Payday

So it is finally payday. I managed to pay all my bills that were due, some of the bills were paid on newly arrived copies of my credit cards. By the time the bills, loan payments, and rent were paid I had a whole $74 remaining to hold me over until the next paycheck.

My friend came over again for the weekend. It was good to talk, to tell jokes, to laugh, even if I also spent large swaths of time crying and trying in vain to understand. Our oldest once mentioned that they had read somewhere that human tears are a mechanism for releasing excessive stress/anxiety hormones. I suspect there is some accuracy to that consdering how much less anxious I feel after spilling rivers of tears.

I was served the petition for divorce that night. The paperwork was surreal. Notes of particular interest to me was that the paperwork didn’t look to have been started until the 02/20 or 02/21. There were some rather curious demands as well.

Among them where:

• My spouse wants me to pay their legal fees, after they walked away with $7k+ in our community funds. I still don’t know if they walked away with the $3k in cash, and I have not yet learned how much they had transferred to their private checking account over time.
• My spouse wants college/post-secondary education funds. This is particularly startling to me considering that our 18 year old was already signed up to enlist in Military service as soon as they graduated highschool.
• My spouse wants long-distance travel expenses for our 18 year old to be paid for by me. I don’t even know what this is.
• My spouse wants the rights to declare our 18 year old as their dependent on my spouse’s 2023 tax filings. I have no idea what to think of this really. I will still be paying their health insurance, spousal maintenance, and I lose the right to declare them as a dependent?

No other requests. No restraining orders, no protection orders, none of it. Just more give me more money.

The largest shocker though was to learn that my spouse signed the documents in a state that is some 2600 miles away from me. My spouse had packed up our child, all their belongings, all of our family photos, gifts to me from our children, our cat, and driven it all 2600 miles across country.

I could not help but laugh, with tears in my eyes I just laughed.