Oxford house prices were quoted in the Oxford Times recently as the highest in the UK apart from London. This places extra stress on separating couples who now need two places to live instead of one, but it doesn’t look affordable
January and February are tough months for everybody. They’re especially tough if you have just worked through a strained Christmas and decided that you can’t hold your marriage together any longer: you’ve decided to separate. The year ahead looks impossible. Were will you each live? How will you share the children? Talking has become dangerous. Rows erupt, important issues are no-go areas, communication is at an all-time low, along with your spirits.
Mediation with Focus Mediation in Oxford is designed to cope with all this stress. It is run by Caroline Friend, who lives near Oxford, she understands Oxford problems and has helped many local people with all the same issues you are now facing. You might do well to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone this way before you.
You start by coming to a MIAM: a Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting. This is time spent alone with your Focus mediator, who will listen to your story and then explain the process of divorce and of how mediation works in detail. Then the joint sessions start, spaced to suit you, your timetables and your budgets. Mediation gives you a safe, neutral environment in which you can tackle your impossible problems.
Sally thought she and Jo were putting their marriage back on track, and was deeply shocked when Jo chose the week before Christmas to announce he was filing for divorce. The next two weeks were grim: you could cut the atmosphere at home with a knife. However, once the mediator had seen them both, they could get a handle on what they needed to do: a session looking at their income and outgoings, so as to work out what rent Jo could afford, and time spent working out a child-care pattern that both parents felt comfortable with: it wasn’t ideal – not seeing your children every day will never be that – but it respected the children’s needs and gave both parents plenty of time with them. All that was completed in two weeks and reduced the stress considerably.
A couple more sessions dealt with the bigger picture of the house and how to share the equity in it. The mediator encouraged both parents to put the children’s stability first, and helped them take difficult decisions in the light of current court practice. She helped them identify any maintenance that would be appropriate, and dealt with any disparity in their pensions. Even more importantly, they established ways of communicating with each other to make arrangements for the children without quarrelling.
Focus Mediation is there to help. It might make all the difference to your new year.
