David Sheff and Vicki divorce and establish a long-distance custody arrangement for Nic

David Sheff and Vicki’s divorce turns their shared devotion to Nic into a long-distance custody arrangement that neither parent regards as a victory. After a psychologist’s three-month evaluation, Nic is assigned to spend the school year with David in San Francisco and holidays and summers with Vicki in Southern California. The schedule gives the family a decision where no ideal choice exists, but it also makes separation part of Nic’s ordinary childhood: two homes, repeated departures, and the parents’ effort to make each transition bearable.

The marriage and the first division

David and Vicki spend Nic’s first three years in what David describes as the half-sleep of new parenthood, before their marriage deteriorates. He responds to their escalating problems by falling in love with a family friend, whose son is Nic’s playmate. When the couple visits a therapist, David announces that it is too late and that the marriage is over. Vicki is caught off guard. David recognizes this as part of a pattern in which he has sabotaged relationships, but the stakes now include a young child.

The divorce is bitter, and David emphasizes that its consequences reach beyond the adults. During arguments at home, Nic finds refuge in the laps of the pandas. David describes the collateral damage as widespread and enduring, and says Nic is hit hard. The parents divide their possessions and their son; at first, joint custody seems self-evidently best because both want Nic with them and believe he should continue to be raised by both parents.

In the initial arrangement, Nic has two homes without the five-hundred-mile distance that later changes the plan. When David drops him at his mother’s, they hug at the white picket gate, and David watches Nic march inside. The repeated handoff is already a small, painful ritual, but the parents still imagine that sharing custody can preserve a substantial daily relationship with each of them.

The evaluation and its decision

That informal arrangement becomes untenable when Vicki moves to Los Angeles and remarries. Both parents continue to believe, with sincerity and anger, that Nic should live with them rather than the other parent. They hire lawyers, then learn how expensive and traumatic custody litigation can become: their lawyers charge more than two hundred dollars an hour and require retainers of five to ten thousand dollars. They also learn that judges often follow a court-appointed child psychologist’s recommendation after a thorough assessment. Because Nic has already been seeing a therapist, the parents ask her to evaluate the situation and agree to abide by her decision.

The evaluation lasts three months and feels to David like an inquisition. The psychologist interviews the parents, their friends, and their families; visits both homes in San Francisco and Los Angeles; and spends long sessions playing checkers, cards, and blocks with Nic. He calls her his worry doctor. While playing with a dollhouse, he points out the mother’s room on one side and the father’s room on the other. Asked about the little boy’s room, he says, "He doesn't know where he will sleep." His answer gives a child’s plain expression to the uncertainty the adults are trying to resolve.

At the decision meeting, the parents sit in matching leather armchairs among the psychologist’s toys, modern furniture, and framed prints. She calls both loving parents and describes Nic as resourceful, sensitive, expressive, and highly intelligent. She also says he is suffering from the divorce and uncertainty about his future. Her stated aim is to minimize stress and preserve as much consistency as possible, while acknowledging that the circumstances offer no ideal choice.

Her plan gives Nic the school year with David in San Francisco and holidays and summers with Vicki in Southern California. David’s first reaction is to think that he has won, then to recognize that he and Vicki have both lost something: he will have the school-year routine, but miss Christmas, Thanksgiving, and summer. The parents sign copies of the decision at the psychologist’s desk. David remembers the scratch of the pen on coarse paper as the moment he signed away half of his son’s childhood. The schedule settles the dispute, but cannot make the loss feel evenly shared.

A childhood measured in departures

For Nic, the arrangement means packing. He carries toys and clothes in a Hello Kitty suitcase with a pretend lock and key when he travels between parents. On the drive to the airport, he tells David that he has a pit in his stomach. He does want to see his mother and stepfather; what troubles him is having to leave. At first a parent always accompanies him. When he is five, he begins flying alone.

The small suitcase gives way to a canvas backpack containing a changing collection of familiar belongings: books and journals, Star Trek Micro Machines, plastic vampire teeth, a Discman and CDs, and a stuffed crab. A flight attendant leads him onto the plane. The family’s word for the exchange is "everything," a compact expression of love, missing one another, and apology at once. The flights also offer Nic a small freedom: he can order Coca-Cola, which is forbidden at home. That privilege is slight beside his fear of a plane crash.

David tries to conceal how much each airport goodbye hurts, because he does not want Nic to feel worse. He watches through the glass as the plane pulls away from the gate and takes off. In his later account, the departures do not become routine simply through repetition. During summers when Nic is in Los Angeles, father and son speak regularly by telephone about movies, ball games, a playground bully, a new friend, and books. When Nic visits for two weeks, David’s household packs in surfing, swimming, kayaking, time with friends, and evenings together. The concentrated pleasures of those visits coexist with a low-grade sadness while Nic is away.

The costs and limits of shared custody

David’s account questions the assumption that children can simply flourish in two primary homes. He calls joint custody a division between households shaped by different parents, stepparents, expectations, discipline, and values. Invoking Emily Dickinson’s statement that "Home is a holy thing," he observes the strain in making home plural: for a child, home is both a physical place and an image of stability, safety, and the rules of life. His criticism does not erase why the parents chose shared custody. Both wanted Nic in their lives, and the arrangement was made after a professional assessment intended to reduce the harm of choosing between them.

After one of Nic’s departures, David interviews child psychologist Judith Wallerstein for a magazine article. Wallerstein describes children returning from one home to another and touching the table, bed, or sofa to reassure themselves that these familiar objects remain. As they grow older, children may stop needing that tactile confirmation yet still feel that both homes are impermanent. She distinguishes the difficulty of long separations for younger children from the burden frequent transitions can place on older ones. Teenagers, she says, may resent spending summers with parents instead of friends; many cannot readily maintain parallel lives and may mistake that difficulty for a flaw in themselves.

Wallerstein’s research also complicates the reassuring assumption that children will be happier simply because their parents are happier. Her interviews with children whose parents divorced in the early 1970s found that they struggled after the breakups; when she saw them again more than a year later, they had not recovered and were doing worse. Her conclusions were attacked and appropriated by groups with opposing agendas, but her work influenced courts, legislatures, therapists, and parents. David’s interview places Nic’s particular travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles within a wider debate about what custody arrangements demand of children.

The arrangement also belongs to a larger limit on parental authority that becomes clearer as Nic grows up. When David later learns that Nic has used meth, he pleads with him to enter rehabilitation but discovers that, now over eighteen, Nic cannot be committed by a parent simply because of his drug use. David wishes he had intervened while Nic was young enough for him to make that decision, while acknowledging that forced treatment might not have worked. Looking back, he favors earlier intervention and would support a child’s return to rehabilitation after relapse, but draws limits around assistance: he would not give money or pay debts, and would make a bail-out conditional on going directly to treatment. These later reflections do not resolve the custody decision; they show the changing boundary between protecting a child and choosing for an adult. The earlier schedule had divided Nic’s time between two parents. The later crisis makes plain that neither parent can determine the course of his life.