In the lobby of the Daley Center, a group of schoolchildren is preparing to give a lunchtime concert of Christmas carols. Eighteen floors above, the sounds of the holidays aren`t so heartwarming.
In the courtroom of Cook County Circuit Judge Kathy Flanagan, a divorcing couple from the north suburbs are fighting over who gets custody of their 6-year-old daughter during Christmas.
Because the wife did not make the child available to him on Thanksgiving, the father wants the daughter for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and a Jan. 2 gathering.
But the wife has alleged that the husband sexually fondled the girl on prior occasions-allegations the husband denies. She demands the child`s visits with him be chaperoned, but she doesn`t approve of his girlfriend or other people he has proposed as chaperones. He counters that it is difficult and expensive to hire professional supervisors over the holidays.
With the judge`s help, a compromise is reached. The husband gets Christmas Eve and Jan. 2, but not Christmas Day. The wife allows members of the husband`s family to supervise the visits, but only if she gets to apprise them of her sexual abuse allegations against him.
Divorce Court is a bleak venue during the holidays. Always a dispiriting place, it is especially forbidding during Christmas and Hanukkah, when its mean and spiteful atmosphere makes a mockery of traditional holiday values.
Judge Benjamin Mackoff, who presides over Cook County Circuit Court`s domestic relations division, as the Chicago-based court is officially known, doesn`t have to think twice when asked if December is the most disheartening month for the more than 30 judges in his division. In his estimation, it is worse than summer vacation, Passover, Easter or Thanksgiving when it comes to child custody and visitation disputes between divorced or divorcing parents.
A slack month so far
”It gets to be a little crazy, as far as some of the things people are interested in and as far as dividing up a child`s life into minutes or hours spent with one parent or another” during Hanukkah or Christmas, Mackoff says. ”It`s beyond rationality. The situations are so emotionally charged when one parent puts so much store in the child`s memory of being with that parent when the child wakes up on Christmas morning and opens his presents.”
Holiday visitation disputes have been no less intense this month, but there seem to be fewer of them in Mackoff`s division. The division doesn`t record the number of petitions filed involving holiday visitation, but Mackoff says his judges believe that, at least through last week, volume was down from levels in recent years.
But Divorce Court has its version of last-minute shoppers, parents who file emergency motions the last few days before Christmas. But as late as Monday, it seemed doubtful that the rush this week would be great enough to make up for the slack of earlier this month.
Divorce Court judges and lawyers can only guess at reasons for the apparent downturn. Perhaps, they say, more parties are resolving disputes in the court`s mediation arm, the Marriage and Family Counseling Service, or through private mediators. Perhaps the poor economy has made parties more conscious of litigation costs.
But the economy was weak last year too. And as Judge Philip Lieb observes, ”Parents can be as unreasonable during a recession as they are during boom times.”
Lieb would rather applaud the apparent falloff in holiday visitation disputes than worry about its cause. ”Maybe there`s more good will floating around this year,” he says.
Many Divorce Court judges and lawyers tell of past Hanukkah and Christmas disputes that essentially are contests for power and control between parents. They say parents often measure victory in time denied the other and in looking good by having the children in tow at parties or gatherings.
Judge Susan Snow recognizes the psychological need of divorced or divorcing parents to have their children with them during these holidays.
”It`s a time when people whose family structure is changing find it particularly important to reconnect to their support systems,” she says.
”It`s something the adults are doing for the adults as well as for children.”
Children feel the pull
But being tugged in different directions is not how children want to spend Hanukkah or Christmas.
”There are kids who dread the holidays because it means the pull. When you love two people, you don`t want to take sides,” says lawyer Donald Schiller. ”Some of these parents are so self-involved, they don`t realize what they are doing to the children.”
Some parents fight over visitation every year at this time, judges and lawyers say. In many post-divorce decree cases, disputes often arise after the circumstances of one parent change, for example, by moving to another state, finding a new love interest or remarrying.
Judge Aubrey Kaplan recalled a case in which he allowed a father to take his son and daughter on a cruise with him and his girlfriend. But to appease the mother, Kaplan ordered the son to room with the father and the daughter with the girlfriend.
”The dispute was less over the holiday than the company the husband was keeping,” Kaplan says.
Disputes often are triggered when a parent makes an unexpected and unannounced change in holiday plans, often involving a non-refundable airplane ticket.
Other fights begin at Thanksgiving, when a parent reneges on a previously agreed-to visitation schedule. The other parent then seeks recompense by demanding additional time with the child during the eight days of Hanukkah or during Christmas and the ensuing school vacation.
Some fights are over gifts. One father went to court to force his wife to make sure his presents and cards were received by the child. Some mothers complain that fathers lavish extravagant gifts on their children during the holidays, yet don`t meet maintenance and child-care payments the rest of the year.
Judges usually resolve visitation disputes by giving one parent Christmas Eve and the other Christmas Day. But in some instances, they may have to divide Dec. 24 and 25 into blocks of hours.
For one warring couple, Judge Herman Knell says he had to ”abolish”
Christmas.
”They carried on so much in my court that I made the official holiday Hanukkah and gave each party four days” with the child, Knell says.
Mackoff says holiday visitation disputes are more common when a divorcing couple is of the same faith than if the parents observe different religions or different branches of the same faith.
In single-faith marriages, he says, ”Both parties have an attachment to the same holiday, they have more invested in it. In interfaith marriages, problems occur when the holidays fall on the same date.”
But when an interfaith marriage collapses, Mackoff observes, one spouse may react by becoming more devoted to his or her religion and by insisting that the child be brought up in that faith. The issue of the child`s religion usually is hammered out as part of a divorce settlement, but disputes can flare up later.
Mediators can help
Mackoff says that when religion is at issue, a mediation service such as that sponsored by the DePaul University College of Law and its Church-State Center may be particularly helpful to divorced or divorcing couples.
Katheryn Duntenhaver, a professor at the law school who runs the mediation service, says couples are referred by the court or by their clergyman. She says clerics often participate by instructing parents on what their faiths do and don`t require about a child`s upbringing.
”What is so helpful to a mother and father is when (their respective)
clergy show up with the belief that a solution can be reached,” she says.
When the holidays are over, the judges can count on hearing of instances in which one or both parents disobeyed the court`s visitation orders. When that occurs, says Judge Snow, ”You can only talk about the next Christmas. You can`t go into court and replace the Christmas just past.”
