|
Georgia's female-supremacist family
courts
By Stephanie Ramage
The Sunday Paper
15 June 2008
Father's Day will have passed by the
time you read this, but as I write it,
I'm making a mental note to take my
son shopping for a gift for his dad.
My ex-husband and I divorced when
our son was a toddler, and we got what my
attorney called Georgia's
"standard boilerplate custody agreement." It
gave
me custody of our son 70 percent of
the time. My son's father basically got
to see him on weekends.
But as I looked around at other
divorced moms, I became almost panicked by
what I saw: sons who seethed with
resentment against their mothers, whom
they felt sure had driven away their
fathers, and daughters who so
desperately wanted a dad in their
lives that they would latch on to just
about any male authority figure who
came along. Though in some cases the
now-departed dads were truly bad
news, in others, moms merely cooked up
tales of atrocities committed by
their former hubbies as part of a
propaganda campaign designed to
justify Daddy's exile to their children.
When I asked why a father isn't as
much of a parent as a mother, those moms
were speechless. Furious, but
speechless. A few confided that they were
afraid of what people would think of
them if they didn't have majority
custody. "Only a mom who's a
heroin addict doesn't get majority custody and
if you tell people it's equal
custody, in their minds it's the same," one said.
By the time our son was 4, we were
already phasing him into shared equal
joint custody - not a legally
hammered-out agreement, mind you, but our own
arrangement, based on a mutual
desire that our child not be deprived of
either of us, no matter our personal
grievances against each another. Such
informal arrangements are not a
matter of public record, so when the courts
look at the number of shared equal
joint custody agreements, they draw the
conclusion that it's a rare thing.
It's not, but most of the people who
eventually do it have no interest in
going back to an adversarial legal
system where only the attorneys win
to make it official.
Our arrangement has worked
beautifully for our son. It has also, quite
frankly, required substantial
sacrifice by my ex-husband and I. I have
turned down half a dozen job offers
that would have required me to move out
of state - taking my son away from
the man who means more to him than anything.
I remember once, several years ago,
getting the job offer of a lifetime,
one that was just astoundingly good.
And it came at a time when I really
needed something good to happen; I
was working two part-time jobs to make
ends meet. An old friend had risen
in the ranks of his organization, and
when there was an opening, he
remembered me, recommended me and was assured
that I could cakewalk my way into
the prestigious position, located about a
thousand miles from Atlanta. It
would pay three times as much as I had ever
made in my life,. But he needed an
answer within the week.
I stayed up nights wondering what to
do. Finally, I talked with a couple of
relatives who told me, "One day
your son is going to grow up and go away
and what will you have? Be smart,
take the job. You know the courts will
let you take him with you. You're
his mom." Friends also said "Take it." No
one, not one person, said, "But
what about his dad?"
The next day, I met my ex-husband to
talk with him about working out a new
visitation schedule based on my
anticipated move halfway across the
country. As I tried to make my
point, I could hear my voice, like the voice
of a stranger, oozing across the
table, and I felt ashamed. My heart was
listening and, no matter which words
I chose, what it heard was: "I am a
selfish woman who would willingly
ruin her son's happiness by taking him
away from you, his father, for the
sake of a big, fat paycheck and a
respectable job. I am greedy and
heartless and too self-absorbed to even
acknowledge how important you are to
him."
I felt my face redden and tears
stung my eyes. I blurted an apology, said
something like "Never mind,
forget it. Just forget I ever said anything,"
and excused myself. I emailed my
friend as soon as I got home, saying, "I
can't take the job. My son's life is
here and mine is with him."
I love my son with the profound love
that just about any parent feels for a
child, but the greatest example that
I have of that love is my decision to
share his time equally with his
father. (By the way, I have never, ever
regretted my decision not to take
that job.)
As my son has grown with both his
dad and I as equal partners in his life
- spending one week with Dad and the
next with me (and seeing each of us
sometimes when it's not "our
week") - I have reaped more joy in his
well-being than any paycheck could
have given me. I know it's not for
everyone, but this arrangement has
certainly worked for my son.
When I consider Georgia's family law
policies and that "boilerplate"
agreement, I am struck by the idea
that even in our criminal courts, a
person is presumed innocent until
proven guilty, but in our family courts,
a father is usually presumed to be
guilty of not being as good a parent as
a mother, of not being worthy of
equal time with his children. It is
strange to me that women are treated
only as if they have divorced their
spouses, but men are treated as if
they have divorced their children as
well. Women, by virtue of their
gender, something as arbitrary as the color
of their skin, are assumed to be the
rightful custodial parents. I don't
believe that children were intended
to have just one parent, although some
single moms, out of necessity, have
done an amazing job of raising their
children alone. Nor do I believe
that fathers are less important than moms.
If ours is an egalitarian society,
then why do we allow an ideology of
female supremacy in the decisions of
our family courts?
A brilliant political scientist at
Stanford University told me recently
that he believes our laws reflect
not necessarily the kind of society we
are, but the kind of society we
aspire to be. If that is indeed the
intention behind our laws, then
isn't it the purpose of our family laws to
mitigate, as much as is possible,
the damage done by divorce? Georgia's
laws cannot put a married couple
back together again, but they can go much
further than they do toward making
sure that children have both parents
even after a divorce.
| 
Having problems with message search?
Fill out this form to ensure your group is one of the first to be migrated to the new message search system.
Offline 
Send Email
