My weekend started off on a grim note. I was served papers by my ex’s lawyer. She is taking me to court because she wants the language in our divorce decree amended to be more clear and for me to no longer speak with our children except for the designated thirty minutes the non-possession parent has on Tuesday and Saturday nights. She also claims I’m harassing her because of a few texts I’ve sent asking her to have a conversation on why she chose divorce as the first option despite us never going to counseling. I thought she’d consider it now that the divorce is final and I suggested a third-party of her choice be part of it so she would feel safe and comfortable. It would be great if she would choose just to simply talk about these things instead of going through the legal system. We could solve everything in under an hour, maybe a half an hour, but she continues to run away from her problems. It would be great for me to hear what she felt go wrong and for me to apologize to her for things I should be accountable for, and to understanding her perception of things. But now I have to cough up more money to rehire my attorney. This may also mean I have to step away from blogging again until this case is settled. I’ll let you know if that happens. I sure hope not, blogging has been a return of normalcy for me, even though what I blog about is a bit different. You know, that was extremely hard, me not being able to do things which brought me joy. When she filed for divorce, blogging was taken away from me on advice from my lawyer, since material from this blog was used in court against me. And I missed doing DIY stuff around the house. But doing that stuff would have been pointless if we were just selling it.
Here I was fearing the PTSD from the icy weather we had and it almost being the one-year anniversary of the big freeze when my ex took the kids and left to her mother, and now court stuff, which I thought was all behind me, is back and feeling some PTSD again. Sadly, the ex knows what buttons to push.
My lawyer will sometimes tell me that something is an option, but there’s a financial price that it will cost, and I should do a cost-benefit analysis. I have a feeling my ex’s lawyer never does that and looks for every opportunity to charge her client. But then again, my ex’s wealthy parents are footing her bill. If they want, they can just keep dragging this on and drain me of funds until they get their way.
I need to remember my mantra or the word for 2022 I chose – yield. I have no control over a lot of these issues and just have to let things play out. But man, do I want it all past me.
I do chat with my children everyday just to get an idea on how their day went. Ninety percent of the time, I will message them first and ask them to FaceTime me when they have some free time. The conversations are usually less than five minutes, I just want to hear and see them and see how their day went. Maybe I wouldn’t be this way if she didn’t start things off by alienating them from me. I always make sure when I talk to them it’s not during dinner time, and if they are ever doing anything with their mother, I tell them they our conversation can wait.
My son told me the favorite part of the weekend was when we picked up two sticks from the ground and pretended to light-saber fight (and make sound effects with our mouths) for about 45-minutes as different Star Wars characters. I thought he would have told me it was playing video games with him or playing in the snow.
Over the weekend, my daughter snuck into my bathroom and put a Post-It on my mirror which said, “I love you,” and signed her name. Last night, my son used my bathroom to shower since the other bathroom was occupied. He arranged my toiletries to spell out “I Luv U”. Yup, I snapped photos.
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on Bag of Randomness for Monday, February 7, 2022
BoyGeeding and DaughterGeeding were up early, even though they knew school was cancelled. They were excited about the snow and went outside first thing this morning. It brought a huge amount of joy to my heart to see this happy innocence and reminded me of the days when I was young without a worry in the world and how magical a school day being cancelled because of snow was. It also brought back painful memories of how I missed out on a week full of this last year when my wife abandoned me and kept the kids from communicating with me. Of course, I had my phone out taking photos and recording video of them playing in it. There were a few moments when I wanted to send them to my ex. That’s one thing I really miss – co-parenting, sharing joyful moments of the children with the only other person who can love my kids as much as I do. But she’s very against me sending her any sort of message or a reminder that I’m their father or we were once married.
Usually I watch a lot of local and national news, but avoided it all because I didn’t want to be reminded of the events of almost a year ago. It’s just too damn painful. Fortunately, I had my weekly session with my counselor to talk things out. Even more fortunately, my session didn’t have to be cancelled due to weather since we could meet online.
To my surprise, DaughterGeeding took her pet bunny (named Buno, after U2 frontman Bono) out of the cage for him to experience the snow.
The butterfly sanctuary, part of the North American Butterfly Association, made the announcement Wednesday. The decision came just days after GOP operatives descended on the site, reviving baseless and false conspiracy theories linking the center to sex trafficking.
A Fight Over the Right to Repair Cars Turns Ugly – In the wake of a voter-approved law, Subaru and Kia dealers in Massachusetts have disabled systems that allow remote starts and send maintenance alerts.
This Old Ship-Carrying Ship Is Cursed To Live Out Its Days As A Billionaire’s Yacht – After being taken out of service, the ship underwent a three-year restoration process. This included the installation of essentials like a sun deck jacuzzi, swimming pool, outdoor cinema, tennis court, botanic garden and four aquariums. You know, basic yacht stuff.
