Divorce Balance

Negotiation > Recovery > Enhancement

Friday, December 24, 2004
Twelve Days of Christmas Aren't Enough

My uncle is probably getting ready to start his Christmas shopping right about now. From what he's told me, it's neither an avoidance nor a bargain-maximization thing.

It's an immersion process for him that feeds his Christmas Spirit.

Divorced families will be adding miles to minivan odometers right alongside my dad's brother, of course. I see from the Michigan Parenting Time Guideline, that nine o'clock tonight is recommended for their big holiday time parenting switches.

With a statewide Friend of the Court caseload of 697,506 custody matters, that's reason enough for me to walk Mrs. Poyndexter's Samoyed this evening.

Or you could confront this conundrum of Rubik's-Cube-meets-Palm-Pilot by following advice from The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday. They suggest multiple Christmas Days, per Scandinavian tradition (God bless Granny Reeves' proud heritage and mine): Their "second Christmas Day" is called "Boxing Day."

Draw your own inferences from that.

As a mediator, what I would like to point out here is that you can truly create win/win situations if you'll only expand your thinking just a little bit. We've sung "The Twelve Days of Christmas" as long as I can remember; and retailers have already established that "Christmas" began more than a month ago.

So why get hung up on exacting your legal share of a 24- or 48-hour period that, by it's very splitting, becomes tarnished?

Think outside the box: That's my Christmas wish for you — and for my uncle, whose Rendezvous may move a little more swiftly without our baggage.

—posted by Dell Deaton @2:14 PM EST 12/24/2004 [250]

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