I spent thirty-one years watching people destroy each other over property.
Not always expensive property. I presided over cases involving a fishing cabin worth forty thousand dollars that two brothers had not spoken about directly in eleven years, preferring to communicate their feelings through attorneys at three hundred dollars an hour. I heard testimony about a riding lawn mower that became the central object of a divorce proceeding so contentious that both parties spent more litigating it than the mower had cost new. I watched a woman cry for forty minutes about a dining room table her mother had refinished by hand, while her ex-husband sat across the aisle calculating whether he could sell it before the injunction was processed.
What I learned from thirty-one years on that bench was not that people are venal, though some of them are. It was that property becomes the language people use when they cannot say the thing they actually mean. The fishing cabin was not about fishing. The dining room table was not about the table. When people fight over objects, they are usually fighting about something that the object has come to represent, love given or withheld, labor recognized or dismissed, a version of themselves that someone else had the power to acknowledge or erase.
I understood this intellectually for three decades before I understood it personally.
My name is Wendy Finch. I retired from the family court bench at sixty-five, which I had planned to do since I was fifty, and I have not regretted it for a single day. I live outside Cedar Falls, Iowa, in a house that my husband Richard built with his own hands over three years in the late 1980s, on a piece of land we bought when we were still young enough to believe in the romantic version of difficult projects.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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