. It took my parents to wake me up. My dad did the speaking, “David, your mother and I love you very much. And we are very concerned now for your safety and for your sons. We think it is time for you to get out of this marriage before any more harm is done. We are giving you this check—and we want you to use it to hire an attorney and file for divorce.”

That probably happened on December 29 or 30 of 1998. And this was the hell that my life had become. Bar none, those words of desperate worry and financial assistance spoken by my dad (and the absence of any words of judgment) were the most “glad tidings” I heard that entire year. Not because they were “tidings of great joy,” but because they were tidings that suggested, just maybe … perhaps … the possibility of hope.

To this day my son and I are bound together by this ordeal in ways we have yet to fully fathom. Our love for one another is sure, but there are still moments when we meet on a landscape mined with memories of fear and absence, ache and longing, and now and again we step on them and the pain of our past explodes into our present.

“An ultimatum”

I came back after Christmas ready to try one last time to save the marriage. But this time there would be a period not an ellipsis at the end of that sentence. We’d been meeting with our pastor for marriage counseling since mid-fall and at our first session in January, when he asked where we were at with things, I was very clear. Either by the end of February my wife would be in anger counseling or I would look for a lawyer to file for divorce. Unsurprisingly, my words were not well-received. My wife accused me of blackmail. Our pastor affirmed the legitimacy of my position, and the course was set. I never expected that she would seek out counseling for her anger, but I felt like I had to make one last genuine gesture at saving the marriage. She brooded, sulked and occasionally exploded over the next six weeks, but she never sought out counseling, and in early March I made good on my commitment to find an attorney.

The rest of my memories of that winter/spring 1999 are a mosaic of agony. Three in particular stand out.

“The furthest away she could get”

Mornings now became opportunities for all out verbal assaults as soon as my son left the house to catch the bus. With the stakes heightened and with my resolve clear, I rarely left the house without a barrage of angry words. Our daughter, who turned three that March, sought refuge during these tirades beneath the dining room table. The shouting would start and, as if on cue, she would wordlessly make her way between the chairs until she sat on the floor in the middle of the table. Confused. Numb. Forlorn. Her whole face vacant of innocence and hope. Unable to flee any further, that place beneath the table became the furthest away she could get from the hurt that was her home.

“Bed beatings”

I slept that spring only by sheer exhaustion, which I experienced in plenty. But short of exhaustion sleep rarely came. We lived in a tiny apartment—maybe 650 square feet. We shared a queen size bed up until I actually met with an attorney. Our daughter slept in a corner of our room. On several occasions in February and March, in the middle of the night, wrapped restlessly in exhaustion, I awoke to discover my wife sitting on top of me, straddling my waist, her fists flailing against my chest while she wept. Had she wanted to hurt me while I slept, she could have. These nighttime assaults were driven by anger now muted by anguish, sensing that my course had indeed been set. But they were frightening each time nonetheless, but you just never knew when it would happen or if it would get worse. Exhausted, I dreaded sleep that spring as much as I dreaded waking.

“I will remember”

Most of my immediate colleagues in the Religion department knew that my marriage was crumbling, though few would have guessed at the depth of cataclysmic rockslides going on behind our withering vows. I said nothing to my students until late spring when our separation was imminent. Even then my words were guarded. The classroom had been perhaps the only real refuge I knew all year. My gifts as a writer and a poet, coupled with my passion for and understanding of theology made me a gifted teacher even when I entered the classroom less prepared and less rested than I wished. Teaching fed me that year. It was the one place where my life made sense.

But the year took it toll even there. By late spring I lived inside Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous poem “Who Am I?”. One morning, after a particularly raw night, one of my best students asked, quite sincerely and quite innocently, “How are you doing?” I responded at the edge of tears, “Life is hard right now. I’m not sure that I even know who I am anymore.” Without waiting she replied, “David, I know who you are, and I will remember who you are in all of this.”

In Christianity we speak of being “surrounded by a whole host of witnesses.” This is the gift that came to me that day on the sidewalk in front of the student union at Luther College. For a fleeting moment I imagined—no, I heard—in her steady gracious words the voice of everyone who mattered to me. In my own personal Pentecost, I heard each person’s voice—a whole host of them—within her voice. It may well be that grace always come in fleeting moments. But that moment—over in an instant—sustained me for the rest of the spring.

“At last and at length”

On April 27, 1999 we signed a divorce stipulation and not long after that my wife and our daughter loaded belonging into a rental truck and left for Wisconsin.

It seems not nearly so long ago because the emotions remain raw (probably due to all of the ensuing conflict over my time with my daughter). Still, my life has moved on into incredible new ventures—as husband now to Margaret, as parent to our blended family, as grandparent to three little ones now, and as writer and speaker. I sometime wonder myself, “How long ago was that?” But I know exactly how long.

One of the quirks in that marriage was that my wife dictated almost to the day each time I got my hair cut. It was one of the first concessions I made when we started dating, and it became a symbol of just how much of my own turf I ceded to her. So how long has it been? Exactly the length of my hair, because since the spring of 1999 no one has told me it was time to get a haircut … and I’m still savoring my wild—and free—hair. All eleven-plus years of it.

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This entry is the second written during my 21-day fast for justice in family court. In the next one I begin to relate my journey through the courts. You can learn more about the fast here (http://davidrweiss.com/hungry), including ways to support me.