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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
To me, they were dependable, a security blanket I would never lose.
Nov 1, 1999 | Theirs was an early '70s marriage: founded on a Jamaican boardwalk, fueled by hippie idealism and snuffed out by drug-induced clashes. Dad was a surfer and film-school dropout from Long Island, N.Y. Mom was simply a seeker, a painter from Scarsdale, N.Y., who had long ago rejected that town's materialistic mantra.
In Jamaica, they fell in love, and in a generic church that satisfied Dad's Catholic and Mom's Jewish relatives, they married. At that point, they had known each other for less than a year. Neither had a college degree, job prospects or a clear idea of what they stood for, rather than against. I've always believed that their relationship was based on a shared lust for life's rushes -- everything from drugs, to the sunrise, to sex, to meeting new people. But whatever it was didn't last. I was born less than a year after their wedding, but the marriage dissolved before I turned three.
"My acid habit and your mom's drinking just didn't get along," Dad told me a few years ago. "I took you because I didn't think I was quite as messed up as she was."
Whatever.
Relative stupors aside, Dad drove me cross-country, kicking off several years of lying and a custody battle rife with claims of kidnapping and abandonment. I don't remember much of this, and have never given it too much thought. Early on I stopped asking questions because the responses always contradicted each other and seemed sensationalized, backfires from a family spin machine that over-compensated for the anger that everyone but me seemed to feel.
Plus, the custody mayhem appeared irrelevant. After the divorce, which finished in 1983, five years after it started, my mother floated out of the picture. My most important relationships -- those with my stepmother and my maternal grandparents -- blossomed outside the court's view.
Or so I thought until a few months ago. That's when my grandmother mentioned over dinner that she and my grandfather were among the first couples to gain grandparents' visitation rights. I initially figured she didn't know what she was talking about. She and my grandfather have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My Christmas and summer visits weren't mandated, I thought. They were simply the desired routine.
Then, upon hearing that the Supreme Court would soon hear a case similar to my own -- one that might lead to the end of the rights that I instinctually favored -- I asked my father to send me a copy of the divorce papers. I'd never looked at them before, but in their yellowed pages I discovered that my grandmother was right. They received a few weeks per year with me, thus joining thousands of other grandparents who also won such rights during the '70s and '80s.
For my grandmother, legalized visits were a victory. When she spoke of them, pride enveloped her words. I tended to see their efforts as a positive as well, but then I began to wonder if it wasn't that simple.
Apparently several judges have done the same. All 50 states still have laws permitting grandparents to seek visitation rights, but lower courts in Washington (where the Supreme Court's case comes from) and other states have struck them down. Judges have argued that the laws interfere with parents' fundamental right to raise children of their own. Other critics, such as Joan Bohl, a family-law expert in Los Angeles, say the laws bog down the judicial process and embitter parties that already are at odds.
About half the country appears to have taken these arguments seriously, according to my own survey of major newspapers, editorials and letters to the editor. A poll by the Orlando Sentinel found 80 percent of the respondents in favor of grandparents' rights, "no matter what parents say," as one woman put it. (Perhaps a predictable outcome for grandparent-rich Florida). A similar call for readers' opinions in the Cleveland Plain Dealer gave critics of grandparents' rights a slight edge.
