Reconcilable Differences

By MEGAN RUTHERFORD

There was a time when divorce was an ugly thing that created unremitting enmity between former spouses and severed ties between fathers and children. Times have changed. Now a spate of unusually cozy celebrity splits is drawing attention to a far different set of templates for divorce.

Five years after their marriage ended amid tabloid tales of toe sucking, Britain's Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, live with their daughters, now 12 and 11, in the same 20-room manor the Queen gave the couple as a wedding present. This winter the Yorks vacationed together in Switzerland. "The welfare and lives of the children are of paramount importance," explains David Pogson, a spokesman for the Duke of York. Two years after their marriage was annulled, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall are once again sharing meals--though not bedrooms--in Hall's home outside London. Jagger was a lousy husband, Hall says, but he remains a great father to their four children, ages 3 to 17. After singer Melissa Etheridge and filmmaker Julie Cypher separated last year, they bought back-to-back houses in Los Angeles. The children they co-parent, ages 4 and 2, move between homes every four days--and at any time in between. "They truck through the back fence. It's very fluid," says Cypher. "We don't want a child to have to get on an airplane to see the other parent."

It's not just celebrities and folks who live in mansions. Ordinary mortals too are finding novel ways to keep their families largely intact following separation or divorce. They're sharing homes, living next door to each other, vacationing together. But why on earth would ex-spouses want to remain in each other's lives in light of the troubles that estranged them? The answer is usually a combination of pressures: financial necessity, a tight real estate market, a child-care shortage and--pre-eminently--an increased awareness of children's need for both parents. As those pressures increase, some people who work with families of divorce say they are seeing a rise in the number of ex-spouses who share many aspects of married life.

Having practiced family law for 40 years, San Francisco attorney Lowell Sucherman had heard of "birdnesting," in which children continue to reside in the family home while their parents take turns moving in and out to care for them, and "doublenesting," in which ex-spouses live in separate areas of the family home. But he had never handled such a case until four years ago. Since then, he and his law partner have helped six couples set up such households. Says Sucherman: "I don't see an end here anytime soon. The more housing prices rise, the more this will happen."

It was family values, not property values, that motivated Rabbi Perry Netter and his wife Esther, a museum executive director, to begin birdnesting in 1997, when it became clear that their marriage had soured. Their three children, then ages 7 to 12, continued to live in the Netters' five-bedroom Los Angeles home. Perry and Esther rented an apartment around the corner and swapped residences every Monday. "Children need stability, and we were trying to provide that," says Perry. The arrangement cushioned the impact of the separation on the Netter children. Though only one parent lived with them at a time, "my life didn't change much," says their oldest child, Elisheva, now 15. "My parents were busy before. With birdnesting, it seemed like one was having more meetings than the other."

There were downsides, of course. Perry's and Esther's friends and colleagues had trouble finding them. Hauling a week's worth of clothes to and fro was a pain. And Esther began to long for more privacy. So when the couple decided to shift from separation to divorce after 19 months, Esther bought a condominium. She and Perry continue to share custody, but now the children must commute between her condo and their old home, where Perry is living until he can find a smaller place. Elisheva finds the constant shuttle a nuisance. "I have two boxes with CDs, books, makeup and clothes that I take back and forth," she complains. "I have five phone numbers--my line and a house line at each home, and a pager."

Even though birdnesting turned out to be temporary, Perry believes it eased the transition for everyone, including Esther and him. "It was more important to our self-image to feel good as parents than as partners," he says. "I'm very proud of the way we handled it."

Divorce experts see birdnesting and similar arrangements as well-meaning attempts to come to terms with America's divorce-prone culture. "Adults are searching for models that are acceptable, feel good and also recognize divorce," says Shirley Thomas, author of Parents Are Forever. "Too many lost their fathers when their parents divorced. They saw abandonment by fathers, or fathers cut off by angry mothers. The pendulum is swinging the other way now."

There is no large-scale research on the effects on children of such arrangements, because they remain a small-scale phenomenon. Many studies, though, find that children are more likely to thrive when they have access to both parents. And birdnesting is one--albeit extreme--means of maintaining access. But some experts see it as a short-term solution only, one that bristles with dangers in the long term. First there's the potential for friction. "People don't take the big step of divorce unless there's something terribly upsetting about the relationship, something that will re-emerge with any long-range continued contact," says New York City family lawyer Jeffrey Cohen. Then there's the privacy problem: "The parents don't have a real home, so it's hard to get on with their own lives as adults," says Constance Ahrons, author of The Good Divorce. Then there's the confusion factor. Says New York City divorce mediator June Jacobson: "Children harbor a fantasy that their parents will get back together. To the extent that children are encouraged to maintain this fantasy, it can do harm because it doesn't allow them to fully integrate the change in family structure."

For six years after therapist Tera Abelson and cameraman Mark Wotton separated in 1992, they worked out creative doublenesting arrangements to enable both to continue living with their children. First, Tera moved into a tent in the backyard of their Massachusetts home. Later, she moved inside, and Mark slept in an enclosed porch. In 1995, after relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, they were able to afford a large house in which they had bedrooms on separate floors. Initially, the children--Zoe, then 3, and Noa, 4--were oblivious to the separation. "The fact that Mark and I were parenting partners hadn't changed," says Tera. Concurs Mark: "They only knew that they were loved and respected." Eventually, about the time Tera and Mark began dating other people, they explained to the children that they were no longer a couple. Were the kids wistful for their parents to reunite? Not at all. They liked their parents' new partners.

