Glen Holmes
I chose Caroline Frost of Inspire Family Law to act as Mediator in divorce discussions with my wife. Whilst the first session regarding childcare began in a promising way I was a little surprised to be chastised by Caroline for being “too honest” when discussing my thoughts on what I felt was an excessive amount of homework that my wife was regularly assigning to my son. Not only did my wife expect my son to deliver his normal school homework but had arranged for him to receive additional maths tutoring and language studies over the weekend, which also came with an amount of homework. I felt expecting a 12 year old to spend every day of each week dedicated to homework was too much and that he needed a break to be a child sometimes! Unfortunately the second, and last face to face session, regarding finances stunned me, and not in a good way. Given that we were discussing a divorce situation with two opposing spouses in the same room it would be fair to expect that the topics discussed would be of an emotive nature and therefore it is widely accepted that a good mediator should show empathy, patience and a non combative stance. Unfortunately, Caroline appeared to switch into solicitor mode after a short while which resulted in her arguing with me in front of my spouse and decrying all aspects of the financial apocalypse I was facing. The real low was when she suggested I should “work harder” in my job to meet my wife’s financial demands. Given that I am a self employed builder who spends his days working on construction tasks and his evenings visiting customers sites to assess potential new projects, preparing quotes, settling supplier accounts and chasing invoices this suggestion made me effectively shutdown. As a result, after the carnage of that session my wife subsequently cancelled future mediation sessions, instead committing us to a costly court based resolution. I can only presume Caroline lacked experience in mediation and let her professional approach slip. I doubt she would be proud of her efforts in our case.