Introduction: Ninety Days

Three things get decided in the first 90 days of a divorce, and almost none of them get decided in a courtroom.

The first is the pattern. Who do the kids wake up with on a Tuesday? Who takes them to school, who knows the dentist’s name, who’s at the soccer field? Courts, evaluators, and mediators all have a strong bias toward whatever is already working. The schedule that exists in month three has a way of becoming the schedule that exists in year three. You are building it right now, whether you mean to or not.

The second is the record. Every text you send, every post you make, every exchange you’re late for, every dollar you stop paying — all of it is being saved by someone, and some of it will be read aloud by a stranger in a suit. The record doesn’t care who started it. It cares what you did next.

The third is the story. Twenty years from now your kids will tell someone what this year was like. You don’t get to write that story. You do get to decide whether, in their version, Dad was still Dad.

There’s a fourth thing, and it’s the one nobody puts on the list: you. The men who come through my office in the first weeks of a divorce are not sleeping, are drinking more than they say, have told thirty people and been honest with none of them, and have their phone in their hand at 3 a.m. composing something. Every one of those is a custody issue. Every one of those is a fathering issue. We’ll get to it.

Who this book is for

You, if you’re a father who has just been served, just been told, or can see it coming. It doesn’t matter whether you wanted the divorce or she did. It doesn’t matter whether it’s civil or already a war. The rules of the first 90 days are the same, and the civil ones go to war more often than you’d think.

It is not a book about getting her back, getting even, or getting full custody. It is not a book about how the system is rigged. The system is imperfect, slow, and sometimes unfair, to fathers and to mothers, and none of that is something you can fix in 90 days. What you can do in 90 days is refuse to hand anyone a reason.

How to use it

Read Chapter 1 tonight. It’s short. Put the Never List on your refrigerator, or in your phone’s lock screen, or wherever you’ll see it when you’re angry.

Then read the rest in order over the next week. The chapters follow the sequence most men live: the first three days, the question of where you’ll live, the lawyer, the kids, the texts, the paperwork, the second home, the money, the court, yourself, the daily rules, the first mediation, and finally a week-by-week plan that pulls it all together. The appendices are meant to be copied, printed, and used.

One more thing. You’ll notice I keep saying the same few things in different chapters: keep it short, keep it about the kids, keep showing up, write it down, don’t drink, don’t post, don’t move out without a plan. That’s not an editing failure. Those are the things that work, and the first 90 days are a bad time for original ideas.