Two and a half years ago, Tera moved in with her boyfriend David to make room in the house for Mark's new wife Erin and her son from an earlier marriage, Tyler. Now Noa and Zoe must commute between homes once a week. But the entire family--including the newest members--continues to get together for holidays and occasional meals. "The conventional view is that divorce is the disintegration of family," says Mark. "For us, it was an expansion of family, an opportunity to renew and change." The kids, who thrived in one house, seem equally happy in two. Do they fantasize that their parents will reunite? Both children are puzzled by the notion. Says Noa: "If my parents got back together, where would Tyler, Erin and David go?"

Though some couples share housing as a transition to divorce, others come to it later, after some of the inevitable ill feeling has dissipated. Relations between Mary Kaye and Pat Perotti were frosty when they divorced in 1992. The three kids, then ages 8 through 15, lived with their mother in Marietta, Ga., during the week. Their dad would pick them up Friday night, drive them to his home 175 miles away in Greenville, S.C., then return them to their mother Sunday night. The two round trips, 700 miles a weekend, were exhausting--and wore out four cars in seven years. Then Mary Kaye offered to let Pat stay in her home when he wanted to see the children. Now when Pat comes, one of the two daughters sleeps with Mary Kaye, and he sleeps in the daughter's vacated room. Outsiders find the arrangement odd--"Everyone thinks there's some kind of hanky-panky; there isn't," says Pat. But the Perottis are comfortable with it.

Some unconventional arrangements initiated to benefit the kids continue because they suit the adults. When San Francisco Chronicle columnist Adair Lara separated from her husband, publisher Jim Heig, in 1985, she moved into a succession of nearby rentals. Though she always managed to find a place within a couple miles of Jim's house, that distance seemed to grow longer and more inconvenient as they chauffeured the kids--Morgan, then 6, and Patrick, 5--to and fro every 3 1/2 days. When Adair got married six years later, to cookbook editor Bill LeBlond, the newlyweds began looking for a home to buy but found nothing they could afford in the city. Morgan was showing signs of what was to become a turbulent adolescence (documented in Adair's book Hold Me Close, Let Me Go), and the adults felt they needed to be nearer rather than farther apart. So Bill and Adair had little trouble persuading Jim to sell them the downstairs apartment he had previously rented out. "It immediately made things better for the kids," says Adair. She and Jim were able to coordinate strategies for dealing with Morgan and relieve each other when the strain grew excessive. "I would just say, 'I can't handle this. You have to go to your dad's.' So there was an immediate safe place for her to go. Jim and I were very supportive of each other."

Patrick is in college at UCLA, and Morgan has graduated and moved away, but the feeling of family among the three adults grows ever stronger. They borrow one another's cars. Jim comes downstairs to use Adair's copier. Adair runs upstairs to borrow tomatoes from what she calls "the Jimstore." Bill or Jim often cooks dinner for the other two. Indeed, a colleague once quipped that Adair's divorce was better than most people's marriages.

Not all divorced couples can or want to share a home. More attainable--and for many, more desirable--may be a relationship like the one Long Island landscape designer Jane Lappin has with her ex-husband, carpenter David Robertson. The couple was fighting viciously by the end of their four-year marriage. The divorce proceedings only exacerbated their mutual hostility. "I would rather go back for another year of combat in Vietnam than go through another divorce," says David. "It was just horrible." Both were concerned about the effect their animosity might have on John, 3 at the time of their divorce.

Over the next two years they slowly rebuilt a relationship, this one based not on the attractions that originally brought them together but on restraint, careful civility and their love for their son. Jane has primary custody but lives just a mile from David, and John, now 14, visits his father whenever he wants. Every Sunday both parents sit down with John for a big home-cooked meal at Jane's house, and the three often dine together at a restaurant during the week. The focus of conversation: John. "We discuss the problems, mostly about attitude and ability in school, typical teenage stuff," says David. Sometimes the three vacation together; they book one room for John and his father, another for Jane. The parents get along so well now that strangers assume they're married. But John fosters no illusions. "Sometimes it feels like they're still together," he acknowledges, "but it's better because there's no fighting."

Not every divorced couple who aspires to hold on to the good parts of family life succeeds. One woman, who insisted on anonymity, said of her attempt to birdnest: "It was the worst year of my life." And some couples--particularly those whose marriages were abusive--should never consider any arrangement in which marital miseries could recur. But for others, creative thinking can lead to unusually satisfying situations. New York City mediator Ann Frisch says she's seeing a proliferation of novel arrangements in her practice. "We try to brainstorm with parents so they can come up with their own unique solutions, and it's astonishing how many solutions there are to the problem of how to deal with children so they don't suffer from divorce," says Frisch. Among her divorced clients are ex-spouses who birdnest, a father who relocated to another state to maintain contact with his kids and accommodate his ex-wife's new job assignment, a mother who helps out at her ex-husband's business.

Even the most custom-crafted arrangements don't last forever. Parents remarry. New spouses bring in stepchildren. Kids grow up and move away. But by the time change is necessary, families accustomed to thinking imaginatively are often able to create a new design for living that suits their new family situation.

--With reporting by Matt Baron/Chicago, Anthee Carassava/London, Anne Moffett/Washington, Adrianne Navon/New York and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles

With reporting by Matt Baron/Chicago, Anthee Carassava/ London, Anne Moffett/Washington, Adrianne Navon/New York and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles