Memories

Let's talk a little bit more about Puppy Girl. What I didn't tell you in my last post was that as my Dad's health started to go downhill, he began to lose his taste for all the things he used to love to eat.  First, he stopped being interested in things that required a lot of chewing.  Then, it progressed to things for which he loved the taste.  Then, everything had to be pureed.  Finally, he couldn't swallow.  So, when Puppy Girl started to become a finicky eater, I had flashbacks to my Dad.  It was like reliving his decline all over again.  I was a wreck (hence the lack of posts), and had a hard time keeping myself together.  Luckily, instinct took over, finally, and I started to problem solve.  My panic subsided, and here I am.  Therapists would say I was having a little post traumatic stress moment.

Here in the Trenches, we deal with post traumatic stress a lot.  It happens most often in the early stages of a separation and divorce, when emotions are raw, and everything is reminiscent of the painful portions of the marriage.  Going to trial, with its emphasis on reliving the past, only re-traumatizes and forces clients to revisit painful events.  When the trial is over or the separation agreement is signed, most clients breathe a huge sigh of relief because the trauma is over.  Well, maybe.  At some point, somewhere down the line, there will be a smell, a look, an event, and all of a sudden they're transported back to that more painful time.  It's terrifying.  It's also normal.  Usually, so long as they keep perspective, the moment will pass and life will go on.  If it doesn't, then it's a sign that professional help is called for.  It's all about grieving and healing.  Here in the Trenches.

One of These Things is Not Like the Other....

Puppy Girl is getting older.  About two months ago, she stopped eating her regular dog food.  Why?  Was there something wrong with her that made her not want to eat?  All of her other behavior was perfectly normal. I tried soft dog food.  She ate it.  One cause down.  Was there something wrong with her teeth that made eating dry dog food hurt?  A trip to the dentist and lots of money later, we found nothing wrong with her teeth.  Yes, she had a cyst in her mouth, which they removed.  Problem solved?  A week later, she stopped eating the soft dog food.  I started making my homemade dog food again.  She ate and is eating it.  For now.  Maybe, it's just that as she's gotten older, her taste has changed and also her jaw isn't up to the dry food challenge.  Only time will tell.

What I'm doing with Puppy Girl isn't at all unusual.  Parents do it with small children all the time.  They keep asking questions.  The baby's crying?  Is it wet?  Nope.  Poopy?  Nope.  Hungry? No.  Gassy?  No.  Tired?  Yes! It's time for a nap.  Most of us have endless patience with our pets and our children. We keep asking questions until we find the cause and the solution.  Why don't we do it with adults?   I don't know.  All I know is that if we kept asking questions, there might be fewer folks here in the Trenches.

What do I mean?  I can't even count the number of people who come into my office wanting a divorce because their spouse stopped communicating.  Of course, I always ask what they mean.  They tell me their spouse stopped talking to them. They stopped answering their questions.  I ask what they've tried. Most folks look at me a bit blankly.  Well, they asked to go to counseling, but mostly, they did nothing. By nothing, I mean they did nothing different.  They kept asking questions for which they didn't really want the answers.  They seethed.  They assumed. They catastrophized.  What they didn't do was try to approach the problem differently.  They didn't break the new behavior down into components.  They didn't investigate further.  Is it only on Thursdays?  Is it every day?  Only on weekends?  Do they seem angry? Sad? They filled in their spouses blanks for them.  They figured adults, unlike small children and pets, would tell us what was bothering them.  If the death of Robin WIlliams teaches us anything, it's that adults don't always tell us what's wrong and how to solve it.  Yet, client after client assumes they would.  Had Puppy Girl had been their dog, she'd have starved to death.   Here in the Trenches.

When You Put It All Together, It Spells "M-O-T-H-E-R"

Daughter has been after me for quite a while to add a sustained weight lifting regimen to my fitness plan.  As you all know, in the middle of June, she created my first comprehensive workout.  I have been diligent in following her instructions (no, I don't say that only because she reads the blog - it's the truth).  Just recently, my per mile running time has dropped by half a minute.  Coincidence?  I think not.    Way back when I was a teenager, I recall the tennis world being turned on its ear by the revelation that Martina Navratilova regularly made weight lifting part of her workouts.  Before that, everyone thought that weight training and working the muscles outside of one's sport made for more bulk and less speed.  Now, everyone, including me, is cross training.  We all see how cross training makes a better, well rounded athlete.  I even work on breath retention when I swim to increase my aerobic capacity when I run.  Weights help me both swim and run (and avoid the muscle mass loss that comes with age - ouch!). Weightlifters do cardio.  Runners, tennis players, basketball players,... lift weights.  We've learned that just doing your sport and doing drills directly related to your sport, isn't enough.  Pushing your muscles to create lactic acid creates endurance and strength, which translate to speed (relatively speaking, in my case) and power.  Having a well rounded exercise regimen is the only way to see sustained improvement, because everything in your body is interrelated.

