* Why did the lawyer break up with me? @Puppy's got it basically right. He said, Look, there's not enough at stake in this divorce to make this worthwhile to me, and I don't feel like billing you for no progress. There just wasn't any value-added anymore in listening to her lawyer say "STBX doesn't like when SP says A,B,C." Plus, her lawyer wouldn't reply to anything we proposed -- her "strategy" was just to pretend we'd said nothing and make a completely different set of counter-proposals. So he wrote off my debt, and I'm free to find someone fresh.
* After I got re-situated, I started doing a lot of do-it-yourself divorce reading. Then I re-read Getting to Yes, and I decided to Take Action and do what I could to facilitate a resolution.
* To that end, I sent STBX an email last week. Basically it said this: A year ago, almost to the day, I sent you a note suggesting we get all the information put together about income and assets and liabilities, prioritize them, and see what we could figure out. I said there was a lot of stuff we hadn't thought about -- emergency notifications, life insurance, formulas for splitting up retirement accounts -- and that it would be useful for me to be able to see all of that in black-and-white. I trust you will recall that you didn't take kindly to that idea.
[Backstory: From D-Day on, she had demanded I "name my price." What was it going to cost for her to be free? I was not the Finances Partner in the M, so I didn't really have a clue what was going on, money-wise. The note I was referring to I'd written roughly 3 months after she dropped the bomb -- not a lot of time in the grand-scheme-of-recovery-things, I think you'll agree, but I was trying to DB and be the guy-only-a-fool-etc. and 180 -- and since I hadn't been involved in the financial stuff, figuring out what was needed was a 180 -- or so I thought. Anyway, even though she was deep into the Bliss of Signore Schmuckatelli il Primero, her reply foreshadowed her later pattern of Teh Batsh*t Krazee (TM): "So that's how it is! Well if you're going try to f*ck me in the a**, then I'm going with a lawyer!"
[Now she hemmed and hawwed about retaining someone, but after I took a meeting with a collaborative law guy -- on behalf of both of us and with her full knowledge, mind you -- she freaked at his statement that the court would order her to play alimony for more than 10 years -- "that a**hole's totally biased against me!" -- and ultimately pulled the trigger and got her Mouthpiece. (And she then told some people we know that she'd hired a "ball-busting woman lawyer" because her goal was "to bust SP's balls LOL!! That a**hole!")
[I've come to realize, apropos of nothing, that this is one of her key personality patterns: if she doesn't like an answer, the problem isn't the answer but the person giving it. So when the collaborative law guy -- whom she'd never met and was just going off of paper numbers and 30 years' experience in family law -- gave her an answer she didn't like, it was "obviously" because he was "totally biased against" her. I'm not sure how that fits into the context of the overall D-situation, but I've only recently become consciously aware of this shoot-the-messenger mentality of hers.]
My note of last week continued: Now here we are, 12 months and $30,000 later, and we're in exactly the same place we were the instant you clicked "send" on your reply. So we tried it your way. Can we please try it a different way?
And I suggested that each of us propose 2 candidate meeting places and times, agendas, meeting rules, recording rules, and a prioritized list of issues to be examined.
(There are some issues that are so trivial it's ridiculous -- who gets the station wagon. You want the station wagon? Take the dam station wagon, I'll buy a new one, know what I mean?)
I suggested that at this point we ought to be able to reach agreement on some number of things, so why don't we try to whittle the list of contentious issues down, and if we get stuck on 1 or 2 or 3, turn those over to lawyers? Trying this, I said, wouldn't make us any worse off, and if we do have to go to trial the trial would at least be shorter and less costly.
She accepted in principle, but she's resisting on defining procedural rules for the meeting, so we'll see how it all shakes out. I'm insisting on agreed-upon procedural rules because of her pattern of mis-representing what I say to score points with her lawyer.
I think the fact that my lawyer quit and so the mandatory court hearing we had for last week is now postponed until nearly the end of the summer freaked her out a little bit. Back in The Day when she was the Jolly Walkaway and was oh-so-happy to not get rid of me completely -- we can still be Good Friends! -- she was "confident" this wouldn't take more than a year. So the fact that she kind of screwed up by constantly getting her lawyer to whine on her behalf and so might have pushed the final settlement all the way to 2011 is a bit of a wake-up-call (okay, I'm guilty of projecting and mind-reading there, I'll admit, but it seems plausible nevertheless).
And I think seeing the size of the attorney's bills in one lump sum had a salutary effect -- it's one thing to say "$1,000/month" and another to say, "$30,000."
It sucks, what with being the Left-Behind and all, that I'm the one who has take ownership here, but it's clear to me that I'm going to have be the Leader here and get this zombie relationship put into the grave it so richly deserves.
