I forgot to mention something... while I was relating to all of you about the things said in the mediation -- in general, I forgot about the one thing that upset me greatly.
xW mentioned at one point how she now feared for her own safety and for our sons. This is serious. She said that I had contacted a mutual friend and it had scared the both of them to think that maybe I was going off the deep end. I told xW to read the letter I wrote to this friend. I told the mediator that all I had done was to merely ask this family friend, who professed to have a deep Christian faith, to pray for xW as we go through this litigious conflict. I said that xW should know me better than to spread the lie that I was in any way a violent person -- at no time in all our history had I ever shown myself to be violent let alone a threat to anyone's health.
Fortunately, the mediator didn't want either of us to get side-tracked. She said that each of us really knows where we may have crossed a line and if so we need to stop it.
I am fuming now over how xW has sought to portray me as a religious fanatic capable of causing her and our children harm. I am quite certain she's just feigning this fear she expressed just to get under my skin -- and I guess she has: so now I am the one who is scared because she will now say and do anything to get the upper hand. She should be ashamed.
As for the family friend... well, the moral of the story is not to involve such people even if it is to ask them to pray for xW. I am disheartened to discover that some people's profession of faith is but a thin veneer, it would seem.
This court battle is going to cost us both heavily in more ways than one as we each discover just who our real friends are one by one. This is going to be very ugly.
