I left my lunch in my car today when I got to work, so I started to go back out to my car to grab it.
“You don’t want to go out there,” I told myself. “You might run into your boss and you don’t want to talk to him and have him ask you what you forgot in your car, and then you’ll have to lie to him.”
Why would I lie to him? Why wouldn’t I just tell him that I forgot my lunch in the car?
“Because you don’t know what he’s gonna do with that. He’s gonna make fun of you. He’s gonna chastise you. You know he’s a jerk.”
Yeah, he’s a jerk. But I think I can take a little chastising in order to get my lunch.
And so the conversation with myself ended, and I headed to the car to get my lunch.
But on my way out there, I reflected on that conversation. Why would I even feel the need to lie about my lunch to my jerk boss? Who cares? Where did that impulse come from?
My first thought was that it came from my wife’s ex-husband, who is constantly attacking us and our family in court. He’s easy to blame. Let’s go ahead and blame him for this. Yes, the impulse to lie came from your feelings of being constantly attacked by this buttholster, and you don’t want to give anyone a reason to be able to attack you more. So don’t give any information about yourself. Close off, and you’ll be safer.
But that didn’t sit well with me. “Close off? That’s not good advice. Then I become just like the jerky ex-husband: hiding behind closed doors, peering out to see who might be trying to get me today. And I DON’T want to become like him. When you close yourself off, you’re either trying to hide something, or you’re not strong enough to protect something that others might judge.”
And as I thought about it more, I realized that nothing that we had ACTUALLY done had come under judgment from the jerky ex-husband or the lawyer. You know, actual things we had done, like love the boys, care for them, and create a safe and secure environment for them to grow physically, mentally and spiritually. In fact, EVERYTHING they had used against us was completely fabricated and made-up. Like saying that we gave the boys no structure in their lives and we refused to co-parent. So why was I so concerned with having them see me for who I am, when who I am isn't anything they can logically attack? I forgot my lunch. Does that mean I’m not a good stepfather? No, it doesn’t. It means I forgot my lunch. And yeah, he can bring up the fact that I forgot my lunch. And if that’s the worst he’s got, I’m going to bring up the fact that he’s trying to hurt me by bringing up the fact that I forgot my lunch, so who do you think the children are going to have healthier lives with? The man who forgot his lunch one day, or the man who wants to vilify and punish the man who forgot his lunch one day? Because I can guarantee you, one day both of those boys will forget their lunch in the car, at which point they, too, will be villified and punished.
It really helps when you can trust your lawyer. Really a lot. I don’t know that this kind of thinking would have been possible with any of the other attorneys we have had before. None of them. Because we didn’t trust them.
I’m pretty much done, but I want to mention all the falseness he’s used to judge us as not good for the boys, none of which have any validity. I just want to have some kind of record, I guess. He said that the boys weren’t allowed to come into the house with their mother, as was the original divorce agreement, because it was his space and she wasn’t allowed to be in his space. That’s why he changed the locks, preventing her and the boys from getting into their house. Not even in question, that house being his space. Except it was also the boys’ space. That’s why my wife left it: so that the divorce would upset their living arrangements as little as possible. But now they were being prevented from going into their space, into their rooms, into their house. He said that she couldn’t see the boys at her apartment because it was too small, and the boys didn’t have enough space to be there comfortably. So she got a house. He then said he wasn’t going to let her see the boys. Just flat out. “I’m not going to let you see them any more than 4 nights a month.” He never gave a reason for that decision, just said that he wasn’t going to give any more than 4 nights a month. So we got a lawyer. And as our court date drew closer, he said that he would allow 8 nights a month. But he didn’t give a reason for this change either. It was just offered. So we went to court, were the judge said that this wasn’t acceptable, and the mother should have equal time with the boys. Jerky ex-husband fought back, saying that she picked them up from school every day, and so she was getting more time with them than jerky ex-husband, and he should be allowed to have an overnight in exchange for this “unequal” time. The judge agreed to this, giving him one extra overnight a week, saying that when (not if) circumstances were to change, the two parties would have to talk about it. So then my wife got a job, because that’s what you do when you’re an adult taking care of children. And she wasn’t able to care for the children after school anymore like she used to. And the jerky ex-husband took them after school, but refused to talk about the overnight. “If you want to get that overnight, you have to go back to court. This decision is too big for me to make alone. The court will have to decide.” So she went back to court, this time with a different attorney, who said that my job wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t funny, and I should change. She said that my wife should provide financial documentation to the jerky ex-husband and equally jerky lawyer because they asked for it. She had my wife sign blank pieces of paper, and then filed the wrong suit with the court. In the meantime, both the boys said they didn’t want to live with their father anymore, because everything they did was wrong and they didn’t like being interrogated about everything they did all the time. It was oppressive. They described mental and emotionally abusive situations, where the father obviously liked one boy more than the other, showed favoritism, but would routinely separate them and question them individually about their time with their mother. An actual interrogation. They weren’t told that they couldn’t speak with their mother, but they would get in trouble when they did. They weren’t allowed to talk about her or me. They weren’t allowed to bring their clothes or belongings over to her house. So we went back to court a second time (third time total), with our first lawyer, asking for ONE DAY more with the boys. The judge said that we were stupid for being there in the first place, and we needed to work things out. She didn’t make a ruling. So our attorneys worked out that the boys would stay with each parent for a week at a time. And both parents needed to go to counseling. In counseling, jerky ex-husband said that he couldn’t talk with my wife because she didn’t create a safe environment for him. When asked to give just one example of how she didn’t create a safe environment, he couldn’t. He said that she didn’t make enough money to support the boys, but then drew up child support documents that required her to pay him based on an amount of money that she wasn’t coming close to making. The week that court was over, he said that we didn’t understand the visitation schedule, and we weren’t doing it correctly. He then checked with his attorney and discovered that we were doing it correctly. So then he dropped off our eldest, never picked him up for visitation again, never told us why he was doing this. And then he took us to court because we refused to co-parent and demanded sole custody. Then, based largely on the stress caused by all of this, our eldest was struggling in school and needed a change. My wife asked the jerky ex-husband for his thoughts about changing the school situation, and suddenly there was another motion in the suit that my wife had acted unilaterally in making decisions about the boy’s school schedule without including him. He involved the public school legal team, saying that they should never have allowed it to get this far. Meanwhile, we have our boy’s therapist and school counselor saying that he needs to be in this program, our boy is saying that he needs to be in this program, and even our attorney and the guardian ad litem got involved saying that the boy needed a change, and nobody was excluding anyone.
Every. Single. Reason. Is made up. One Giant Fiction.
I really wish he would just come out and say that he’s gay and let it all of this go.
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