My ex filed against me about once a month on average I would say. Filing was the weapon. Every time he filed, I had to respond, and responding cost money and energy, and money and energy were the point. He could reach into my life on a monthly schedule and make it more expensive and emotionally challenging to be me, and there was nothing in the system that stopped him, because the system doesn’t ask whether a filing is in good faith. It just processes it, and sends everyone the bill.
That’s the first thing I learned about divorce lawyers and the machine they operate inside. It runs on conflict. It does not profit when things resolve easily and cheaply. It profits when they drag, and mine dragged for years, on a nearly monthly basis, because the person on the other side had figured out that the process itself could be used to bleed me.
I was almost never paid child support. And at the same time, I was paying for a lawyer to represent my children against me, paying for my children’s therapy, losing time and income from work for every hearing and every filing, and paying for my own legal help on top of all of it. The man who ignored his obligations paid very little. I, who met mine, paid for everything, including the opposition. During the longest custody round I did most of the work myself, and I still was ordered to pay the children’s attorney whose job was to argue the other side. That is the racket. You are at the lowest, most frightened point of your life, terrified for your kids, and you are also, to this system, a revenue stream.
But here is the thing I didn’t expect, the thing that’s stayed with me way more than the money. Across all those years and all those lawyers, I saw the entire range of what a person can be. Same profession, same machine, and wildly different souls operating inside it. I got a tour of human character, and I paid for the tour by the hour. This showed itself most prominently when my ex husband filed for custody the second time.
At one end was my ex’s attorney. Her reputation arrived before she did. The first time I sat down with my own lawyer and her name came up, he actually said, more or less, “oh boy — that’s a cruel one.” And she was. She was mean in a way that was strategic, and the thing she was best at was making my own honesty look like dishonesty.
It’s still hard to explain without feeling the helplessness. My ex was gone constantly, and he’d say he was working. Saying you’re working and actually working are two different things, but she was expert at closing that gap in her client’s favor. She’d maneuver me into confirming that yes, he was “working” — a technically true answer to a narrow question — and then let that stand in for the picture she wanted painted: a good provider, a hardworking dad, a reasonable man. My truthful answer became the load-bearing wall of a lie. I’d walk out of those rooms feeling like I had been the dishonest one, when all I’d done was answer honestly and watch her build something false out of it. She was very good at her job. Her job was cruelty with a case number.
Eventually she fired him. Her own client. Even she reached a limit with the man. And she wasn’t the first — the lawyer he hired at the very start of the divorce actually came to court complaining and asked to be removed from his case. One after another, his own hired representation walked away from him. There is a pattern in that, and I noticed it even then. The professionals kept quitting him. I was the one who didn’t get to quit.
At the other end of the span was a man I was referred to by an old boss. He helped me quietly, behind the scenes. I couldn’t afford a full-blown legal war, so I’d go to him and he would help me write up my own papers, and in the process he taught me. He explained the things that were hardest for me to accept. He’d tell me the things about how this system actually works, the outcomes I didn’t want to hear in a way I could finally process instead of just drowning in. He was a calm presence in the least calm years of my life.
I learned so much from him that I’ve thought, more than once, that I could have become a paralegal. That’s what he gave me that the machine never would: not just help, but competence. Some footing. The difference between being a frightened woman things happened to and a woman who understood the paperwork in her own hands.
In a system engineered to keep you dependent, scared, and paying, he handed me a little bit of my own power back. He didn’t have to. He chose to. That was the whole difference between him and the cruel one. The difference was not the law, not the system, which was the same for both of them. Just the kind of person each of them decided to be inside it.
That’s what I actually took away from all those years in the system. Not bitterness about the law, exactly, though I’ve earned some. What stayed was the span itself. The same machine held a woman who weaponized my honesty against me and a man who taught me to stand on my own feet, and everyone in between, and I met most of them at the worst moment of my life, when I had the least ability to tell in advance which kind I was getting.
I didn’t get to choose the system, but I got to watch, up close, a whole spectrum of people decide what to do with the power they had over someone who had almost none.
I remember the cruel one, but I remember the kind one more. And I try, still, to be the second kind, in the rooms where I’m the one with a little power and someone across from me has none.
Whatever Held 
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