As a seasoned divorce lawyer, I should have seen my own divorce coming, yet I was completely blindsided.
It was an ordinary Thursday morning in 2003. I’d been busy getting our daughters, then aged four and eight, ready for school and I popped my head round my ex-husband’s study door to ask what he’d like for supper later. Instead of the reply I was expecting, he said: ‘This isn’t working.’
In an instant, his totally unexpected and devastating words changed the lives of me and my children.
After 13 years of marriage, despite all the usual struggles of balancing work, family and life, I had thought we were doing fine.
My initial reaction was utter disbelief and I asked: ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ But I’d seen that steely, hardened look on client’s faces and I knew — with horror and deep sorrow — that he had already mentally checked out of our relationship.
Divorce lawyer Sheela Mackintosh-Stewart has decades of experience immersed in the turmoil of unhappy and warring…