Unpacking the Declaration

2023-04-17 5854 words 28 minutes

Soo .. I have sat down to try to write this a number of times, and every time it has resulted in an anxiety attack. Somehow my spouse is finding new and improved ways to make this whole situation worse.

My spouse has requested a temporary motion in order to start receiving funds, of which there are none, but for some reason my spouse seems to believe that if they can convince the court then funds will magically manifest. Like, this is somehow part of their game of “me says they says” and not a matter of “let’s look at all the bills, debts, paystubs, tax filings, and other financial obligations and see what is leftover”. The hard reality is that, at the end of each month, I barely have $100 left over after paying for bills/debts. I certainly don’t have the $2700/month my spouse is asking for.

Anyway, the Declaration they filed is pretty painful to even go over, in part because the vast majority of it is, IMHO, self-contradictory or full of gaslighting and or out-right lies; which is particularly apparent for anyone whom has any intimate knowledge about our shared past.

Unpacking this whole thing has proven to be a chore, not least of all because it is an 11-page document which more or less ignores the divorce and generally attacks my posts on this blog. My spouse spends a good deal of time telling the court what I will tell the court. Litterately they make declarations about “my spouse is going to say” and then dictate chunks of the blog to the court, and then try to defend against my blog posts; even going so far as to mention the blog site’s title in their Declaration. My lawyer even made the comment that, in over 30 years of practice, they had never seen anyone write a Declaration like this. Admittedly, my lawyer was also taken back that I wrote a 16-page response.

It also seems quite clear that my spouse does not understand that all of these documents, as well as counter documents presented by me, will end up as public record in court. Basically, my spouse is not free to just “make stuff up” in an attempt to persuade the court. Any claim should be supported by evidence, including counter claims. This is a far-cry from the whole idea that one can just tell random people a random story to get them on your side. This also means that not only will any member of our friends or family eventually be able to look up this information, but it will be relatively simple even for the casual visitor to cross-reference the blog to court records. It is something of the worst case scenario that I had hoped to avoid by anonymzing the blog. Now it will be relatively simple to coorlate them… This has the very potential to become a painfully spectacular example of the Streisand effect.

Depressingly, the response I presented to my lawyers was 16 pages before counting DKIM signed emails between my spouse and I going back to 2006. Basically, my spouse made some claims that are out-right lies, and I was forced to present proof that my spouse is lying. Unfortunately, this drags our personal life into public record, but I really don’t know what else to do.. I feel like I am forced to defend myself. After all, the outcome of this court process will litterately impact me for the rest of my life, it isn’t something I can just shrug off and walk away from, as much as I wish I could. While I am comfortable discussing these topics with my friends, family, and my therapist, I tend to have misgivings about all of this becoming a public spectacle, which it looks destined to become now.

Even the short and skinny version for this post is going to be pretty verbose, though I am going to try to avoid refuting every last little random detail as it would take post upon post upon post, and it isn’t all that important in the end. Anyone whom wants the gory details can lookup the court case.

Claims from my spouse.

Originally my spouse claimed that I gave them an ultimatum to force them to live as a prositute or leave, which was never true. Now they are saying it was live as a prositute or get a job or leave. Their declaration is just shy of admitting that they were told they could keep living as they were and that I would refuse to call it a relationship because it felt to me like prostution, or they could get a job and we could continue on as roommates until the lease was up in August and we had finished the divorce process.

They also continue to try to leave out the entire qualifier that we both agreed on, that regardless of the choice, neither choice was permanent and that should a new solution arise we could discuss it. This was never a “pick one of these two or get out” situation, which is the picture that my spouse keeps trying to paint.

Unfortunately, my spouse has tried to distort this same statement by claiming that I stated I would be removing them as an “authorized user” from my credit cards. I am not certain why they even made that claim really. Working through the process of a separation/divorce for August would indeed be expected to split out our credit cards, our bank accounts, and work through whom was getting/keeping what. Sooo .. I suppose they are admitting to that as the goal, but excluding the entire idea that this was all part of a separation process? It seems a pretty weird point for my spouse to bring into a court Declaration really.

