Til Death, or Divorce, do you part?

Have you ever just felt all the hope and empowerment leak from your body like so much hot air? Felt it sigh from your pores leaving you feeling empty and powerless and small? I felt that on Monday afternoon.

After 2 years of waiting the X finally got around to actually wanting a divorce himself. After 2 years of dealing with his fits of rage, the threats, the stalking, the stealing my mail. After 2 years of calling the police and filing reports (to no avail), after being threatened with guns, after smoothing out the edges when he told my youngest son that he was going to commit suicide if "Mommy doesn't take me back". After sending my kids to Florida when things got too out of control; after replacing doorknobs when he stole keys from the children’s key rings, after dealing with him skulking around the property and driving by late at night he finally decided he was ready. After 2 years of watching him postpone and delay my X husband finally decided that he was ready to get divorced.

So, on Monday I had an appointment with my x husband’s attorney and my x husband. I don't have a lawyer because the retainer for an attorney was so far out of my budget that it was a pipedream. So, in short, it's hour zero and legal aid still hasn't called me back, they're swamped over there, so many women, so many stories and mine got shuffled into the stack of people waiting for something, someone to help.

I'm sitting there in the office, it's a green office and I'm grateful for Dims presence by my right hand because I'm feeling rather small and ineffectual (not a good thing when one is sitting next to a violent, angry, manipulative man) The attorney starts to go down the divorce decree point by point. I had to correct him on the 2 bills that the X left out that he was supposed to be taking. There were also bills that he claimed that don't even exist anymore, and haven't since several years before we separated. (That point I'll have to get corrected on Thursday when I'm supposed to meet with them again) He also underreported his income, by $10,000.

I took all this in stride, retaining my composure even though a part of me was screaming that I should run out of the room that the man was dangerous and I knew it. Even though I was sure that if I said something wrong that no matter who was there he would hurt me. I swallowed all of that and did quite well, until we began discussing the house. When I heard what the attorney said I felt the air escape me and every scrap of empowerment and control I felt leaked out of my body and sighed onto the floor where it lay in a useless puddle. The attorney stacked his papers and tapped them on the desk. The X was sitting next to Dim, looking rather smug with himself as the attorney said, "Ok, as for the marital residence, you have one year to remove X's name from the mortgage" I balked. My mouth dropped open. 1 year? My eyebrows furrowed and my face fell into a mask of confusion. One year?

"One year?" I said. "But that's not possible! I can't do it in one year".

"Well," the attorney countered, "We could just go to court and the judge will order you to sell it now"

"But," I stammered, "But...my credit is ruined! He destroyed it! I can't get my credit back in line in a year, I'll lose the house."

The X broke in, "Well BB, it's about time you realized that you're not going to be living in my house."

The air escaped my lungs and the last 2 years came back to hit me full force. For the last few years the X has been busy destroying my credit. Not just destroying it, but obliterating it with a sledgehammer, I couldn't even get a $100 loan at this point. Where once my credit score was wonderful and amazing, it is now so horrible that I can't even get a fucking cell phone. Goat (that's what I'll call him) launched a war on my credit when he realized that I was not going to take him back. He defaulted. On everything.

When I kicked him out I took possession of the house, I have paid for everything that is related to the house and the children. I have paid for my car, my insurance; I have paid for all of these things without incident. I have kept my credit clean, for my part. I have also taken over an additional 4k in debt on top of the 27k that was in the form of a second mortgage and was a debt consolidation loan. I gave the credit cards to Goat who said he would pay them. And he did pay them, right up until he knew I wasn't going to take him back, then, he defaulted on everything.

All of the credit cards, except for one installment loan and one credit card that was in my name, are his. All of them had me as a secondary. The installment loan had me as a co-borrower and the one credit card I had in my name was used to transfer his balance from his credit card over to that one because it had a better interest rate. He has launched a full frontal assault on my credit.

At first, I tried to pay all the bills he wouldn't pay, even though my income was only 22k a year which stood in stark comparison to his 80k a year income. I failed; I could not carry the debt incurred on an 80k income on a mere 22k income. The bills fell further and further behind and he refused to pay them. I fell behind and the hits began to come. There has been no payment on them since March of this year and they're getting ready to take me to court over them.

