First person: My two husbands are great friends - welcome to the 'good divorce'
The milkman thinks I'm having an affair with my husband. My second husband, that is. My first husband, Tim, and I have what my parents would call a very modern divorce. We dispensed with bitterness and fighting over money (none to fight over, anyway). Instead, we focused our energies on our new lives and surviving financially in an area where it's hard enough to afford one house, let alone two.
Actually, I think my mother missed the bitterness and fighting to start with. She was expecting me to cry on her shoulder while I excised Tim from as much of my life as possible. Instead, Tim and I stayed friends. I stayed in our family home (Tim's idea) and Tim moved nearby. He continues to see our eight-year-old son for most breakfasts and bathtimes and is invited for Sunday lunch. He came to my second wedding.
My mother struggled to watch me dance with Tim that day while my new husband, Alex, played guitar in the family band, but she coped. And she's glad she did, because the ensuing good relationship means flexible babysitting, minimal legal fees, relaxed children and a host of other benefits - including lots of grandparental access to the growing brood. She and my father are big advocates of the set-up at dinner parties now.
With celebrity divorces in the headlines, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that many couples are getting better at splitting up. In a survey conducted by Constance Ahrons, author of books such as We're Still Family and The Good Divorce, half of the couples she sampled were collaborating on a good outcome for everyone, instead of arguing over the furniture. This can in turn cause other problems. If you make divorce too easy, does that mean people will consider it the soft option and do it more? And in some quarters, there's no such thing as a "good divorce" - any divorce is bad, and, in particular, bad for the children.
I'm not going to claim it's good for them. Or that, even though all our children adore us all, they wouldn't rather have their parents back in original working order. My own experience of the lead-up to separation was like bereavement, or losing a limb. With it went 14 years of shared memories, my self-image as a good Catholic girl and my ability to imagine the future. If friends are thinking about it, I beg them to do everything in their power to avoid it. But if they can't, I recommend our approach.
The good divorce idea was originally suggested to us by our second counsellor (we really worked at splitting up). I thought counsellors were there to stick you back together, but not necessarily. There's a scene in What Just Happened, where Robert De Niro's therapist congratulates him and his ex on successfully separating beyond hope of reconciliation. It's supposed to be biting satire, but for me it had a disconcerting ring of familiarity about it: the sessions in which we focused on what had gone wrong were agonising; the one where we thought about what to do next was liberating.
I remember it vividly. Tim and I were still struggling with the idea that it wasn't going to work out. We had reached an impasse. Tim came from a big family and wanted a small one; I came from a small family and wanted a big one. We thought we could meet somewhere in the middle. After years of trying, we couldn't.
So there we were in our counsellor's sitting room. I can still picture the box of tissues by my elbow, her self-satisfied family photographs all around us. Suddenly, she told us about friends of hers who got divorced but still go on holidays together. A light came on. This was something we could do, perhaps even be quite good at.
There were few role models at the time, though Terence Conran and his wives seemed to be able to talk to each other, at least. But now I read about more and more families who are making it work. Chris Evans and Billie Piper are the models of a good divorce. Even Sadie Frost and Jude Law are said to be planning a Christmas holiday together.
I was also helped by our friends. None of them took sides. The only person who told me to change the locks was a relative of Tim's. She meant well. I ignored her.
We planned to separate, not divorce, but a few weeks later I had my first date with a new man. I thought I might as well try to remind myself how to do it. A couple of months on, I was sure I wanted to get married again to this man who had two daughters. It was very quick and very risky. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Luckily, time proved us right. Which meant making things with Tim official.
Professionals within the legal system were helpful and pragmatic. All those I spoke to strongly recommended a conciliatory approach when it came to divorce. Perhaps I just couldn't afford the more adversarial types. But despite the fact that Tim and I quickly agreed on money and childcare arrangements, it was impossible to find a single lawyer to represent us jointly. The system in this country is still adversarial, even if couples aren't. So we had to pay two separate lawyers to check the paperwork and agree that we had agreed.
Of course, it takes two to make a good divorce. I still hear stories from friends of friends where one partner is being blatantly unreasonable. In those cases, I believe the state should step in and set them straight. In this newspaper, Yvonne Roberts recently described an early interventions project to ensure fair childcare arrangements in this country. What a shame it wasn't adopted.
However, in today's "binuclear families" (I'm sorry, but that phrase is never going to catch on) there is more to it than allowing reasonable access. Children need permission to love all the people in their lives, new and old. My stepdaughters' mother has pictures I've taken of the girls on the mantelpiece at her home. I'm grateful for that subtle act of big-heartedness, and others like it. She, too, is a good divorcee.
Proximity helps too. We've agreed that while our son is growing up, Tim and I will always live a few streets from each other. Fabulous job offers in New York? Rejected. Perfect family houses in Hampshire? Ignored. We had to make compromises for the sake of our son's stability while we were married - why not now? If he leaves a crucial book at the wrong house, no problem. One of us can retrieve it in five minutes.
Golly, it's complicated, though, playing happy families. Apart from the milkman and my confused, but ultimately grateful, mother, there are my son's friends' parents at school. They see me arriving at some events with Tim and others with Alex. They usually see Alex picking up my son from school with our toddler, but it's Tim's name on the class lists.
Five minutes ago, while I was writing this in a cafe, one of the mummies asked me which surname I use. Babysitters, who see Tim putting our son to bed and then Alex coming downstairs in his gladrags with me, have given up trying to work it all out. Even I have to think twice about who should be at which birthday party.
Then there is the question of how many children I have. I'm not sure what the right answer is. I think of myself as the lucky mother of four. There are my two teenage stepdaughters, my eight-year-old son with Tim and now my two-year-old son with Alex. My elder stepdaughter is a fabulous second mother to the baby, and life is much easier when she and her sister are around. But the girls have their own loving mother, so I feel a twinge of guilt if I appropriate them as my own, and an equal twinge if I don't.
And what about the relationships between all of us? We're a smorgasbord of parents, step-parents, siblings, step-siblings and half-siblings. And there isn't even a word for Tim's relationship to the baby, although they see each other daily.
Tim is one of the few people I trust to bath the baby and put him to bed - very useful if Alex and I have an early evening appointment. Last weekend, the eight-year-old went to play at Tim's house and at his request, the baby went too. Yes, it's weird and yes, Alex has to take the occasional deep breath, but then Tim often arrives to find Alex playing a fabulous game of spies or Lego with his son (Tim's son, Alex's stepson - I said this was complicated), so it works both ways. We just do a lot of deep breathing and get on with it.
Then there's the milkman.
Early one morning, three years ago, I was walking to the station with Alex. We passed Grant the Milk and exchanged smiles. "Off somewhere nice?" he wondered.
"To Paris. On my honeymoon!" I said gleefully (and truthfully).
From the startled, conspiratorial look he gave me, I could tell that he thought he had just caught me on a dirty weekend with my lover. After all, he still regularly saw Tim leaving the house at breakfast to go to work on his motorbike. So there was no reason for Grant to suspect that anything had changed, except the state of my morals.
Three years on, the situation continues. I would explain it to him, but he is too polite to ask and 8.30am is not the time to start explaining, uninvited, the benefits of a good divorce.
Grant, if you're reading this, it's OK: I married him. Honestly.