Pretty Much Done

[built4speed]

No, just the paranoia. Her mother has schizophrenia with psychotic tendencies (and was institutionalized for nine months last year), and her dad was on schizo meds for 25 years and we never knew until just before he died a few years ago. That said, she was raised by these people and she does have many issues, like lack of trust and lack of forgiveness, and assumes the worst about people. But other than assuming things about people based on no data, there just doesn't seem to be any of the more serious stuff. She does get scared if she perceives major money issues, due to her childhood where her folks would drink their paychecks and leave no money for food, but we have monitored her closely and see no real evidence of the really serious stuff.

She is having trouble adjusting to the new financial arrangement. She says she had done some budget that showed she needed more $$$ than we agreed on in the settlement, but I have never seen this "mythical" budget. I told her if she had a different set of assumptions than we were using she should have brought it up, but I really think it was a fantasy and not really defendable at the collaborative table. Even in the collaboration, she was showing a budget spending $1000 more than I was, but I'll need a bigger mortgage and, for a while, more for replacing household items, since I'm the one moving. She was doing things like adding $200 a month for church donations that we weren't doing last year, so she inflated it a bit so she could show extra cost that would prevent her from paying for kids expenses. Yeah, I had some other budgets, too, but I couldn't have reasonably convinced her and her atty to agree to them. Her atty is a really sharp guy, and he thought we did a pretty good settlement. She, of course, is whining about all of it, but that is her way of working through issues that scare her.

Bottom line: she insisted on this, and she isn't going to get everything she wants. I don't want to be divorced, but that is the deal I get. So she needs to get used to having, how do I say, a non-optimal solution to the problem. Welcome to the club.