Lately, there have been a number of people who have told me that they feel that my ex-wife and I have fashioned a “very good divorce” for ourselves.

While I appreciate that they recognize that we are working very hard to create a healthy and cooperative environment in which we can raise our daughters, I must say that telling someone they have a “very good divorce” is akin to walking up to a double-amputee and saying, “Hey, those are some good-looking fake legs you’ve got there!”

What they don’t seem to understand is that a finely-crafted set of prosthetics doesn’t do much to make up for the fact that you will never walk again, you’re still experiencing excruciating phantom pain in your missing extremities, and without any proper training and using only blunt tools, you had to carve your own prosthetic legs out of the wood of the very tree that crushed your legs in the first place.