Winning Argument

“No. It. Wasn’t.” Mr. Edwards said stopping after each word as if it were a live grenade. “Tommy Stewart was my friend before we got married. You never even met him until after we got engaged.”

“Are you kidding? Do I have to sit here and listen to these calumnies?” Mrs. Edwards looked imploringly at her forensic accountant, her attorney, and the mediator. “You know very well that Melissa Stewart and I met in grad school.”

“And who paid for your graduate degree?” may I ask.

“I paid you back every cent of those funds and you know it!”

“Not a syllable of truth,” said Mr. Edwards. “I have a copy of your journal entry from 1988 in which you clearly state that you didn’t like Missy at all.”

“A journal entry? What were you doing looking at my journal?” Mrs. Edwards sputtered.

“The same thing you were doing when you were reading my emails without my knowledge or permission!”

“Which is how I found out about that floozy you were seeing.”

“How many times do we have to do over this?” Mr. Edwards shouted. “I have told you repeatedly that Tiffany and I didn’t start dating until after you had hired this divorce attorney.”

“That frying pan was given to me by my friend and I’m not going to let you run off with it like you have with everything else we ever tried to…”

Mr. Edwards interrupted: “If you hadn’t turned the children against me, I wouldn’t…”

Mrs. Edwards interrupted more loudly: “If you hadn’t hidden our assets with the intention of stealing…”

And off they go. I have too much affection for my gentle readers to subject them to any more of this endlessly vapid argument. But I will ask your indulgence with the following middle school level arithmetic question: If the attorneys each charge $450/hour and the forensic accountants each charge $300/hour and the mediator also charges $300/hour, how many minutes can Mr. and Mrs. Edwards talk about the stupid frying pan that couldn’t have cost more than $120 to begin with before it would have made more sense to just take a darn cab to Crate and Frigging Barrel to get another one?

Clearly, there is something else going on in this room. You don’t need a master’s degree in marriage and family counseling to notice that Mr. and Mrs. Edwards have some unfinished business to work through. Wouldn’t you agree that the frying pan–which is a big lose if they spend more than four minutes talking about it–is the least of their issues?

The real question is not “why are they still fighting?” The question is whether or not the frying pan is worth fighting over.

It seems that Mr. and Mrs. Edwards are “invested” in continuing to fight. They must be “getting something” out of their endless billable meetings with their attorneys and their forensic accountants because they are certainly not obtaining any frying pans.

Which brings us–“finally” you might say–to conversations with our beloved children. What are you spending much of your day talking about with your kids? Is homework a frequent topic? What about chores? Bedtime?

I’m not advocating for abnegating our sacred responsibilities as parents to model appropriate behaviors and to live together in a cooperative household where everyone works and everyone eats. There is no more appropriate parental sentence than “Give me a hand with these dishes and then let’s go toss the ball.” But if you hear yourself saying, “I have asked you a hundred times to do the dishes! Yesterday you promised you would do the dishes! Why don’t you ever do the dishes? Your father didn’t do his share of the dished, that’s why I divorced him!” then you might be in “Edwards territory”.

And something went horribly wrong somewhere way before the attorneys, the forensic accountants, the mediator and the frying pan worth–at most–four minutes of everyone’s time.