Snoskred - Life in the Country

Well there’s a lot of things I’ve probably never mentioned to you guys, and I believe one of them is that my other half has an ex wife. That’s fine, I have an ex-husband.. however.

When you are young and stupid you sometimes make mistakes that come back to haunt you for a lot of years. Unfortunately the ex-wife got pregnant. Whether by her own plan (and given what happened later, I’m of the opinion that she knew what she was doing and it was quite deliberate) or by accident, it takes two so he has to take his share of the blame.

However, he has to pay much more than his share for the kid. Take a guess what his ex-wife does for a living? Yes, you’re incredibly psychic. Nothing. Zip. Bugger all. Even though after the kid was born, she got a diploma in something which could easily earn her 50 grand a year working *from home*.

Then, I enter the situation. She doesn’t like me. For a year she fights us over all the most minute, tiny, insane little things. EG one weekend she told us, you can’t take him to fast food places. You better believe the minute she said that, we ate every meal at a fast food place that weekend. Including breakfast at Subway. There’s much much more, but I can’t even get into it with you guys. It was a horrible time in our lives, made even more horrible when she decided to stop our access to the kid and take us to court. Yes, mothers can do that in this country. It’s then up to the father to shell out huge amounts in legal fees trying to get their access back.

$15,000 later, and a year and a half had gone by, and the lawyer told us it could take another two years and at least $25,000 more in legal fees not to mention how much the actual court thing would cost, we made a decision to let it go and put that money to better uses. Yes, I’m sure many of you reading this are thinking whoa, what better use than to reunite a father with his kid? But you don’t get it - she would have been fucking with us the whole time. Our minds, our house, and I’m sure at some point she would have said he was allergic to cats and he wasn’t allowed there until we got rid of ours.

So the child support has always been a slightly bitter pill to swallow. Knowing as we did that not one cent of it went to the kid - she was actually buying a house with that money, and not one trip to Mcdonalds for a happy meal, or one $2 admission to the local heated swimming pool would she give to that kid. Maybe we’d like to buy a house with it instead?

She already had moved another man in with her, and during the court battle she got pregnant. Hello? Anyone figure out the pattern here? Of course the man is no longer in her life but 18% of his salary is. And 18% of my other half’s salary, which actually shot up to over 25% last year after he left his long term job to move here and got a lump sum payout. Plus the parenting sole pension. Plus any other payments she can get. She’s earning quite a packet sitting on her ass doing nothing, she won’t even drive the kid to school if its raining, she doesn’t give a shit about that kid, who I’m sure is going to turn out to be very damaged. The sad fact is a lot of women in this country do this.

Karma is however quite a bitch, because the second child seems to have something very wrong with it. I don’t know what as I have never seen the kid myself but from all reports it seems to be quite disabled. Do I feel sorry for her? No. Not after the hell she put us through. I can’t even describe the personal hells we went to for quite a long time thanks to this situation. However, the following might be a clue for you.

With child support, if we are one day late making the payment, she does not see the money for a whole month. So if the money isn’t there when she’s expecting it, the other half’s phone rings. She goes on for 45 minutes about how she wants to allow him access to his child again, how he misses his daddy, puts the kid on the phone to make nice, makes promises that she will ensure they get to see each other and she will undo all of the court things, apologises for being such a bitch and god knows what else. Right at the end of the call, she asks where the child support is.

Of course, everything she’s said for the previous 44 minutes has been complete lies, however it gets the other half’s hopes up. He loves his kid, he would like to see him, he wants to be a part of his life and he’s crushed that he’s not. She did this a good number of times before he realised what she was really doing. All she cared about was where the money was, and anything else was just her trying to manipulate him.

So the other half has put in for a re-assessment of how much he is paying recently, and the shoe has been hanging over our head ever since. You better believe I want to get that phone call before he does, because I have some things to say to her. However he’s now pissed enough he’s not going to fall for her bullshit again if she does call. He’s had his heart crushed enough times to know better.

The child is now 14, there’s only 4 more years of this child support left to go. I’ll be honest, I dread it ending, because how much do you want to bet that kid is going to be sent to our doorstep? After she’s done irreparable damage to him. Frankly, I’m not excited about the idea of living in the same house as him. I get these pictures in my head of being stabbed in my sleep. I don’t think I’ll be able to do it, but I know the other half is going to want to, and how can I say no when I know how much it means to him?

So really, the shoe is always over head. We live in a constant pretense that everything will be fine, that we’ll know how to handle it when it happens, we try not to talk about it because it stirs up issues. That’s probably more scary than anything else.

But the kid I remember was, when out from under the shadow his mother cast, a lot of fun. We used to build lego and play computer games - transport tycoon we were both addicted to. He would sit next to me and point at the screen telling me where to lay the tracks for the trains, and the roads. We had a fishtank with live bearing fish and one night we sat there watching little fish babies mysteriously arrive and talked about what kind of lives fish lead. It wasn’t the brady bunch, but I did adore that kid even though he wasn’t mine.

Neither of us know him now. He’s not allowed to write or call his Dad. So how can anyone let a stranger, though biologically related to one of us, move into our house?

It’s a long way off, I hope. Maybe I still have time to work it out.