“Lobster” Sauce & No Fault Divorce

One of my sisters and I were visiting my mom in Florida this summer and went to her favorite local Chinese restaurant for dinner a few times. I love this place. It reminds me of the old Cantonese Chinese restaurants I knew when I was a kid: softly lit room, scenic murals on the walls, white table cloths and napkins, booths covered in green leather, and immediately put on the table when you sit down, a pot of hot, steaming tea and a bowl of those crispy noodles we all love. With the proliferation of Szechuan and Hunan style Chinese food that entered the American palate in the early 1980s, this place is a blast from the past indeed.

As we perused our menus, I noticed this listing: Shrimp in “Lobster” sauce. When our waitress came to take our orders, I queried what the quotes in “lobster” sauce meant, crooking my index and third fingers to indicate the quotation marks. She told us that the health department insisted that if the sauce didn’t have actual lobster in it, they could not call it a lobster sauce and thus, the quotation marks were to really indicate “other.”

This became the family joke throughout our visit. Whenever we were distinguishing something, we would stop, crook our two fingers, say, “lobster” sauce and crack up.

But think about it:

• “Gourmet” Deli
• “Custom” Homes
• “No Fault” Divorce

Oxymorons ALL. And yet we hear these words of hyperbole so often that it doesn’t even phase us. Really, when was the last time you ate in a “gourmet” deli or had your home “custom” built? Probably never, right? “No fault” divorce? I don’t think so either.

I am certainly not advocating for blame here. It was about time that New York State joined the rest of the union in 2010 to become a No Fault divorce state. It certainly makes things much, much easier for people to file uncontested divorces without shame and blame, AND without the state imposing individuals postpone their divorces for a year in order to have a “cooling” off period before they file.

However, I think it’s disingenuous to ignore the fact that there may be plenty of fault to go around when it comes to ending a marriage. We mediators deal with the emotional fall out of this often. When our clients walk in the door, we rarely know exactly what brought them to our office to begin with. But as the mediation progresses and the give and take, back and forth gets hot, you can be sure that there is some underlying feeling of fault somewhere that, left unaddressed, may derail the mediation.

Although our focus in mediation is in the “here” and “now” with an eye on the “future,” dealing with the “lobster” sauce of issues is the menu from which we must read and help our couples make their decisions.