POP QUIZ 7
A lady marries a man from a very wealthy family and they have a baby together and they both love the baby a lot, although as time goes by they become less and less keen on each other, until eventually the lady files divorce papers on the man. The lady and the man both want primary custody of the baby, but the lady assumes she’ll ultimately be the one to get primary custody because that’s how things usually shake out in divorce law. But the man really wants primary custody a lot. Whether this is because he has a strong paternal urge and really wants to raise the baby or whether he just feels vindictive about getting served with divorce papers and wants to stick it to the lady by denying her primary custody is unclear. But that’s not important, because what is clear is that the man’s whole wealthy and powerful family all line up behind the man w/r/t this issue and think he should get primary custody (probably because they believe that since he’s a scion of their family the man should get whatever he wants — it’s that kind of family). But so the man’s family comes around and tells the lady that if she fights their scion for primary custody of the baby they’ll retaliate by taking away the lavish Trust Fund they’d established for the baby at birth, a Trust Fund sufficient to render the baby financially secure for life. No Primary Custody, No Trust Fund they say. So the lady (who’d signed a pre-nup, by the way, and has absolutely nothing in the way of remuneration or spousal support coming from the divorce settlement regardless of how the custody issue is resolved) walks away from the custody fight and lets the man and his hideous family have custody of the baby so that the baby will still have the Trust Fund.
Q: (A) Is she a good mother. 1
POP QUIZ 6(A)
Try it again. Same guy X as in PQ6. X’s wife’s elderly father is diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. X’s wife’s whole huge family is really close and intermeshed, and they all live right there in the same town as X and his wife and the father-in-law and his own wife, and since the diagnosis came down there’s been a veritable Wagner opera of alarm and distress and grief going on in the family; and, closer to home as it were, X’s wife and children are also terrifically distraught over the old man’s inoperable brain cancer because X’s wife has always been so close to her father and X’s children love their Grampappy to distraction and are shamelessly spoiled and their affection purchased by him in return; and now X’s wife’s father is progressively enfeebled and suffering and dying of brain cancer, and X’s whole family and family-in-law seem like they’re getting a head start on grieving the old man’s actual death and are all incredibly shattered and hysterical and sad all the time.
X himself is in a ticklish position w/r/t the whole father-in-law-withinoperable-brain-cancer situation. He and his wife’s father have never had a very close or friendly relationship, and in fact the old man had once actually urged X’s wife to divorce X during a rocky period some years prior when things in the marriage were rocky and X had made some regrettable errors in judgment and had committed some indiscretions which one of X’s wife’s pathologically nosy and garrulous sisters had told the father about and which the old man had been typically judgmental and holier-than-thou about and had loudly communicated to just about everyone in the family that he considered X’s behavior disgusting and wholly infra-dignitater and had urged X’s wife to leave him (i.e., X) over, none of which X has forgotten over the years, not by a long shot, because ever since that rocky period and the old man’s h/t/t condemnations X has felt somehow provisional and tangential and non-grata with respect to his wife’s whole teeming intermeshed close-knit family, which family by this time includes his wife’s six siblings’ own spouses and kids and various soricine great-aunts and — uncles and ordinally disparate cousins, such that a local Conference Center has to be rented every summer for his inlaws’ family’s traditional Family Get-Together (caps theirs), at which annual events X is always somehow made to feel provisional and under continuing suspicion and judgment and pretty much like your classic outsider looking in.