These bills are his bills, the bills that he agreed to take and HE is the primary on them all. He has cut off his nose to spite his face. He trashed his own credit to ensure that I would be utterly helpless financially and it has worked very well indeed. It didn’t stop him from getting a brand new 2005 Pontiac Grand Am. Of course, when you make 80k a year you have a little more leeway after you trash your credit than someone who makes 22k a year and also has shitty credit.



He has admitted that he did it on purpose, to a loan officer no-less, when we were at the bank trying to remove his name from the joint checking account. There is an overdraft attached to that account that I told him I'd pay for (even though the bulk of the bill was for a car he bought). Unfortunately, to remove his name from the account I would need to qualify to transfer the debt to my name. He laughed at this and said, "Fuck, she doesn't qualify for ANY loan anymore, I took care of that when I trashed her credit".

Ok, so anyway, here I am in the lawyer’s office. Staring at my soon-to-be-X and telling him that I simply cannot have my credit back in shape in a year because he trashed it. I explain to the lawyer that giving me just a year to get this all in order will ultimately be an eviction notice. The bank simply will not refinance me in my own name when my credit has been this smashed. The house payment has been on time every month, except for 1 month that it fell 2 weeks behind after I was laid off from my job. That happened well over a year ago and it hasn't been late since. However, the bank will be looking at all my credit to see if they can put the house in my name alone.

It's not going to happen.

I told them that I needed a minimum of 18 months. There was no way in hell I could do it in less. I managed to get 2 years, but now I'm stuck.

As I sat in that attorneys office I watched as the marriage and the meltdown that came afterwards flitted through my mind. I saw him smashing the kid’s toys, I watched him holding me eldest son against the wall when he was but 12 years old, I watched myself, screaming at the boys to run to the car on that last day. I remembered the stalking, the ineffectual police department. I remembered the way they laughed at me when I told them I wanted to file charges against him for stealing my mail, breaking into the house and destroying my vibrators. They apparently found his behavior amusing.

Then my mind fast-forwarded to the future and I saw me, holding my 10 year old and consoling him as his pony was loaded into a trailer. I saw the horrified look of my eldest son when I told him we were moving. I saw it all, and every ounce of fight I may have ever had just leaked out of my body. He had won.

He will be filing bankruptcy on all this stuff and the things that are jointly held they'll be coming after ME for. I'm also facing the knowledge that, even though I've been paying my mortgage without any problems for nearly 2 years, the bank will still have to finance me alone. I will need to land a job where I'm making 40-45k a year to get the bank to refinance me on a 95k loan.

In short, I'm pretty much fucked. I've been a stay-at-home mom throughout this entire marriage, 12 years. I have no college education, no way to make that kind of money within 2 years.

As I sat in that attorney’s office I watched as my college education was flushed down the proverbial toilet. I saw my dreams of writing books, of telling the world what I believe, of working or running a battered women’s shelter slip away. I watched a future that I had been so excited about fall away one shard after the next. How can I do full-time schooling with a full-time job? Furthermore, even if I do get a job that pays me 40K a year I'll no longer qualify for the grants etc. that will allow me to do college at all. I simply cannot afford college without the grants and scholarships that I'll qualify for.

I'm utterly lost. Even if the business takes off quickly I'll never be able to claim a 40k profit in 2 years. The path which seemed so clear to me has become muddied and hazy. I don't know what to do next. I'm faced with a terrible decision. Go to college and risk selling the house, my children's horses, all of the things that they know and love and move them into a small house or apartment in the city, or forgo schooling, try to get a job and still wind up selling the house in 2 years.

It just seems so unfair. The man who makes 80k has defaulted on his bills just to fuck with me, knowing that he would trash my credit, knowing that it would likely leave the kids and I in a small apartment, knowing that I'd be forced to sell their horses and hold them when we have to leave their friends behind. He's leaving this marriage with a 80k a year salary, a salary he never would have gotten if I hadn't been giving every ounce of my being to help him succeed. If I hadn't been at home caring for his kids and keeping the house clean and tidy. He's leaving with 23k in stocks and retirement, a cushy salary, and when he files bankruptcy on it all, no bills.

I'm leaving this marriage just as I came into it. Penniless, uneducated, no health insurance and no more than 150$ in savings, and soon, in about 2 years, I'll be homeless with 3 kids in tow. I'm sure that I'll be able to get an apartment, but the thought of trying to console these kids while their horses are loaded up onto someone else’s trailer is tearing me up inside.