The one thing they have fully confirmed is that I told them I would be taking over the finances. That they would stop having free access to spend money, that I would be setting up a budget plan, and that they would lose free access to the credit cards to wontonly keep spending. It is looking more and more like this small agreed upon detail is the heart of what triggered my spouse to leave. Thanks to all these filings we now know that my spouse had been spending at a rate of close to $3k/month above and beyond what I bring home. That we had over $24k in new debts since July of 2022 that I knew nothing about, and that these debts were about to be discovered when I started working on getting our finances in order.

So my spouse is still holding onto this twisted lie of omission, and it is starting to look like this was all about finances and my spouse getting caught lying about the current state of our finances. The rest of their claims seem to be an attempt to justify the method by which they left and the damage they did, are still doing, to all of those involved.
My spouse claims that I prevented them from getting work, ignoring their previous work as an EMT, a librarian, a school bus driver, a massage thrapist, a food server, an office administrator OR that they already admit in the same declaration that one of the reasons they left was because I told them they needed to get a job… Yes, you don’t need to go to a GOP convention to get this sort of self contradiction.

They even claim they were in the act of becoming a bus driver for the local school district, but that I forced them to stop. I have no idea what they are even talking about. Yes they had mentioned several times about the idea of becoming a bus driver, but so far as I am aware it never went further than that. This claim that they were actively applying is news to me. I certainly never told them to stop looking for work.

What is more frustrating to me is that, over the last several months, we had been talking about the need to downsize our home, to dramatically reduce expenses, and for my spouse to get a job in order to fix our finances and get ready for retirement. We even joked about trying to downsize enough that my spouse could cover all of our living expenses and we could just dump my entire paycheck directly into retirement. My spouse regularly agreed with these ideas and discussed various possibilities…

So, I don’t even know what to call this outside of just a flat out lie that they themselves contradict.
My spouse admits that they took the cash from the safe, but left out the conditions as to how we acquired the money, instead claiming we were “holding it” for their family member; thus justifying them taking it. The reality is that that cash was reimbursement from their family member to us for the thousands of dollars we had spent helping them out. I had tried to give it back to them, and they refused, so it went into the safe; thus it was communal cash.

I suppose this whole claim is another lie of omission.
My spouse claims, rather shockingly, that our chicken business was not a business. That the chickens were in fact, pets? I don’t even know what to make of this statement at this point. It also makes no sense because pet’s can end up in a custody process, just like all communal property. Any attempt to declare them as pet’s doesn’t explain why my spouse up and walked off with them. My spouse left the dog, which was clearly a pet, but “gave away” the chickens, because they were pets? I suspect that my spouse is trying to get the court to ignore their overall worth as a “business”, which potentially includes future damages.

More interesting, they ignore that they filed for a Doing Business As for state taxes and for a logo for the business. They also leave out that they declared over $2k in losses related to “Agriculture Business” on our taxes, or that they opened a “business checking account” with the local credit union. These very same tax documents are already filed with the court. So either my spouse committed tax fraud and tried to claim “pet expenses” as “business agriculture”, or my spouse is just flat out lying.

Spectacularly, they claim that they were doing me a favour by unillaterally making a decision for me by giving the entire flock, and all equipment, away for free to some friends up the street; at least according to their Declaration. This caught me off guard. They just give away $1500 in pullets and equipment? As a favour to me? After taking every personal item from the house, and emptying our checking account?
My spouse has made the curious choice to make a claim of domestic/sexual violence against me, after they rejected filing a restraining order or a protection order, and after admitting they left a collection of firearms in the home. They litterately claim they were subject to “every kind” of abuse and then make implications about physical, sexual, and mental abuse. They also imply that I was abusing our children with a statement about “fearing for our children’s safety”. In all cases they never actually present any evidence for this, they just make a lot of implications which include implying abuse towards the children.

