NOW at last we know the precise mathematical point between a rock and a hard place. It’s Marcia Clark’s life.She’s the prosecutor in the OJ Simpson trial, a case so high-pressure and so celebrated that it’s headline news if she drops a verb.
She’s a single mother competing with the big boys. When she tried to get home on time one night, defence attorney Johnnie Cochran called her child care worries a strategic ploy.
And she’s an ex-wife whose ex-husband is sueing for custody of their two boys on the grounds that he can be home at 6:15. This is what he tells the world: “I have personal knowledge that on most nights she does not arrive home until 10 pm.”
You want a single mother’s nightmare? You want a professional mother’s post-modern bind? I give you Marcia Clark.
These days half of the custody disputes in the United States are won by fathers. Fathers who are sued for money often sue for the kids in a mutually assured destruction tactic. These days it seems that many judges have a new double measuring stick. Mothers less caring than the judge’s mother was are seen as neglectful. Fathers who do more than his father did are seen as heroic.
The message is: watch out. Time may be the only standard on which you’re judged as a parent.
Well, one of the great modern myths is quality time. Kids need quantity as well. Every parent makes choices, but the work world doesn’t make these choices easy. In the Simpson case, there is no flexitime, no job- sharing, no part-time.
Nevertheless, time is not the only measure of a parent’s love, or a child’s best interest.
Believe it or not, the OJ Simpson case will not go on forever. It just seems that way. It’s wrong to decide something as permanent as a child’s lifelong custody on something as temporary as a trial.
In any work life there will be a time when one parent’s job is too demanding, when she is sick, or he has to travel. If every change in one parent’s work schedule risks a change in custody, divorcing couples will be in court longer than Judge Ito.
Clark is at the top of her form. And still stuck. Between work and family, a rock and a hard place.