Brave Little Gerda Faces the Cutting Winds

[Gerda]

Devvo, I think you would need to read my whole story to understand, but to try to make it short -- there is no truth in anything he is saying. He squandered everything, drove our biz into the ground, ran up tens of thousands in debt, doesn't work much and hasn't given me money for house or kids in over five years. I slowly had to build walls around our joint ventures, block him from my cards, etc. I refused to sell our house so that he could live without working. And that is why he says I control everything. It's all madness.

Likewise the clashing. If you have followed my thread at all, it may be apparent that my goal is sainthood. I'm only partly kidding. But I will say that though we did fight in the early days, the year or so before BD, as he got angrier and angrier and I didn't understand it was MLC so I resented him for not loving me and for leaving me alone to deal with our biz and kids and debts. But then I became a Christian. And I have raised my voice to him maybe five times in the last five years -- e.g, when I found out about OW, etc. Generally I am very kind to him or try not to interact if I am hurt or think I will say something angry/harsh. So again, all madness. The only clash is that of paragraph one, but I don't fight or engage, I just don't give him the money he wants or I show him our accounts and how we are always short and he becomes furious that I am creating a "myth of scarcity." Our accounts are all joint, he could easily empty them or at least look at them. He told the court he has no access to them and I control everything and the court was like, "Wha...? They are joint accounts!"

When he was the H I knew before, he was not very good with money so I did all the books and paid all the bills. In fact, he was deep in debt when we started dating, and I helped him set up a schedule to get out of it, and he did. Once were a family and then running businesses together, I was every week begging him to do it with me but he always refused. Even after BD, I kept trying to involve him, if only to show him how dire things were, but he refused. then when he got crazier, he said he wanted total control and to do all bills and run everything alone without me, etc. I tried to show him how but he would just sort of disappear about it. I was too scared to abandon it to him. He always had bad credit so everything was and is in my name as far as debts, and I knew our biz would totally go under with the way he was disappearing and so crazy and out of it. His vision of me is in fact almost comforting, because it's so far from reality that it helps me to know that it's not about me.

I'm not saying I was perfect. I did and do millions of things wrong. I am just saying that his view of things in that way is totally insane.