I’m not joking or trying to make light of anyone who has gone through a genuine tragedy and suffers from PTSD, but I felt like I was suffering from it yesterday with all the news coverage of the icy weather and school closings. I’m approaching the anniversary of February 12, the Friday before of the big freeze that hit last year, and the day my wife pulled our kids out of school at 11:00 AM and drove them 110 miles to her mother’s and alienated them from me. Oddly, last year, I was grocery shopping at that time, stocking up for the icy weather buying a lot of ingredients to cook a lot of comfort food for the family. Yesterday, I was at the grocery store stocking up for this upcoming winter storm and it all felt eerily familiar as I was shopping for my children’s stay with me this weekend. Then, all the news talked about was the upcoming winter storm. Dreadful memories started to fill my mind, as well as a lot of anxiety and an immense sense of loneliness and abandonment.
At least this year I won’t have to suffer through the start of the winter storm isolated by myself, I’ll have my children. My ex will have to go through the storm alone (I’m guessing), though at least she’ll know the next time she’ll be able to hear and see her children again and the worst of it will only be a few days instead of an entire week full of power outages. I did send her a text saying if she needed any help or ran into an emergency regarding the winter storm, not to hesitate to reach out to me for any assistance.
As I mentioned, she didn’t allow the children to speak to me for four nights and then the fifth day was our son’s ninth birthday, and she had her mother grant me a monitored five-minute call on speakerphone with him. She also bought the children new iPads and created new accounts for them to keep me from being able to contact them, despite us buying them both new iPads a month and a half prior for Christmas. I thought she’d return with the children that Sunday so she could return to work and the children to school on Monday. Nope, without my knowledge, she enrolled the kids in online school to keep them away from me for another week. She did this despite the teacher writing on our daughter’s report card that she struggles with online school.
She did return the following week, but wouldn’t reveal the location of where she was keeping our children. She allowed a few FaceTime sessions and I could tell wherever they were staying didn’t look like a safe place. Through her lawyer, she asked me to leave the house for four hours so she could collect some clothes and belongings, but I refused to leave my own house and that amount of time seemed unreasonable. Through our lawyers, we worked out a compromise that during school, I would place her clothing in our SUV and I could have the children for a whopping two hours for dinner. The next day was the custodial trial.
At the trial, she told the judge I was controlling, an emotional abuser, and a manipulator. I refute every one of those claims and don’t understand why she couldn’t have told me she ever felt that way before or would want to resolve any of that with at least trying a single counseling session before going nuclear by filing for divorce or trying a separation and destroying a family. The first I ever heard of any of those claims was when she told it to a judge. She still won’t grant me a single conversation about why she feels that way or can provide an examples.
She told the judge she was withholding the address of the children because she feared I was going to do something to damage our SUV. I do not know why she would think I’d ever go to that extreme when I have done nothing remotely close to that before.
As I mentioned, I’ve been proactive in treating my depression (a lot of it caused because of her emotional infidelity), so I’m on antidepressants. And, you know I have a bad back and I sometimes take pain medication for that. She played those things up to make it appear I had an addiction problem. The thing is, I was always transparent in everything I did. So, anytime I took pain medication, I told her because I wanted her to know I wasn’t hiding anything and wanted her to know she could hold me accountable. She also claimed I was abusing Ambien. That didn’t help at all because the judge had several cases in which Ambien was blamed for causing some odd behavior. So, as a caution, the judge ruled that I had to take a psychological exam, go to anger management classes, and worst of all, only get the kids to visit me twice a week with no overnight visits. They only got to visit me on Wednesdays for two hours and on Saturday for seven. That’s right, a total of nine hours a week with no overnight visits. That was torturous. However, the judge also required for both of us to take a 12 week parallel parenting course and for her to reveal the address of the children before the evening. I also had to listen to the judge talk down to me after she told my wife to reveal the children’s address, stating if I ever step foot on property I’d be arrested. I was like, geez, that’s overkill, but I bit my lip and nodded my head out of respect.
It was also annoying hearing my wife claim she did most of the laundry, cooking, and cleaning. I did those things because I wanted to spend more time with her. I had the bandwidth since I worked from home, and I wanted to free up her time so we could spend time together as a couple.
I will say my evening ended on a fantastic note because I got to watch the latest episode of The Book of Boba Fett with my kids, and it was the greatest episode of Star Wars from a cartoon or series ever. I won’t say more because I don’t want to ruin anything, but was so happy I got to watch it with my kids because it made me feel like I was a kid again. So I was a kid, with my kids. But, I will be honest, I miss watching television and experiencing these moments as a whole family.