More amazingly, the only example they give of this supposed abuse/violence as being a period of “consensual sexual exploration” (their words) back in 2006/2007. One of the most amazing parts of their decision to even mention this time period is that this was after my spouse had been pursuing an affair with someone whom I had considered a close and personal friend. My spouse’s attempted affair included writing sexual fantasies, masterbating while on the phone with the other party, and even making plans to abandon the children and myself and move to Japan with the other party.

My spouse initially denied everything, begging me to believe them, demanding to know what they ever did to make me not trust them. Tears in their eyes. The most emotional and wordy sentences my spouse ever spoke to me was on that day. It wasn’t until I pulled up the email exchange between my spouse and the other party that the tears stopped, their face lost all expression, and they just sat in silence. I was so mad. They wouldn’t talk, they wouldn’t speak, they had planned on leaving their own children. I told them to leave and they did. I was told by my spouse’s sibling that my spouse had just sat, in silence, for days, not saying anything.

Later they tried to downplay the whole event since “nothing actually happened”, since I caught them before it could. So to them it wasn’t really an affair.

The “consensual sexual exploration” that my spouse tries to claim as abuse happened after getting caught. In response to their fantasy writing, and in a horrible attempt at trying for some form of healing for all the pain, we attempted a number of things which included bondage as well as hitting. In fact, each of us had taken turns as both the dominant role and the submissive role, which included my spouse striking me.

So far as the specific night that my spouse mentions in their Declaration, I did strike them as part of our “consensual sexual exploration”, and at the end of it I cried and asked them if I had hurt them and they held me close and said “yes, but it will heal”…

At this point in time in our life my spouse was not fully aware of the scope of physical abuse I had received as a child, and they had no knowledge of the sexual abuse I had experienced. They did not understand how these events had hurt me, what was going on in my head, what I was struggling with internally.

So yes, these events did indeed happen, though not at all as my spouse described. Honestly, it was a really crappy solution to a really crappy siutation. Over the years I have mentioned time and time again how horrible I felt about the whole episode, how I felt it was the lowest point in our life together. And while I have asked them occasionally about other sexual exploration options, nothing has ever happened as my spouse has said no, and I have respected that.

The only other claim in my spouse’s entire declaration is a claim that “this one time” I struck them before kicking them out of our home, though they never state anything more about it. I have no idea what they are even talking about. They make no attempt to even add dates or describe anything. No such event ever happened and and they have failed to even associate it with any one of the numerous times that they were kicked out of our home. If they had managed to make an effort to associate this claim with real-world events then I very well could refute it with more emails/chats. Right now it is just a vague statement which seems tooled to continue to vilify me.

Regardless, emails about the “consensual sexual exploration” events were submitted to the lawyers, as were emails related to the rest of our sexual lifestyle; as this was the only way I felt I could refute the rest of my spouses claims on the subject.
My spouse claims I kicked them out of our home more than 12 times in over 18 years, but they also claim that they were the ones attmpting to leave and that I had begged them to come back. In the end I don’t even know how to interpret what they are trying to say. Were they kicked out, or did they leave?

Their claims about 12 times over 18 years seems pretty accurate, that is roughly the number of affairs my spouse attempted over that same period of time. I am a little surprised to find out that they were tracking their affairs that closely.

These affairs were painfully numerous and varied, including attempting to have an affair while we were in marriage counseling, pursuing an affair and getting the other party to pay some $2k against our debts for my spouse (I learned about the cash for this years later), pursuing an affair to run away to some other country, or just pursuing random acts of sex and sexual fantasies with other people.

These affairs were so frequent that I eventually agreed to an open relationship on the hopes that my spouse would at least start the process of communicating. Spectacularly, my spouse decided to lie to me about their affairs during our “open marriage” period because they didn’t think I would be comfortable.

Emails from my spouse confirm all of this. Discussions about our open marriage, them telling me they lied to me during the open marriage because they were protecting me, emails about their plans to leave for Japan, all of it. They even confirm that it was my spouse whom requested to come back home, and in one of their most recent events in 2017, our children requested that my spouse go to therapy as a condition for coming back home.

