And Then Came the Financial Reality

For the better part of the night last night I could not stop imagining dialogs, questions, claims, responses, pleads. The constant anxiety, constant wonder, and constant imagination preventing me from finding sleep. A good portion of the issues going through my head were due to divorce research I had done. The state where we currently reside is a no-fault state, that is a marriage can be terminated for any reason. Further more, all property acquired during the marriage is community property, to be divided 50/50 by the legal proceess. This includes all pictures, furniture, vehicles, community owned businesses (our chicken and equipment), and debts. I also learned that the moment my spouse walked out the door that we were officially informally separated.

Eventually I turned on a random TV show and let it play in the background. Just the effort of attempting to follow the words of the show helped to mute the voices in my head.

I awoke to a dream of dialogs and an overwhelming sense of anxiety. Walking into the living room and seeing the empty walls filled me with pain and sorrow and once again I found myself curled up crying, for how long I could not say.

Do the morning things, do the routine, try to find footing in the new fragile reality.

Upon trying to have a cup of morning coffee I found that my spouse took the coffee cup that had a picture of our oldest when they were still young, a gift to me that was now gone. Every photo of our family, of our children, gone. My spouse had erased them from my existence. I had myself another weep.

I decided that I needed to contact my children, I had no idea what to say, it was all so horrible, and I was so scared of the claims my spouse was already making; had they told all of the children similar stories? When did they tell them, whom else did they tell; whom else did they poison?

I have no idea if you have heard, or what you have been told, and I would ask that should you have been told anything, that you please avoid passing any judgements until you have heard both sides of the story, in particular after it goes through the legal process, I do not want to get into a “he says she says” situation.

Ultimately I came home to an empty house yesterday, devoid of many of our family items, some of them of great sentimental value, my spouse and your youngest sibling have apparently moved out and I have been unable to contact them. They both left some painfully shocking and hurtful letters to me, and I am not certain what is really going on, but based on the content of your parents letter to me I am fearful that they are on the path to a defimation lawsuit, which will likely be separate from the divorce that seems all but inevitable at this point. If you have not been told anything then I am deeply sorry you had to find out this way. You kids deserved so much more than the constant distrust and irresponsibiulity your parents have shown one another and the environment that created. I wish we could have been better people and set a better example for all of you.

One of the things that my evening research had informed me was that I would need to collect a rather large sum of data regarding debts, paystubs, account transactions, itemized lists of personal property. Further more, as part of this new reality and the upcoming legal fees, I would need to get finances squared away and build a budget plan. Having a budget plan was one of the things my spouse had been promising to do for litterately months, but had failed to start. Curiously, my spouse and I set up most things to autopay to credit cards, and every automatic payment and every due-date was scheduled in a shared calendar. So it wasn’t like it was a lot of work to build a budget plan, most of the work had already been done really, just needed to plug it all into a spreadsheet and see how things looked.

And that is when I found out that my spouse had transferred $1200 to one of their credit cards. While I was aware that my spouse had been spending down our savings, I was told that we had no pending balances on any of our credit cards. To see a $1200 payment go out to a card in their name came as a significant surprise.

The anxiety swelling up again I checked the status of all our credit cards, all our loans, all our bills and came to a shocking conclusion. Based on the data I could find, we were $21.48 into the hole every month. That is, our outgoing expenses exceeded our incoming pay by $21.48. Further more, we had a standing balance of $12,524.21 on our credit cards. This, combined with 2 other unsecured loans for my spouse’s previous credit card debts put us at $67,764.29 in debt.

My spouse had been lying to me, again, and now I couldn’t even afford a lawyer to handle our divorce. The further betrayal just added to the pain caused by the sound of the echos off of the empty walls that used to be lined with pictures of our children.

Again I curled up and cried, wishing for it to all just go away .. to wake up from this horrible nightmare of pain.