Here in the Trenches, we understand interrelationship.  Although I usually settle custody before child and spousal support, I never settle support without settling property.  I never settle just one piece of property without settling it all.  Why is that?  They are all interrelated.  If a spouse keeps the house but doesn't have enough income or support to retain it, what good is that?  If a spouse keeps the majority of retirement but has no cash to buy their own home, is that a good result?  Maybe, but maybe not.  What if they keep the house and waive retirement, and they outlive the house proceeds?  Ouch!  We try to explain to clients that piecemeal settlement is almost never in their best interest because all the pieces have to fit together for an acceptable outcome.  When you either take a piece off the table, or fix it in place, you have removed some maneuverability and made our job here in the Trenches that much harder.  All the pieces need to be in play to create a life outside of the Trenches that is acceptable to all. We aren't trying to make life more difficult for the client, who just wants each individual piece settled so they are that much closer to the end.  By refusing to settle piecemeal, we are actually making it easier to fashion an acceptable life after the Trenches.  It makes for a better product, kind of like weight lifting helps create a faster running time. Here in the Trenches.

Show Me the Love

My bathroom remodel is humming along.  OK, not humming, but moving forward.  At any rate, the slabs of marble for the wall were delivered this week and installed.  That's them in the picture above.  It's hard to tell, but those are 3 separate pieces of marble, only two of which were from the same slab.  The stonecutter did a masterful job matching them and making them look like they belong together - this picture doesn't do his work justice.  Sure, we paid him for his work.  We also called him and told him what a fantastic job he did.  It made his day to have someone really appreciate his work.
 
This week I got an "Atta Girl" from a client.  They are surprisingly rare.  It's not that I don't do a good job for my clients.  The vast majority of them are very happy with my services.  They're satisfied.    Yet, they almost never say "Atta Girl," or "That was a stupendous argument."  They don't think I need it.  They show their satisfaction by paying my bill.  Don't get me wrong, I love being paid.  I like that clients put the same value on my services as do I.  Still, there's nothing that beats an "Atta Girl."  I was floating all day on that one.  It energized and inspired me.  Two little words.  So much power.  Here in the Trenches.

I Get the Orange; You Get the Peel

The hardest cases for us here in the Trenches are custody cases.  How do you assign a value to time and the ability to make decisions for someone's child?  The hardest custody cases are relocation cases, where one parent wants to move away from the area, of course with the child.  Usually, I'm good at finding a compromise to meet both the parents' and the child's needs, but relocation cases don't lend themselves to that kind of compromise.  On top of that, as much as I respect our judiciary, judges are not remarkably creative in fashioning custody schedules.  They don't have the time to get to know everyone.  They don't have time or the inclination to take everyone's needs and family traditions into account.  They just make a decision.  They give one parent primary custody and try to come up with some sort of long distance access schedule.  Period.

The fact is, in a relocation case, someone has to move.  There's usually no choice to stay.  That means one parent will have the majority of the time with their child and the other will have less.  It's a fact.  The question is who decides where the child is when - the parents or the judge?  We know what the judge will do.  What about the parents?  What if, just what if, the parents sat down and hammered out a schedule for each parent, let's call the schedules A and B.  One parent would get the parenting time in schedule A and the other would get schedule B.  They don't need to decide which parent gets which schedule, they just need to fashion the schedules themselves.  They can let the judge decide which parent gets A and which gets B.  Think about it.  If the parents design both schedules without knowing which of them will get which, they each have an incentive to make sure both schedules are acceptable.  They are both motivated to create schedules that work for each of them and their child because they don't know which one they will get.  I've done it before, and it works, much better than a third party making those decisions.  Here in the Trenches.

The Tortoise and The Hare

As you might recall, Daughter just graduated from college with her Bachelors of Science Degree in Exercise Science.  The first thing she learned is that without a fitness trainer's certificate, her degree would not get her a job.  To those of us here in the Trenches, who are unable to practice law despite having a law degree before passing the bar exam, Daughter's experience seems familiar.  This week, she took and passed her fitness trainer's exam and, most importantly, got a job.

