My mother’s divorce lawyer looked exactly like this hyperactive kid I knew from school.  He had the same helmet haircut and the same roundish cheeks.  Even his frown was identical.   On meeting him, these were my first thoughts.   

Dad’s attorney was spindly and red-headed with beady blue eyes and an ugly gold watch.  When I stuck out my hand to shake his, the ghost of a chuckle flickered across his face.   

I was there in the office ostensibly to answer questions related to my mother’s petition for sole custody and had every intention of being polite to ensure the preferred outcome.  But even then, at the age of 11, I told myself if I had to I could take them.   I didn’t need some fancy degree to tell me how to think. 

I followed the lawyers down the hall to a small room lined with built-in shelves of fat, color-coded reference books.  We sat there together in tall-backed leather chairs clustered at one end of a humongous oak table. 

The attorneys proceeded to wonder aloud whether I ‘understood’ things and ‘how I felt’ about them.  They nodded and said, ‘mm-hmm,’ a lot.  They scribbled on giant yellow notepads and whispered to each other, a de facto tag team of incompetent shrinks. 

I did my best to stay even tempered, to act cool and be respectful, but their questions were just so ridiculous.  And they asked so many.

Had my father ever abused me?

Was I sure?

Was I really, really sure?

Then why on earth would I choose not to see him?

Was there some other legitimate reason to reject a person’s company?

After what seemed like several hours of this, the red-headed one set his pen behind an ear, sifted through his notes on the tabletop and sighed.       

“Do you think you’d still feel this way if your mother were ‘the bad guy’?” he asked me.     

But I didn’t feel like answering.  

Behind the thick lenses in my rainbow-framed glasses, I leveled my eyes to his and held them there, completely unaware of how small I must have looked in their stuffy, self-important room. 

“I don’t see what relevance that has to this situation.”   I said. 

The attorneys exchanged a look of abject shock. 

“Oh-ho, well,” came the reply.  “Where did you go to law school?”