Halle Berry wants to try co-parenting therapy. I did it

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.
Crossword
Polygon
Sudoku
Old celebrity flames often resurface in the press. Usually it is with a subtext of romantic gossip. Could Brad and Jen get back together? (Still no.) I’d all but forgotten that the Hollywood actress and Bond girl Halle Berry once used to be married to the smouldering French star Olivier Martinez.
They’re back in the headlines this week over Berry’s attempt to drag Martinez along to co-parenting therapy — sessions to iron out the childcare kinks in the post-divorce storm (their two-year marriage ended nine years ago but they only divorced last year). In Berry’s case the therapy centred on her and Martinez’s ten-year-old son, Maceo.
It was meant to happen by Zoom, only Martinez didn’t pitch up on the calls, which led to Berry’s emergency court application. That was denied this week because of a “lack of exigent circumstance”.
Now, some may think Berry is off her maternal rocker in the first place trying to enforce a concept as new age as co-parenting therapy. But trust me, I’ve done it. It’s a good thing.
Kids don’t miss a beat. When my ex and I divorced last year my youngest, relieved, said, “Ah, so does this mean Papa and you won’t be arguing any more?” All our fights had been late at night and behind closed doors, but they are sponges, absorbing energy as well as words quietly muttered through clenched teeth. That’s where the trauma lies. Kids can handle conflict better if there’s clarity. The danger, in my experience, is when they are left filling in the blanks of an acrimonious exchange.
In the aftermath of my divorce I made a pact with my ex that we would put the kids first at every turn. However stormy things were for us adults, we would use everything in our arsenal to calm the swell for them. If we needed to vent to a new partner or family member, it would be away from the kids — or frantically on WhatsApp so no tiny ears could hear.
And good God it wasn’t easy, of course it wasn’t. Divorce is traumatic, however amicable. It is the brutal division of bricks, mortar, memories and, of course, people. It is the severance of friends, family and children who did not choose to have their lives upended. It is finding a little sock in your laundry basket and uncontrollably sobbing on the landing, mourning the days and weeks now missed with them. It is traumatic.
• ‘I want a divorce, he doesn’t. Can a last-ditch holiday fix us?’
Perhaps what helped the most was that a couple of our pre-divorce therapy sessions transferred to post-divorce parental planning — aka co-parenting therapy, if you will. Like any huge project, especially one with an ex, there needs to be a neutral space to talk through the nuts and bolts of taking on Mother Nature’s biggest task: parenting. It is unhelpful to swipe co-parenting therapy off the table as psych babble because in its simplest form it is just communication. And every parent needs that, whether in the throes of a newborn haze or in the embers of divorce.
These days there is relationship counselling, there are divorce therapists and most of my friends book in for CBT sessions or some other marital healing work. When it comes to co-parenting therapy, it isn’t about mum and dad, it is about the kids.
So I have little sympathy for Martinez. He barely had to lift a finger to log on for his son. (Although perhaps an immediate court order from Berry wasn’t the best response to his lacklustre investment in the process.)
Personally we threw the kitchen sink at trying to make our kids feel anchored during our split. Now I’m in a new relationship, engaged, pregnant and I’m even having pre-emptive conversations with my partner, Olly, ahead of the impending arrival of our baby. Neutral discussions about roles and expectations before we hit a world of eye twitches and relentless white noise. Because unlike those who mumble, “It was your choice to have a kid”, as if it is some recreational side hustle, I know that raising the next generation takes guts with very little glory. It’s a superhuman task and one that, regardless of acrimony, requires both parents to be, well, grown-ups.