So yes, I suspect my spouse is right, they were likely kicked out at least 12 times in 18 years, but they failed to explain why.
My spouse makes a really odd claim that they did try to talk to me about therapy.. this is pretty wild because it is also the only claim in the entire document regarding any attempt to communicate with me at all. In fact, at one point in the document my spouse actually admits to keeping more and more secrets out of concern that I would use information against them. Again, this feels surreal as the only time I have used chats and emails against my spouse was to call them out on their lies/deceptions; much in the same way I am being forced to do now in response to their Declaration. Sooo .. due to our lack of communication and their failed promises, they chose to keep more secrets as that would solve things?

What is the most interesting is that we never talked about their therapy, at all. I would ask how it was going, how they felt things were going, if they felt they had any new tools or anything to help work on the communication problems, the trust problems, the procrastintion problems. They regularly gave a vague answer which was more or less “it is going good”. That was the extent of our discussions “about” therapy in the last decade. Prior to that the only discussion we had was for my spouse to admit that their therapist told them that they are not a marriage counselor. To this day I do not know if they were even going, at least regularly. We certainly don’t have any medical bills for therapy that I know of, certainly not after we left Texas a decade ago.

Spectacularly, my spouse’s Declaration attacks my attempts to understand and locate information dealing with anxiety/depression on web sites such as Psychology Today. Not Reddit, or Facebook, or some random social media/forum site, but Psychology Today. I am attacked for trying to understand what they are going through, for looking up research and advice from profressionals, and for attempting to bridge the communication gap. Apparently all of that makes me a horrible person.
My spouse admits that all accounts and finances were 100% co-mingled. They also 100% admit that they had full control of the credit cards by admitting that they knew I would need access to the safe to get the credit cards, and that is why they sent the safe code to their lawyer to pass to me; after 2 attempts before we even had lawyers to get the codes, a month after they left, after I had already cancelled all the cards and had them re-issued, and after they read this blog.

Curiously, they falsely claim that my attempts to get the safe code happened after they had acquired legal representation. I was forced to present date/time information for the only 2 attempts that I tried to ask a 3rd party to contact my spouse for the code. Both times happened before legal representation existed and before any papers were served.

It is pretty amazing to me that they did not give the codes up when initially asked, that they waited a month, and that they tried to make claims that I was still trying to contact them. So once again I am forced to defend against false claims, providing dates/times and confirming that my spouse is lying.

Still, while admitting that they had control of the finances, they simultaneously attempt to claim that all financial debt was mutual. I am not certain how this works. My spouse was in charge of all finances, had control of all the cards. I didn’t spend a single dime w/out asking their permission first to make certain we could afford it, with the most recent example of this being me asking if we could afford for me to get my college degree.

My spouse litterately chose to belittle/attack me in their Declaration due to my inability to remember the safe code that my spouse came up with. They include mocking me for forgetting the PIN numbers to debit cards that I litterately never use because, again, my spouse was in 100% control of our finances. I never needed to use any of these cards, but apparently that is worth mocking me over? In a court document?

So, they admit they had control of the cards and that I went through them to spend, but then claim that we are both responsible? And I was in control? And they want the court to order me to take on $54k in debts while paying my spouse $2700/month in maintenance? As this has progressed it continues to smell like my spouse is saying/doing anything to avoid dealing with the financial elephant in the room.
My spouse attempts to take a common complaint from me that I have made verbal over the years, the very complaint from this blog, and re-spin it to describe me in a different light. Basically, they admit that we had periodic problems which involved a lot of crying, begging, pleading, frustration and even yelling, and they admit that these events happened with an ever increasing frequency. Amazingly, they completely leave out the broken promises, the lies, the affairs, the rotting food, the piles of junk around the house, the debt, etc. They have left out the daily life of waiting for the next lie, the next disconnect, the next broken promise. Their entire claim leaves out their entire involvement and only describes my side of things, and w/out any context. Only the fall-out and none of the lead-up. Effect w/out cause. Thus suddenly I am painted to look like this emotionally unstable person whom has nothing to react to.

