THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603130047
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 135 lines
Flintstone jelly glasses, rock collections. The items needn't be expensive. When the relationship ends, couples are fighting over the silliest things.
IT'S OVER.
He grabs his stuff. She takes hers. They split.
Not quite. Faster than you can say, ``See you in court,'' love can turn to war.
When the stuff of dreams turns into nightmares, vengeful former lovers get into knock-down, drag-out fights over stuff like a set of glasses. Not crystal. Not expensive. Just jelly jars. The kind with cartoons of Fred and Wilma on the side.
It's happened.
``My client wanted the Flintstone jelly glasses and she didn't want to give 'em to him,'' said Sonny E. Stallings Jr., one of many local attorneys who's seen divorce negotiations screech to a halt over the darned-est things.
Before they go their separate ways, couples fight over possession of birds, Oriental rugs dotted with holes, even sleeping bags.
``That was one of the weirdest ones,'' Stallings said. ``I mean I'm talking about a $20 Kmart sleeping bag. You can take a 30-year marriage, agree on the kids, stock, bank accounts and then you can get hung up on a five-dollar item. And it's not really the item, it's, well, I got that. You may have gotten half my retirement but I've got my favorite carving knife.''
It's expensive to bicker over bric-a-brac, attorneys warn their clients. But it's not just who gets what, say therapists. It's about love lost, trust broken and a desire for power.
``Really the items aren't the issue,'' said Fredrick H. Hodges, a pastoral family therapist with The Virginia Beach Group, providers of mental health services. ``It's power and control and fighting for who's right and who's wrong and fighting to win so somebody else loses.''
Or as one Virginia Beach divorcee said, ``It's about control. It's: I control this, so I control you because you want this.''
No need to tell that to Bryant Teetor. Since his divorce from his wife last November he's had one bit of unfinished business nagging at his mind.
``There's something she still has that come hell or high water I'm going to get it some day and that's the baby blanket that my greatgrandmother crocheted that I came home from the hospital in and my son came home in, too,'' said the Navy aircraft engine specialist. It's important to him, he says, because he wants to be the one to pass the blanket on to his 4-year-old son when the child grows up and has his first baby.
Claiming something someone else wants can fill a need and be, temporarily anyway, immensely satisfying.
``I guess you feel at the end that you put so much into the marriage and now all that's left is the stuff and whoever gets the stuff wins,'' said Cindy Horstman. The secretary's 11-year marriage ended 18 months ago but not until after a tussle over his grandmother's set of dishes and a wall unit.
``He seemed to really want the wall unit, which seemed to make me want it that much more. I don't know,'' she said, pausing, ``but I got it.''
Two can play at this game.
``I think he took great delight in keeping the queen-sized bed,'' mused Horstman.
Dishes, beds, it makes some psychologists wonder if it's time for the couch.
``People communicate on two different levels,'' said Frank A. Mullins, a psychologist with Ghent Psychological Practices. ``There's the obvious level - bank accounts, houses, then the unconscious level - spoons, dishes. Something related to food is a very primitive thing that relates back to the security of a child. A lot of people don't go along with that these days because it's Freudian and all that, but the unconscious does live. If it were genuinely insignificant they wouldn't fight about it.''
But it could be very simple. Said Mullins, ``It feels good sometimes to hurt the person that hurt you.''
Like the angry live-in lover who refused to give up a pastel couch and love seat to his girlfriend when their affair hit Splitsville six years ago.
``He just wouldn't give them back. I don't even think he liked them. I think he was just trying to get even,'' said the 30-year-old Virginia Beach hairdresser.
Or stay involved.
``It keeps them fighting and keeps them emotionally close and they feel they still have some control over what the other person is doing,'' said Ronna Adler, a licensed clinical social worker with Thrasher Associates in Ghent.
``I had one case that went on and on. They had been messing with the attorney for a year and a half and the thing they couldn't decide on was who gets the stainless steel and the pots and pans. It was dime-store stuff.''
Monetary value has nothing to do with it.
And most of the time, it's little stuff, like the man who swore he needed his cereal bowl because it was the only one he could eat from. But in another divorce case from some years back, the stakes were bigger, much bigger.
``It hung up on a rock collection,'' recalled Buster O'Brien, a Virginia Beach lawyer with Brydges, Mahan and O'Brien. ``I thought it was these little plastic boxes full of rock samples or something. But it was boulders. They weighed several hundred pounds a piece. He had them and wouldn't give them back to her and she had to have those rocks. We got 'em back but we had to get a frontloader and a dump truck to get the stuff moved.''
Sometimes mediation helps. But no amount of reason helped a couple with a cockatiel.
``Both wanted custody,'' recalled Carl W. Isbrandtsen, a Virginia Beach lawyer. ``I didn't get into it but I tried to explain to them, `Hey, it's a bird.'''
Isbrandtsen said most lawyers spend some time explaining to clients how much money fighting over property will cost them. Usually folks start giving a little after they rack up their second set of fees. ``That's when people become reasonable and when they realize certain things aren't worth worrying about.''
That was not the case when a client instructed Norfolk attorney Besianne Tavss Shilling to get his washer and dryer away from his wife. Money was no object.
``He paid me like five times the worth of the washer and dryer,'' she recalled. ``He said, `I'd rather pay you than give them to her.' ''
And if Shilling gets another case involving porcelain figurines, she's going to throw away her briefcase.
``Lladros!'' she said, ``Everybody fights over those darn things. I had one divorce that almost fell through because of them. They had, like, five or six pieces and he wanted all of them and so did she. In another case, each agreed to take half but when my guy went to pick halves, they couldn't agree.
``Some people seem to think, `If I agree to this one last thing then it's really over,' and they don't want it to be.''
If people could cooperate, said Adler, the social worker, ``they could divide this stuff up nicely.''
Take Michael Rizzo's case.
His mistake was hanging his girlfriend's painting in his new, gray-and-peach hair salon.
``She said, `I have this painting, it'll look perfect.' It was like a big curl of hair,'' said Rizzo, recalling his live-in lover's help last year when he opened M.A.R.S., his Hilltop West studio.
As they hung the large three-by-five-foot painting on the wall, ``She said, Now if we ever break up, this goes with me.''
Months later, they called it off. He brought her the painting.
Then wondered what to hang on the nail. ILLUSTRATION: Color drawings by JANET SHAUGHNESSY, The Virginian-Pilot
KEYWORDS: DIVORCE PROPERTY SETTLEMENT by CNB