I’ve passed many a satisfactory hour complaining about my ex-wife, bitching about the logistics of our shared custody, and congratulating myself with the thought that all our problems are her fault. And they are. Seriously.

One thing I’ve learned, though, is someone always has it tougher than me. This past weekend Tomoko and I drove down to D.C. to visit a friend of hers who had just had a baby. The friend’s husband had a teenage daughter from a previous marriage. They had a custody arrangement similar to mine, joint, with lots of moving the child back and forth over the course of each week.

What’s more, the teenage girl’s mother had only just remarried, to a man who had two boys from his previous marriage. They, too, had a complicated custody arrangement with much back and forth, only in their case, the girls mom and her new husband had chosen not to live together, because making the custody work–the boys live and go to school in Virginia, the girl lives and goes to school in Maryland–would have been impossible.

These are all teenagers and college isn’t that far off. But at least for the next several years this triangular, multi-state, multi-home, tri-divorced, tri-kid, mish-mish will hold. My ex-wife lives three blocks from me. My son goes to a school equidistant from both of our homes.

I’m still right and she’s still wrong. But it could definitely be worse.