This, I have learned, is gaslighting.
My spouse claims I controlled their entire life:

That I prevented them from working, even though they had held several jobs in the past and I was trying to encourage them to get a job to help prepare for retirement, and they admit that me telling them they needed to get a job was one of the reasons they left.

That I controlled them even though they had 100% control of all the finances.

That I controlled them even though they were given free reign to pursue their own attempts at a private business, egg sales, crochette sales, build an online website with recipes and “help” information for taking care of chickens and the like. To try to make money doing whatever job they chose, even random hobbies.

That I controlled them even though they were allowed to go open private checking/savings accounts, complete with the account statements delivered to our home.

That I controlled them even though I agreed to an open marriage so they could feel free to continue sleeping with other people so long as they stopped lying to me and stopped hurting our children.

It is all so Trumpian to me, and it is so funny I can’t stop crying while writing all of this.
My spouse tries to claim that they left me with “plenty of money to live on”, after admitting that they transferred $8k from our account of the $10k we had total. Spectaculalry, a loan payment for a $34k loan to cover my spouse’s previous credit card debt was due the following week, a measely $832/month payment. If they had ever written the budget plan they had been promising then they would have known that we didn’t have enough money to do anything with. I wasn’t aware of our financial situation until I drew up a budget on 02/11, 1 day after they left.

Further more, my spouse has requested that I be allocated some $54k in debts, which includes $12k of the $24k extra credit card debt created by my spouse between July 2022 and Jan 2023. They further request they I pay them another $2700/month in maintenance, even though I can barely afford the debts/bills I am already dealing with and I can’t even afford new clothing.

What is the most amazing aspect of the issue of debt is that my spouse never admits to the amount of debt we have in their Declaration. They mention the accounts, but not the debt amount in the accounts. This is a 50/50 state, and so legally, my spouse gets half of the total debts. It doesn’t matter who’s name they are in. All told we have $70k in debts between us, and according to the state, my spouse is going to receive half of that. If they want to receive less, then it comes out of any maintenance they get awarded or liabilities/property they give up.

They further claim that I “patently lied” with my submissions to the court which outline 100% of all my spending and demonstrates, thanks to the amazing power of math, that I am in fact broke. I am so broke that my lawyer has advised me to consider filing for bankruptcy.

Right now I can scrape by, but that is all I can do. If I file for bankruptcy then my credit starts over. This will significanty impact my ability to even locate a new place to rent as most places today require a credit score of 650, which I will no longer have. It also impacts my job prospcts because, insanely, more and more companies are looking at credi reports now.
My spouse tries to claim to the court that the checking account that they opened years ago and told me was “for the chicken business” was actually a secret bank account that they were using to save up money to leave, but that it never had more than $700 in it. They further claim that they “knew I would cut them off” when they eventually left and so they were going to need this secret checking account. This is a pretty impressive claim since they received account statements to our home, some of which I still have.

My spouse and I have utilized a password vault for these accounts for years. Previously we had used LessPass, but due to changes announced in December of 2022 in regards to how LessPass functions we ended up migrating to BitWarden in January. I did temporarily change the passwords to all of our shared-accounts on the advice of lawyers during consults after the financial damage my spouse did. Because my spouse acted the way they did, the lawyers advised me to take precautions to protect myself financially, which included blocking my spouse’s access to credi cards and other accounts. I was advised to open a new checking account, which I did, and move my direct deposit, which I did. I restored the passwords in the password vault upon receiving the Temporary Restraining Orders. My spouse still has access to our shared-accounts via the password vault. The only shared-accounts that are not accessible in the password vault are the ones my spouse has changed the passwords on. Their claims that I have cut them off are more of their attempts to paint me as a villain.

Lastly, they failed to submit a full transaction history of this account, and instead only report a transaction history for Jan 2023. Amazingly, in that 1 month transaction they confirm that they were direct depositing funds from OfferUp which were acquired by selling communal property from our home.

