Late Monday evening, my cell phone rang.

It was a client from a divorce I’d mediated two years ago. The parenting schedule alternates weeks between households, with the switch at 8 p.m. This call came about half an hour after that, from the mother.

Speaking loudly, at a fast pace, in earthy language, she told me that her former husband had taken their daughter to get the H1N1 “swine flu” vaccine last week. Without telling Mom. She was, by her own self-assessment, “furious.”

Two things never cease to amaze me when I hear them from colleagues working with folks in divorce. The first is the degree to which these advisers rely upon finding common ground in values and definitions. The second is in thinking the courts, its administrators, and the legal system can manage parental disputes to the smallest controversy necessary when parties cannot find their own path to agreement.

This was Mom's position: She saw the currently unfolding flu season this year as something vastly different from years past. Her safety concerns regarding potential, if not likely, side-effects could be substantiated by multiple, credible medical authorities.

“Besides,” she said when we first spoke, “how hard could it have been to let me know when he decided he was gonna do this, before they went to the clinic?”

Dad’s response when I subsequently talked with him was that Mom took their daughter to get her flu shot last year, so 2009 was his “turn.” The child’s pediatrician was recommending the vaccination; he additionally deferred to other authorities that advocated taking this path as a preventive measure.

“Everybody’s out of H1N1, Dell,” he said to me. “So when my buddy told me where we could get it, you bet I moved fast. That’s good parenting, and it’s good co-parenting.” He made it sound heroic.

An adversarial, “right” versus “wrong” approach to this situation wouldn’t have been helpful. Both parents wanted what’s best for their daughter and diligently researched the question; they simply reached different conclusions. That said, either was free to take this to court to litigate the finding of “one” answer. Of course, that will never give them “the” answer regarding whether or not their minor child “should” have been vaccinated.

Worse yet, neither parent can “win” here. Ever. True, in court the position of one would be seemingly validated, the other not. But it’s merely a judgment call, even if handed down through process and authority by a duly elected judge. There’s no objective, reliable way of predicting the outcome here — nor the outcome of the next question, and the next questions to follow. Divorced or married, parents are the only ones who can effectively make decisions such as those regarding flu shots. And in making them, whatever they decide becomes right.

Divorced parents’ decisions aren’t so much they-decisions, of course. Rather, they are in practice a series of incremental I-decisions. And for the most part, the preceding I-decision becomes “right” by virtue of having been made, particularly if it arguably falls below some effective (or at least grey area) requirement of “joint legal custody.”

It’s typically easier to defend a decision that’s already been taken than it is to sell a proposal in favor of some future choice.

Accordingly, that would make what Dad did “right” in having his daughter injected with the H1N1 vaccine. Moreover, that conclusion would likely give him some confidence in seeing that it’s always easier for the parent to prevail when advocating from “the position at rest.” In other words, in order for things to go as Mom felt they should, she would have to be on constant vigil against her daughter getting the flu shot. Dad, on the other hand, would only have to act once to achieve the result he advocated. He’s in the position at rest.

Bad for Mom, right? Sure. That is, until some future question arises where she finds that her own point of view in that situation is the one better served by a position at rest. That could well spell preamble for Swine Flu Controversy: The Remake. It’s starting to feel a bit like Exodus 21:24 here, the “eye for eye” part.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, then, I opened my solo meeting with Dad on Tuesday by encouraging him to expand on what he’d said to me the night before about Mom’s approach to the well care for their daughter in 2008, and maybe even prior to that. How were things working out in practice, now that the marriage had legally ended? Turns out there was a secondary issue in play here. Not only did he have a strong predisposition toward having his daughter inoculated, but he additionally had further fears that his former spouse would, as he felt she had the year before, marginalize him when it came time to face the needle. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Mom might disagree with the decision; significantly, however, now that this reality was evidenced, he actually saw that as all the more justification for driving this act on his own.

When Mom, Dad, and I met at my office yesterday, things took an ironic, yet predictable return to square one. “Dell, you’re a parent,” came the words from one — although valid for both (funny how often that happens with formerly married persons). “So who do you think is right?”

Just when it seems people are committed to self-determination, they come up with some new authority to direct them. Exodus 32:1.

The best thing for divorced parents is not to have someone else give them the answer. Rather, it’s two other things. It’s to help them develop tools to work out their own answers, ones that are in the best interests of their children, as only they can determine. It’s additionally to encourage them in their own esteem, their own confidence to find these answers by consensus and making those answers stick. It wasn’t appropriate under these circumstances to tell them what I was doing as a parent, nor my underlying thought process.

So I didn’t.

Any way other than their own would also have been as bad or worse than where they seemed set to head three days ago. When parents function as adversaries, the children always end up in the middle. And that was a common value to which I could connect them in this case. That’s the ground from which we could then kick off.

Somewhere in the discussion yesterday, Dad hesitated just for a moment. He asked what difference any discussion today could make. After all, the vaccination had been given and there was no way to undo it. That’s when Mom expressed her feeling that in coming together through this ad hoc mediation, they’d achieved what she considered a fundamental accountability for what had happened. A good-faith gesture that was enough to deflect her from quid pro quo thinking.

“If we need to do unto others as we’d have them do unto us,” she concluded by paraphrasing Luke 6:31, “I’m okay being the one who does first here.”

That’s where they are today, and there’s reason for hope. I’m praying for them, as I do all my clients.

After all, even the most expensively litigated judgment of divorce can’t provide immunity from all potential illnesses to which our children will be exposed.

They say you can’t legally force parents to cooperate. Well, whoever “they” are, they might also want to add that if two co-parents don’t find their own way to cooperate, the job of parenting will never be better than outcomes which fall from the least common denominator.

“Should parents consult before vaccinating their child?” The answer lies not so much in what you decide, as how.

Dell Deaton is a divorce pastoral counselor, independently practicing since 1983. He can be reached through www.divorcepastor.wordpress.com or on (734) 668-2001 in Saline. Also check out /divorcepastor to Follow me on Twitter.