This is a commercial litigation, mediation, arbitration and negotiation blog.  My dad ~ proud graduate of the San Fernando Valley College of Law at age 42 ~ was a Beverly Hills family law attorney before he became a Superior Court Referee and then Commissioner in the Juvenile (Referee), family law, writs and receivers, law and motion and trial setting departments (Commissioner).  I avoided family law like the plague.  

Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much emotion.

It remains disappointing to me when I get this question from 90% of the strangers I meet when I tell them I'm a lawyer ~>"oh, a family law attorney?"

Now that I've written a book about the emotional lives of disputants (A is for Asshole, the Grownups' ABCs of Conflict Resolution) it's finally time for me to embrace rather than to reject the assumption that I, a woman attorney, have, after all, a fair number of womanly concerns.*

My book is selling in those sectors in response to which I have raised crossed fingers in the universal sign of demon eradication most of my legal and ADR career ~ employment, family law and education (as a child raised in the 50's, the only reason I was ever meant to proceed to college was to become a teacher so I'd have "something to fall back on" in case my husband died).

And yet I have a sad though all too common story to tell. My parents divorced when I was nine.  My father high-tailed it out of town early one morning, packing his Samsonite and leaving without saying goodbye or telling anyone where he was going.

Child days, weeks and years pass far more slowly than adult ones do.  If this were a 1940's movie, I'd show calendar pages being ripped off a pad over a backdrop of changing seasons and passing years.  I have no way to calculate how much time actually passed before I once again saw dad's battered brown VW chug up 71st Street in our neat subdivision slung long and low against the row of eucalyptus trees that populated our otherwise barren neighborhood on the outskirts of San Diego.

My parents communicated rarely and never by phone.  Letters were dispatched once or twice a year, after which my mother packed bags for my sister and me and put us on the train from San Diego to Los Angeles where we spent two weeks each summer.  Occasionally, Dad would make a rare San Diego appearance (the town made him too sad to bear) for a half day of Christmas or ten minute Thanksgiving visit, sitting in his car in front of our house, my sister stiff and unyielding, myself filled with the desperate longing I would not feel again until I began dating in my teens.

All of which (finally!) brings us to "Our Family Wizard," a suite of services available to sundered families that, had it existed in the mid-1960's, likely would have altered the quality of my childhood and, inevitably, the somewhat excruciating difficulties of my early adulthood.

Even though this is a "commercial" blog, every corporation, every small business, every LLC, every partnership and every sole proprietorship, is run by people with families.  In the absence of a family capable of meeting its obligations to raise its children in an atmosphere of unconditional loving, American business suffers.  And this is no time, this time of commercial disruption and uncertainty, to be working at anything less than one hundred percent.  And no one, male or female, can work 100% if their days are dogged by the excruciating conflict of a fractured family living at cross-purposes.

So it is that I finally (geesh, that woman talks too much!) come to the point about "Our Family Wizard."

Here's the promise for the program (the 21st Century meets the challenges of the mid-20th century when kids could still say their parents were the first on the block to get divorced).

Finally, parenting tools to deal with the issues that arise in divorced and co-parenting families:

• Coordinate shared custody and joint custody parenting time schedules
• Make adjustments to the parenting time and custody schedules through documented trades
• Share kids activities and holidays
• Send secure messages without having to deal with spam.
• Keep a shared or private journal
• Track shared expenses
• Share family health records, immunization histories, school information, virtual document storage and much more 

Our website is the premiere shared parenting software committed to removing conflict and improving the lives of children.

Our site is so effective that judges in at least 35 states have ordered families to utilize the site in contested cases to reduce family conflict.

The OurFamilyWizard website has quickly become the leading way parents coordinate all of their vital information, divorced or not.  Much more than just a divorce software or a calendar for divorced parents, we provide life management tools.

Check it out!  And then get back to work!  There's a recession to beat and a grim political divide to bridge. Maybe, just maybe, if we learn to communicate effectively with our former spouses, we'll be in a position to require our government to communicate, problem solve, and advance the ball toward recovery.

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*/  I no more want to exclude men from the category of people who are concerned about their children and families than I wish to exclude women from the category of people who litigate, arbitrate, and mediate commercial disputes and negotiate business deals.  I'm really pinning my hopes on Gen-Y to finally and forever stop pinning "natural" preferences, interests, talents and concerns on people based on their gender.