We have to go through the process of requesting full and complete histories for all of their accounts. Between the 1 “secret” checking account, and 2 other accounts that my spouse failed to even admit to, we have 3 accounts with no history, and 3 more with only partial history. The process of performing a formal discovery will, so far as I am aware, result in doing lookups based on social security numbers and filing paperwork with the financial institutes directly. This will end up adding to our shared finanacial burden, and so it is not in either of our interest to be trying to hide our account history.

Besides, I have nothing to hide.
My spouse tries to claim that they had multiple cards that I was not an authorized user on. It turns out, my spouse added me as an authorized user on all but 1 of their cards, but never turned the cards over to me. The one card that I am not an authorized user on was only opened up recently, after my spouse had maxed out most of our other cards; though they took special care to keep our VISA from the credit union debt free as this is the card I would be mostly likely to see, and was the only VISA card in my wallet.

Still, it looks like my spouse leveraged my name+social to get a better credit limit and then just pretended I wasn’t on the cards. My spouse’s attempts to claim otherwise flies in the face of my credit report which clearly has me listed as an authorized user on these cards. I even received credit alerts notifying me about the “new address” I had moved to when my spouse changed the address on their cards, because .. I am an authorized user. Not giving me a copy of these cards doesn’t change that.
Thanks to the incomplete financial filings from my spouse, we have learned that my spouse started paying for a storage unit back in October. No idea what was stored here, or why they needed one. Were they taking communal property and storing it here? Were they buying/selling stuff from OfferUp using funds from selling property from our home? We just don’t yet know.

Curiously, my spouse also claims that they had been saving up, for over 2 years to leave (the “secret” checking account that had its account statements mailed to our home), but they also claim that they decided that our marriage was unworkable until after I told them I would be taking over the finances. Soo.. what was the storage unit for? What was being stored here?
My Spouse admits to walking off with the gift cards, but insists they were already spent. This is just an amazing claim, I sort of think it speaks for itself.

I had to go locate the redemption history for the accounts I have access to. This history appears to contradict my spouse’s claims. Further more, any VISA gift cards used for online purchases would have had to have been added as a payment option, of which none exist. That leaves only a claim of using VISA/MC gift cards for shopping, and ignoring things such as store specific Gift Cards. E.g. Amazon.

There is so much more in this document, and it is just all over the place, I just can’t write much more about it.

Ultimately, my spouse has demonstrated to me that our entire marriage was really just a lie. I really don’t know what motivates my spouse, or what is going on in their head. I hate that they have chosen to take this path of lying all the way to court. That all of this is going to end up in public record. That I am still stuck dealing with unworkable choices due to their whims and fancies.

They have made some insanely hurtful falsehoods, the vast majority of which will be refuted by dragging our private life into public record for all those whom are morbidly curious as to what a truly fucked up marriage looks like.

The only good I can see is that my spouse has given me something tangible that I can refute in court, as opposed to leaving this as a “me says vs they says” situation.

Right now I just want all this to be done and over. Even thinking about all the hell that is going on causes me to spend my days curled up in bed wanting to avoid it all.

To think, on 02/03 I had talked to them and told them I felt our marriage was over, that we were not on a path to recovery. That when our youngest moves out, and our lease was up, we needed to go our separate ways, and that we should start the separation process. I was tired of being ignored, of being lied to, of being betrayed, and of being sexually used. I told them that if they wanted to continue living as they had been, that that was up to them, but that I couldn’t call it a relationship anymore. It felt like prostitution to me. We had discussed the options going forward, we drew up notes, and one of those options was for my spouse to get a job and start preparing for the day when our lease was up. My spouse chose to continue living as things were, much to my shock. On 02/05 we discussed this again, and I made certain they understood that none of these options were the final word, that should either of us find an alternate solution that we could sit down and talk about it. We also agreed that should we start working on our relationship, that should things start to get better, that we didn’t have to pull the trigger on the divorce. Nothing was off the table, there was no ultimatum.

Instead my spouse chose to empty our accounts, pay off their debts, pull our youngest out of school just months before graduation, and move some 2600 miles across country. For what? To avoid getting caught in the lie about our finances? Can all of this really be over something so petty?