and all that other crap I should have mentioned…

It’s been six years that the first papers were filed to start the divorce processes.
I knew going into court where I stood and how much child support and custody I would have. I was scared, but I was going to be okay.

A week before our court hearing my ‘exhusband’ got a phone call and was informed that his brother had killed himself. This drew us together long enough to get his affairs in order to go to the funeral and still be back for the court hearing. I stayed with him and made sure that everything was going to be fine.

Going into court we actually rode together. We sat in my attorney’s office and talked about what the courts were going to award each parent and what each attorney was going to ask for. I was scared because I KNEW where I stood. I was going to get most of the custody and a shit load of child support. My ex, who had done nothing…didn’t want the divorce in the first place…who had just lost his brother, was going to be handing over pretty much everything he had spent his life working for. When he was handed the support judgment he looked at me as if I was Satan. I asked if we could have a moment alone and we went into the conference center and he looked at me with tears in his eyes and he said, “I can’t do this.”
and then pretty much made it sound like he would do exactly what his brother had done.

I went back into the office and I sat down with the two attorneys and I said, “He gets 50% custody and I don’t want alimony…and take the amount of child support and cut it in half.”
My attorney turned about 100 shades of red. His attorney grinned from ear to ear.

My attorney told me, “Someday Kristine…you are going to regret this and you’re going to call me crying because you just made the biggest mistake of your whole life!”

That day has happened more times than I care to admit. I never called her though, but I called her this morning.

After the beginning phases of the divorce we hit this road block. Both his attorney and my attorney were fed up with us. Dan and I got along fine. We just had this sticking point we couldn’t get past. The house…and the 401k. Both had several hundred thousand dollars in it. I wanted either one or other. Dan wanted both.
I wanted his insurance, he wanted me as a tax right off. It seemed like a good idea to not finish the divorce so both of us could essentially ‘use’ the other.

He lost his job and I had no insurance so I began pushing for him to finish the divorce. The more I pushed for him to do it, the more reasons he came up to NOT finish it. “The attorney is too much…The court was closed when I went up there….”
and I am so lazy that I didn’t push hard enough.

Then I met Shaun. I decided it was time to really just start taking care of these things. I needed to get my taxes done, get my own care in my name, get Dan’s name off this house, and …Embarrassingly I admit this….finish my divorce.

And here is where the Xanax part of my life comes into effect….I opened Dan’s mail from the IRS yesterday. I don’t normally do this, but as of late I have been getting a lot of letters for him. This CAN’T be good.

I won’t go into the details of how truly fucked I am right now. I am truly fucked because I was lazy and didn’t finish what I should have finished YEARS ago. I might lose EVERYTHING I own because I didn’t follow through on things I was told to follow up on.

So here is my crash test dummy comment of the day, “If someone tells you to do something because you will look back and regret the living shit out of it later…just do it. Don’t worry about how the other person’s life will turn out because you never know what is going to happen.”

I was so scared that my ex would lose everything if I just didn’t give in a little. Now he has nothing to lose, and I might lose everything.