Kramer vs Kramer

I'm taking a film class, and yesterday we watched a movie called Kramer vs Kramer. The movie is about a couple who have been married for 8 years, and have a 6 year old son together. One day the mother decides that she's not good enough and walks out. 18 months later, after the father and son have adjusted to living life without the mother, she comes back and says she wants her son back, and sues for custody. She ends up winning custody but at the end of the story she doesn't take the son, because she doesn't want to turn his world upside down again. Watching this movie brought me back to my own childhood, when my parents were locked in a brutal custody battle for my brothers and I. In my case, we had to meet with a guardian atlightem every week or so, to determine which parent we wanted to live with. I consistently wanted to be with my Daddy, but my brothers wanted to be with our Mom. My older brother, who is not my father's son, but the product of my mother's previous marriage, wanted to live with our Mom because he was abused by my father, as a result of his alcoholism, from which he is now recovering, and my twin brother wanted to live with our Mom because he is a Mamma's boy, and had never gone a night away from her. I was very much a Daddy's girl and wanted to spend the rest of my days with him, watching baseball and eating cheeseburgers. 

Since we were all so young (My twin and I were 6, our brother 10), and since the court favors mothers, and keeps children, especially twins, together (among other reasons that I was not privy to at the time), we were assigned to our mother's house, in Florida, with her new husband and a stepsister we had never met. 

The one theme from Kramer vs Kramer that really resonated with me, was that the little boy's world would be flipped around, again, just as it had 18 months before, and just as it had in mine, and so many other children's cases. I hope that when I one day have children and/or get married, I will remember what I went through, and hopefully come to a peaceful agreement, without hurting the children too much.