marital woes

There is such a difference between the contents of what I write in the evenings and mornings. Evenings, I only have morose writings to my credit. Mornings seem to offer more hope to the world.

Today is going to be a long day. A tough trial in court. A mentally ill mother is my client. She has a child of five years old. The husband says thats she is mentally ill and ineffective and therefore cannot take care of the child. He proposes that he should have the custody of the five year old. The wife says that her illness was caused by the husband's ill treatment. She was not born with the illness. It was the violence of conjugality that produced the illness. Sounds familiar isnt it. There are many of us here who would attest to this fact. Marital incompatibility and marital violence is so common in our lives. I guess a majority live in marriages that do not suit them. But we go on for the sake of children, respect in community, loneliness, some sex, some love and so on. Not all of us separate. It depends on how we manouver some space and respect for ourselves. This does not preclude the fact that respect and space are results of major battles. Many of us do arrive at some consensus.

Some marriages go completely bonkers. They are the ones that end up in the courts. My mentally ill client is one example. The child is the bone of contention between them. The child signifies many battles between the two of them. Except the child there is no other peg to hang their battles. The husband is trying his best to prove that she is mad, uncooperative at home, uninspiring in bed and most importantly a useless mother. He has caught hold of her medical prescriptions and letters to prove that he has ben living with a mad woman all along. The wife is battling his allegations quite courageously. She endured an elaborate seven hour cross examination with aplomb. The child becomes important for her status as that is the only way of proving that she is sane. This trial has been quite an eye opener for me in the sense that the battle for the child is not simply about maternal/paternal love for the child. It is a trial of establishing sanity. It is incidentally that the child becomes the pawn in the game.

The other side lawyers hates me. He is a foggy old man who doesnt know what marital incompatability means or that society gives a certain sanction for a husband to ill treat a wife. I dont say that women/wives/mothers are innocent. But as far as sanction and those invisible rules of society go, it is the man and his family who set the rules for the wife. According to him there should be no separations. The home is a peaceful haven where the man and woman should coexist on consensual terms. However all divorce applications are evidence of the battle ground that a family or a marital relationship is. Yet in the face of this glaring evidence we continue to espouse the cause of the peaceful domestic space. Our films, our advertisements reinforce this concept of the guileless family.

His lawyer thinks that it is all the woman's fault. Now that is a non negotiable position. My position is that we have to share faults and also understand the larger family frame in which these faults are located. It is true that my client has her share of problems. It is clear that resumption of the marriage is not possible between them. In such cirumstances would it not be best to separate amicably with negotiable terms of settlement?

But domestic battles rarely fit the rational. They are contested tooth and nail. An eye for an eye. Marriage is something in which we have invested all our money, dreams and future projects. It is a big investment. So when such an investment goes awry, the battles are truly tremendous.

The most common repsonse to a custody battle is that the child is suffering. I beg to disagree. The child moves between father and mother and gradually takes advantage of both the parties. The child also forgets in phases. But it is the adults who are worst hit. I am not sure if I will fight such a battle. I would be torn apart.