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on Bag of Randomness for Thursday, February 3, 2022
I disclose a lot of personal stuff. It has come back to bite me a few times, but sometimes I receive some heartfelt letters about how I may have helped someone and the impact I’ve made on their life. It helps to know you are not alone. So, that’s one reason I tend to be an open book and reveal more than what a lot of folks are comfortable with. With that said, I’ve taken some serious steps to fight my depression, but not willing to go into detail because I’m scared it will be used against me from accessing my children, as it was before. I will admit, that hurts. I tried to be proactive in taking care of my mental health. But the court views it differently. With that knowledge, my ex used my attempts at bettering my mental health to keep make it seem I was mentally unstable and keep my kids away from me. She was so successful at it; she convinced a judge to make me take a psychological evaluation. Talk about humiliating. And until the results were came in, the judge only allowed me to see my children for only nine hours a week, with no overnight visitation. I had to go 137 nights without giving my kids a kiss goodnight. It’s hard to forgive someone who keeps you from your own children. The judge’s orders allowed us to mutually agree to other options, but my ex would have nothing of it. She knew I was never a danger to our children, and despite them wanting to stay the night in the only house they have ever called home with their father, she refused to let it happen.
Despite seventeen years of marriage, me never physically harming her, and us never going to a single counseling session together, she was so determined to divorce me she got my estranged sister (actually, my adopted cousin from Vietnam who was 11 years younger than me) to testify against me. There’s a lot of history here, but basically after our mother died, I was literally the only family she had. She wanted to become an actress and needed to attend acting school, but she could only do so with private student loans, so she asked if I would cosign them. I did. When she moved to New York and that didn’t pan out, she wanted to become a chef and attend cooking school. Once again, she needed a cosigner for her private student loans. I was hesitant, but felt like it was the right thing to do. She ensured me she would pay off the loans herself and would never do anything to harm the future of my children, but she went back on those promises.
I attended my sister’s graduation from the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking academy, where she was first in her class. She asked me to give her away at her wedding. When she needed a car, I gave her mine. After mom died, she lived in our house rent free. But for some reason, she stopped communicating with me. I was sad she wasn’t being a part of my children’s lives. When it came to family, all my kids knew were my wife’s side. As opposed to me, her parents are still living, and she has siblings who have their own families. I thought it was sad that my kids would never get to know anyone from my side of the family, who I felt were equally important.
The total amount of the two private student loans I cosigned was over $40,000. One day I started to receive notices in the mail that payment was due and she wasn’t paying. She was three months behind. Then, I started to get phone calls from the student loan company. I tried to reach out to her, but she never responded to any of my emails or voicemails. I no longer knew where she lived. Monthly payments were over $800 a month and the interest rate was insane. I spoke to my wife about what we should do as we couldn’t budget that amount. We both decided it would be best to refinance the house and get cash back to pay off the loans.
My wife and I paid off the larger of the two loans, about $32,000, thinking my sister could handle the lesser of the two loans in which the monthly payment was less than a hundred dollars a month. Or, if she failed to pay that, could manage that amount. After paying off the larger loan, I heard nothing from my sister. No thank you, no acknowledgement. A lawyer friend told me Texas law was set up where I could sue my sister, but I had a two-year window to do so. I kept that in the back of my mind in case she defaulted on the lesser of the two loans. After about 14-months, I started to get letters and phone calls from the student loan company that she was three months behind. I spoke to my wife about what we should do, and we both decided to that we shouldn’t allow her to walk over me like that and take money away from what would go to our children’s college savings. So, I sued.
It’s not everyday you decide to sue your sister. I hated the idea of it. I made an appointment to meet a lawyer about it, and remember confiding in my wife how hard of a decision this was. Rarely have I felt my wife made me a priority. Proof of that came after I met the lawyer about suing my sister. She never asked me how the appointment went. Two weeks went by, and she never inquired a single time about me meeting with a lawyer to sue my sister until I brought it up to her. Yeah, I could have brought it up, but it was difficult to talk about. A compassionate wife would have had it on her mind.
To make a long story short, the judge, via Zoom, ruled in my favor. It wasn’t the ruling I wanted. My sister claimed she was never informed the loan was in default or paid off. To my astonishment, she said the following, “He paid my loan off without my consent.” Seeing her in online court was the first time I saw her in five years. Before the trial, her husband sent me an email and attached an audio recording of her speaking to a customer service representative of the student loan company. I’m not sure if they were aware, but they didn’t turn the recording off after the call and I could hear them tell me to suck a part of a male anatomy and how much money he was earning selling luxury cars while she, a woman in her mid-thirties, was a full-time college student who still didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. The judge said she could start paying me back in five years once she graduates medical school, which was she still didn’t know if she was accepted in.
As I said before, I never physically harmed my wife and we never went to a single counseling session, yet her first step was to abandon me, kidnap the kids, alienate them from me, and file for divorce. Not only that, but she reached out to my estranged sister and got her to testify against me in court at the custodial hearing. My lawyer objected, stating since my sister hasn’t communicated with me in five years, had no idea what kind of parent I am. Nevertheless, the judge allowed her to testify, and she lied in court claiming that I once got on top of her, held her down, and beat her. That is a total lie. My lawyer objected, but it didn’t matter, it was said and I’m sure it stuck in everyone’s mind. Before the trial, when my lawyer first talked to her, she claimed my parents abused her.
More about the trial, later.
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, February 2, 2022
