Vol. 9, No. 4, Pg. 36. The View from the Minors.

• Author: By Lee M. Robinson

South Carolina Lawyer

1998.

Vol. 9, No. 4, Pg. 36.

The View from the Minors

36THE VIEW FROM THE MINORSBy Lee M. RobinsonThis article was recognized as the ABA's 1996 Ross Essay contest winner and appeared in the September 1996 issue of the ABA Journal. Reprinted by permission of the ABA Journal.

"Family values" is a phrase so overused and abused that it has become almost meaningless. Politicians use it as a disguise for schemes to reduce benefits to children. The rest of us, the ones who complain about the politicians, use it to avoid difficult discussions about the very serious problems families grapple with on a daily basis.

I have practiced law in the family courts of South Carolina for almost 20 years. Family court is a place where "family" is a broken thing that needs fixing and "values" is a word rarely uttered. It is a place where motions for emergency relief-to get a restraining order for an abused spouse or temporary support for a child-are scheduled in 15-minute increments, while divorces involving substantial assets, but no children, occupy weeks of courtroom time.

I've always known the system has its problems. I certainly wouldn't want to trust my children to it. But not until I began to look at this system from the child's point of view did I really begin to understand the enormity of the gulf between all our talk about family values and the way we let our courts devalue our families.

I've done my time representing feuding parents in custody battles, parents accused of child abuse, fathers and mothers and grandparents begging for more visitation time. I've learned a great deal from these cases-litigation skills, perserverance, how to keep the judge's mind off the fact that my client has been married three times and doesn't seem to be able to keep a job.

In representing the children themselves, however, I have seen from their perspective how we fail at resolving the disputes that surround their lives.

In 1993, I began writing a story about a teenage girl at the center of a custody case. Although the plot is fiction, I cannot take credit for any great creativity in putting this story down on paper because the voice I heard telling it was the clear, persistent chorus of all the children's voices I have heard over the years. The story kept telling itself until it turned into a novel, Gateway (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1996).

THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD

Margaret - a sophisticated 13year-old who calls her parents by their first names - has a few thingsto say about her family and the court that tries to deal with it.

"'We're working with lawyers to come up with a plan for where you'll be living.' That's what Mollie said.

"She forgets I'm good at translating from I Don't Really Want to Talk About It, a language spoken by adults, into Get Real. And what Mollie said translates into: 'We're fighting over custody.'

'When I asked her point-blank if she and Hal were fighting over me, she said, 'Not really. I think it's just his way of showing his anger.'

'This was Mollie's way of not dealing with the fact that Hal, for the first time...