No Place Like Home

My godmother has Alzheimer's Disease. I believe friends help friends. I don't mean the easy stuff, I mean the stuff that takes a decision to go the extra mile. Let's face it, any bloke can do the easy stuff and go on their merry way.

What I do can be done anywhere I have wifi. My youngest child went off to university this year. So I'm not making much of a sacrifice moving to the mountains - no hero banners here.

I go back and forth between her mountain cabin and our city suburb house. The only real inconvenience is that I sometimes need something on my desktop computer at home. You don't need to send me lots of solutions to this, I've got it worked out now.

The point is this: As an adult it is a bit frustrating to reach for something that is at the other house. It made me think about the new vogue custody arrangements coming out of family court in divorce cases.

Everyone is patting themselves on their backs regarding the new The King Solomon Solution. The solution is that the kid/s will spend half a week at one parent's residents and the rest of the week at the other residence. They attend the same school all week, obviously. Oh how wonderful! Or maybe not. The parents are delighted because they get their half.

The words of Father Sigman keep coming to mind. His parents were two religions. Alternating weekends they attend each church. Father told me he wasn't both religions, he was neither. He was a kid then. Obviously at some point, he decided which religion he was to be for the rest of his life.

There is a judge I used to appear before who, in one case twenty years ago, had the parents rotate through the house every two weeks, the kids stayed put in their own rooms with their own stuff. I like her creativity. Perhaps a new Solomon Solution. So why hasn't that caught on? Because it was inconvenient for the adults.

Retrospective studies haven't been done on the impact of this 'ancient wisdom' on the kids. But I wonder if they feel they don't have two homes, they have none.