There’s nothing I like more than to be able to announce/promote/hype up a project from one of our roster of writers and artists. Posting essays and shorter works on the internet is great but it is the longer work- the novels and collections and actual physical artefacts- that truly matters and will stand the test of time.
So it’s my pleasure then to kick this week of by giving you all an extract from
‘s novel-in-progress to enjoy. The set-up is this:Jennifer Howard’s 15-year-old daughter has moved out and cut off contact. Privately, she struggles with grief. But in her professional life, she’s a judge in a suburban California family court, deciding custody disputes for others.
That’s a great hook in my opinion. Looking forward to seeing how this novel develops. I hope you’ll feel the same way.
Enjoy.
TJB.
Here we are again. In the legal world, it’s another Wednesday docket. The parties and their lawyers sit at two wooden tables facing me, slightly below the level of the bench.
In the mythical world, a new Demeter is being created. Or maybe it’s just the real world, since I’m watching her face change in real time. It’s always the same expression as realization dawns: The eyebrows raise slightly, the jaw drops, the eyes subtly widen. She is trying to process what has occurred, the tragedy that has befallen her, while maintaining her composure.
At her side, the lawyer drones on. You can see the thoughts flicker across her face: But I’m the mother. I’m the mom. I’ve taken care of this child always. He has no idea, he’ll do everything wrong. My child will ask for me and wonder where I am. My child is still so young. Wait, wait—
Fifty percent. That’s how much Dad gets, under California law. The divorcing parents split the child’s time down the middle, fair and square, and if they can’t work out a schedule, a schedule will be imposed. This is the default arrangement in every case, and we will set it aside only for good cause. The child in question can be six months old, two years old, whatever. The old “tender years” doctrine no longer applies, and Dad and Mom are assumed to be interchangeable caregivers from birth to age eighteen.
This understanding, when it hits her, leaves Mom stunned.
Dad, too, is startled, but for different reasons. Fifty percent seems like a lot. Fifty percent? What is he going to do with a four-year-old for all that time? He, too, is trying to conceal his racing thoughts. He asked for this, he wanted this. It’s his legal right, after all. But he cannot quite figure out how it’s going to work in practice. He has to be at his job at X and stay till Y, five days a week. He’s sort of used to doing Z in his spare time. He’s picked the child up from preschool a few times, and made her noodles a few times, but he’s accustomed to Mom handling all that. Still: fifty percent! That’ll show her. She’s the one who wanted this divorce. Let’s see how much she likes it now.
These are just ordinary cases, the bread and butter of family court. And yet, the tearing apart of a family is larger-than-life in some way, the stuff of myth.
To the ancient Greeks, Demeter was the goddess of the harvest. She had a beautiful daughter, Persephone, to whom she was devoted. The god of the underworld, Hades, encountered the maiden, fell in love with her, and hatched a scheme to steal her from her mother. When Demeter was busy elsewhere, Hades’ chariot surged out of a fissure in the earth, pulled by a team of soot-black horses. He seized Persephone and dragged her back with him to the underworld. Demeter frantically searched for her missing daughter, mad with grief, while the crops withered in the field, flowers crumpled to the ground, and livestock perished. Eventually, through the intervention of the gods, a deal was struck: Persephone would spend six months of the year in the underworld with Hades, now her husband, and the other six months back on Mount Olympus with her mother. Fifty percent.
The Greeks believed this custody schedule explained the changing seasons. In autumn and winter, Demeter is in mourning, and so the earth grows cold and barren. In spring, Persephone comes home, and in her joy, Demeter makes the earth bloom with new life again.
From my elevated vantage point on the bench, I’ve seen countless Demeters: women realizing they will never again be full-time mothers. They are a different species, now, than married women, and their children will come and go, arrive and leave, until they are no longer children. A pall of winter comes over their faces, and they age visibly as the order is read. They see their future: a decade or more of hellos and goodbyes. How is it possible to explain to a child what has happened? The court says that you have leave. The court says I can see you Thursday. We have to stop playing. It’s time to pack and go.
And in some of their faces, you can see them think: What have I done?
The ugly thing is that the child’s time is always tied to money. A complicated rubric imposes child support obligations based on the parents’ respective salaries and percent of custody time. If Dad earns more than Mom (which often means a more demanding job), he’ll likely request fifty percent custody, because it means he’ll have to pay Mom less.
Life isn’t cheap in California. It’s a tough place to get by as a single parent. So, the amount of money changing hands between the former spouses often becomes a key factor in where the child spends her time. Dad may be ill-equipped to take care of a four-year-old alone (and perhaps, on some level, knows this), but he would rather take his legal half and put the child in daycare than pay another cent to Mom. The lines between the child’s best interest and the parents’ interests become blurred. Nobody likes it, and the outcomes can be harsh, but it’s the framework Sacramento has come up with. It’s the law.
In case before me, the custody split will be fifty-fifty. Because Mom is the higher earner, she will pay Dad child support each month. They have two daughters, ages six and four. Dad will set up a room for them in his new apartment. The girls will need their own suitcases, right away.
Mom blinks her eyes. She turns to her lawyer. Wait, wait—
I bang the gavel, briskly, twice. I didn’t do this. You did this. I’m sorry you two couldn’t make it work, but this is how it has to be.
At times like these, I feel glad that I never had to share Emily. Nobody could take her away, whether he and I stayed in love or not. Whether he found someone he liked better or not. I saw her every day, a golden daughter in a sun-washed decade. It was the springtime of my life.
I didn’t know—how could I know? —winter was coming for me, too.
“All rise,” booms Stan, and everyone hauls themselves to their feet while I walk out, the long black robe making a swishing sound against my clothes.