If Solomon returned to sit on the bench in Kane County, he might slyly suggest that Kelly Rissman, Joe Rissman and Todd McLaughlin take the little boy they are fighting over and divide him into thirds-one part for the mother, one part for her ex-husband and one part for the man who claims to be the mother`s former boyfriend and the natural father of the child.
When the Biblical king suggested a similar solution to a pair of contending harlots in an Old Testament tale, it settled a bit of bad business in a hurry. But things are never so easy now.
The child in this latter day trilemma was born to Kelly Rissman of Aurora in July 1988. She was a waitress and married, at the time, to Joe Rissman, now of Hinckley. But in petitions set for hearing in Kane County Family Court Monday, Todd McLaughlin of Morton Grove, who was Kelly Rissman`s manager at Maxwell `N Millie`s restaurant back then, alleges that the child was the result of a 2-month sexual relationship between the two.
McLaughlin said Kelly Rissman told him Joe Rissman was the father, but that he became suspicious when, as the child grew, he began looking more and more like McLaughlin`s baby pictures. Just after the boy turned 2 and the Rissmans separated, the Lifesource Paternity Testing Laboratory of Chicago sampled blood from the mother, the boy and Todd McLaughlin, and analysts concluded with 99.99 percent certainty that McLaughlin was the father, according to the laboratory.
McLaughlin said he began paying between $150 and $200 a month in child support and taking the boy home on alternating weekends. He said the estranged husband also had visitation. Unconventional, yes, but in this era of surrogate mothering, anonymous test-tube fathering, declining marriage rates, Murphy Brownian parenthood and so on, it pays to be flexible and inventive in our notions of family. And if the arrangement worked for this foursome, well, who was anyone to criticize?
”He called me `Daddy,` ” said McLaughlin, now 25 and working for a Vernon Hills furniture company. ”We loved each other. He meant everything to me.”
The informal custody agreement collapsed in January, said McLaughlin, when the mother cut off visitation after he became unemployed and missed several support payments. Three months later, Kelly Rissman, now 31, and Joe Rissman, now 38, legally ended their 7-year marriage. They signed a divorce settlement calling for them to share custody of the boy and making no mention of McLaughlin.
McLaughlin and his attorney, noted father`s rights advocate Jeffery Leving of Chicago, filed a motion shortly thereafter asking the court to vacate the joint-parenting agreement and award McLaughlin partial custody. He now has not seen the 4-year-old for nearly seven months.
”There`s a big box of his toys here,” said a despondent McLaughlin Tuesday night. ”I look at it every day. Every day it hurts.”
”This is a pretty touchy situation,” said Joe Rissman when contacted at home. ”Because of the uniqueness of it, I don`t think I want to say anything except that what`s best for (the child) is the most important thing.”
A man identifying himself as ”the person who lives with Kelly Rissman”
returned telephone messages to her Aurora residence and said she has no comment on the case.
Kelly Rissman`s attorney, Donald Tegeler Jr. of Carpentersville, and Joe Rissman`s attorney, Rory Weiler of Batavia, have filed responses to McLaughlin`s petition that argue, in essence, that McLaughlin has no legal standing to jump in now. He was not a party to the divorce, the filings say, and Illinois` statute of limitations ran out when McLaughlin didn`t legally assert his claim to parenthood within two years after the birth of the child, as required by law.
Leving said he will argue Monday that the 2-year limit unconstitutionally deprives parents of equal protection, and that the limit should not apply in any event because Kelly Rissman misled McLaughlin and caused him to believe that the visitation arrangement was permanent.
But, legal fine points aside, would it be so terrible for the boy at the middle of all this to have, in effect, two or more dads?
”Children are remarkably flexible and can work out all kinds of arrangements,” said Bennett Leventhal, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Chicago, after hearing the story. ”With divorces and remarriages, they can easily learn to have three parents, four parents and so on. These are adult problems, not child problems.”
King Solomon knew that the woman who did not want to cut a disputed child in two with a sword was the true mother, while the woman who agreed to his plan was a pretender.
The idea worked because the threat of his solution was credible in ancient times. Our judges today don`t have the same options. We don`t chop kids into pieces in this society. Not literally, anyway.