Daughter was excited,.... and then called me in a panic.  Everyone was going to expect her to know what to do.  She worried that a client would come in and ask her to devise an exercise regimen for a specific purpose, and she wouldn't be able to do it on the spot.  What if a client came in and presented a need she'd never seen?  What if she really needed to think about it for a while before answering a client?  Would she get fired?  Would the clients think she's an idiot?  Her questions brought back memories of my first jobs after law school, and when I told them to Chrystal, brought back the trauma of her first days as a paralegal as well.  There is such a difference between going to school and actually applying what you've learned.  It doesn't matter if you went to a trade school or college.  School is school, and it's a controlled environment.  The working world is not.  So, what did I tell Daughter?   I told her that clients (at least the ones you want to keep) understand that even though you know your stuff, you may not have all the information at your fingertips at any given moment.  That's especially true when you're young and just starting out.  Clients appreciate that you don't just try to bluff them, that you don't stumble your way through a response that is only partially correct.  My stock response starting out was that I wanted to think about their question and research it thoroughly so I could be sure to address their concerns fully.  Clients got it; they appreciated it.  After all, who doesn't want to feel special enough to know you really want to answer their question.  Of course, I did do what I said I was going to do, and the clients were satisfied with the response.  Our lovely Chrystal had the same experience, and so I passed that advice on to Daughter.  She felt better knowing that she didn't have to decide and advise clients on the spot, but could think about her response before answering..

There is a lesson here for our clients here in the Trenches.  Simply because  someone wants an answer today doesn't mean you have to give it to them today.  The world understands, even if your spouse doesn't seem to, that a thoughtful response is better than a hasty one that is then changed, and changed, and changed again as you think on it more.  I'd rather wait a while for one answer than have a continuing barrage of new responses to the same question.   The  problem here in the Trenches is that  our clients are not faced with easy questions about minor things.  They are making decisions that  affect the rest of their lives.  On top of that, they are suffering the same anxiety of needing to respond faced by Daughter at a time in which  their higher level thinking is compromised.  For our clients, taking the time for a deep breath and detailed thought is imperative, yet they feel the emotional  pressure to get it done and over with.  Part of our job,is to help them take that deep breath, present them with all the facts for their options, and help them vet alternatives until they can find the right one for them.  That's not an immediate process.  They have to take the time to investigate the issue thoroughly.  Here in the Trenches.

A Man Walks Into a Bar....

Most people never walk into a lawyer's office because something good has happened in their lives.  Here in family law, people are as stressed as they will ever be in their lives, except when someone they love dies.  If your marriage is ending, if there are problems with the custody or support of your child, you know you need help.  You don't want to make the wrong choice of lawyer.  How do you know which one is the right one for you?  There are a lot of ways to decide, almost as many ways as there are attorneys to help you.  I know it's overwhelming.

First, get a recommendation from someone you trust.  That's not just from anyone, but someone whose opinion matters to you.  Don't stop there.  Ask them questions.  What questions should you ask?  How about these?  How did the attorney work with you?  Were you a team, consulting with each other, assessing options, planning strategy?  Did the attorney take charge and tell you what to do and when and inform you of what was happening?  Did the attorney do everything and not have you participate?  How did you feel about the attorney's office staff?  How did they treat you?  How did you feel about how the attorney conducted your case?  Why?  What were your expectations for the attorney?  Were they met?  What about your attorney makes you recommend them?  What didn't you like?  Don't just ask these questions - really listen to the answers.  Think about the answers and about how you process information.  Think about how you like to be treated.

Second, call the office and make an appointment.  Pay attention to how the office staff treats you on the phone.  Are they courteous?  Do you feel like they are listening to you?  Do you think they care?  Remember, they work for the attorney, and they wouldn't keep their jobs if they didn't treat the clients the way the attorney wants and tolerates.

Third, meet with the attorney.  Pay for the consultation.  I know, who likes doing that, but you will get some legal advice, so it's worth the money.  Decide, first and foremost, whether you feel comfortable with this person.  Most people know in 30 seconds whether someone makes them feel comfortable.  This is a person who will know every one of your deepest, darkest secrets, and if you're not comfortable with them, you will be even more uncomfortable as time goes on.  Do you think their communication style works with yours?  What about their philosophy of life and how to practice family law?  A client who comes to me wanting scorched earth and burned bridges will never be comfortable with me.  If you recall, I'm the information girl - I want my clients to have as much information as they need to make their own decisions.  I'm there to make sure they have the information, help them apply the information to their lives, and support them as they make their decisions.  Not everyone is like me, and not every client wants what I offer.  Which brings me to discussing how much involvement the attorney expects you to have in your case.  Some want you to have a lot, and others are just as happy if you just show up for trial and trial preparation.  While we're at it, do you want to go to trial, or do you want to settle the case?  Do you want to leave destruction in your wake, or do you want to make sure that even in the turmoil of your divorce, everyone finds an acceptable solution? You'd better make sure your attorney is on board.

Finally, talk money.  Yes, it's a dirty word, but you need to talk about it now.  How does the attorney bill?  For what do they bill?  If they talk to their associate, for how many attorneys are you billed?  The same with support staff.  Do they charge for copies?   For postage?  Do they routinely use delivery services instead of the US Postal Service?  Do they charge for faxes?  You need to know, if only so you're not surprised when you open the first bill.

Think you're ready to choose a lawyer?  Good.  Oh, one last thing.  When all else fails, go with your gut.  If it feels right, if it feels comfortable, it probably is.  Here in the Trenches.