I have one hope. Dim. It's a bittersweet hope, a hope filled with anger, indignation and helplessness. Dim is insisting that I continue on with college, he continues to say that if I can get through college then I'll never have to rely on a man again, including him. He says that college is the way out, that I shouldn't deviate from that lofty goal of PhD, because it's that goal that's my ticket to independence.

He's applying for an internal job opening at his place of employment, a job that touts a 45-50k income, if he gets it he says he'll buy the house from me as a way of keeping the kids and I here. Of course, that will still leave me in the same predicament, relying on a man to keep everything intact and that thought scares the fucking shit out of me. Dim says he wouldn't screw me, of course, my X said he wouldn't screw me either and it just makes good sense for me to be cautious.


I'm searching in vain for a silver bullet to solve all of it, I'm searching, but I fear that it simply does not exist.

I either trust Dim until I can get a degree and a job with enough of an income to allow me to refinance on my own, or I leave the dreams of college behind and try to get a job and pray that I'll be making enough in a few years to buy my house.

The part that knots me up inside is this.

I've spent all this time trying to get some tattered sense of self-esteem and empowerment. All this time trying to find just a little more courage, just a little more power. I began to pull myself up bit by bit, quelling the self-doubt that welled within me, clawing and grasping to regain some semblance of normalcy. I've spent the last 2 years trying to undo the damage that living with a violent man for 12 years did to my children, and to me. Little by little I began feeling more in control and now this. For all of my efforts, for all my hard work and pain and devastatingly slow progress I still have no 'real' control.

After the years of torment at the hands of this man he will still win. He has done what he set out to do. He wanted, more than anything else, to punish me for being uppity enough to think I could do it without him; to try to live my life without him overseeing it and he has accomplished that goal. His legacy will still be around in 2 years when the kids and I pack our things and move into a shitty 3 bedroom apartment.

After all the degrading, insulting things he has done to me he had to deliver one last blow. He had to cripple me financially, destroy my credit which the marriage linked inextricably with his, he had to devastate me financially and set the dogs to my doorstep when he files bankruptcy and there's little I can do to stop it.

I look back at the progress I have made and realize that I still haven't come far enough to escape the grasp of male authority. Even now, even if Dim pulls my ass from the fire, I will be caught. I am forced once again, rely upon a man to keep everything together, I have to put my faith once more into a man and experience has shown me that I should be wary and cautious. Experience has shown me that men are fickle and what they say right now, may not be what they say in 5 years when I'm still in college and he's no longer with me for whatever reason.

I think that Dim may be right, that the only way to end this cycle once and for all is to pull myself up and get my ass to school. To guarantee that I never find myself in this situation again I will have to put my faith in a man and get the education I need to free myself and my children from the control of any man.

The irony doesn't escape me that for my entire adult life men have been the force that has manipulated and hurt me, and now I'm going to have to close my eyes and take a leap of faith and trust a man to actually help me.

In the meantime, I'll keep searching for that silver bullet. Maybe there is something else I can do that I haven't thought of, maybe there's another way out of this that will still allow me to go to college and make a good income and keep my house. I only have a few short days to do it in though because there's another appointment with the attorney that will finalize all of it and send the wheels spinning for the completion of the divorce.

The saddest part of all is that I don't know if I'd even fight for it all now. If an attorney showed up on my doorstep and told me that she'd do it all pro-bono, I'm so exhausted that I don't know if I'd take it. I'm just desperate, at this point, to get out of this marriage, to take back my maiden name and to wash my hands of all of it. I'm so fucking tired of it all. So tired of the collections people calling me all day, so exhausted by trying to explain to them that I don't have the money, of hearing from them that "You should have thought about this before you put your name on the dotted line" (yes, I actually DID have a woman say that to me, when I explained to her that I was a co-borrower and that she should be talking to the person who made the money. That I was a single mother with 3 kids trying like hell to make ends meet. That was her reply)

He has utterly exhausted me, draining every ounce of fight I had in me, that I managed to scrape up from the ashes of an abusive marriage. I don't know if I'd take the help now, I just want it all to end, and I'm almost willing to let him have anything he fucking wants just to make it all go away.

In the meantime, I'm hunting silver-bullets.

~Biting Beaver