Little Gerda Goes Forward with Courage and Safety

[Rita]

Own, this is incredibly helpful, thank you!

I have asked in the last two motion sequences for an end to motions before trial in order to staunch the dissipation, but maybe it needs a motion of its own.

My judge has not ruled on motion sequences 8, 9, or 10. So I am not sure there is any point in filing another but I will try what you are saying in my response to sequence 11. What you say about instransigence sounds so obvious and clear when you put it like that! I can't believe that not one of THREE lawyers I had ever said that. One of them said if we went to trial, he would ask judge to impute income, but with all of them I kept asking why we weren't filing a motion about it and they were all just unwilling to stop playing defense.

One thing you may have missed in my story -- H's lawyer has not been paid in well over a year. In summer, 2019, I wrote to the godfather's wife and asked her to stop paying. She of course didn't know about it but I think it caused quite a ruckus in that household and the payments stopped. So H's L complained to the L I had at the time that my letter had caused him to stop getting paid. And since then he finally I guess pushed my H to accept a small buy out on the upstate rental, almost all of which went to the L. But he is now owed probably 80-100K, based on the last bill I saw, and is trying to force a sale of the house rather than a payment plan, because he is afraid he won't get paid. He just keeps working for free and billing. That is the main thing I was going to complain about, as well as the time he had to be pushed away from me to avoid a physical altercation. Oh and also the fake offer letters he has produced trying to force me to buy H out at an insanely inflated price.

Likewise H doesn't want to do the payment plan -- and I offered 50K (that I would borrow) as a downpayment -- because he thinks he has to give it all to his L.

Anyway I see what you are saying but I think it is important to get this lawyer's extremely unethical practices on record. Otherwise I am just passing his evil on to the next woman he targets. So I'm not sure it matters if it "works." Think of the limits that weren't placed on people in America the past couple years and what that led to recently.

Likewise my judge. She is known as the worst judge of all the divorce court judges in my city. Everyone complains about her laziness and her anger and the fact that she doesn't care about children. She also has an all-female court staff and I think they are trying so hard to show they aren't biased towards men that they are totally biased toward women. But no one ever complains officially. We all just pass it on to the next sad woman.

To all of you following along -- despite my determination here, I will say that last night, the first time I have been ALONE in years because my son is skiing and my daughter is with the was-band, I found myself face to face with that old demon, disbelief. Disbelief that H is such a terrible person and that he is unwilling to stop trying to destroy me. Disbelief that he would undertake mediation at the same time as he was filing a really disgusting motion against me. I know that that is who he is now and who he may have partly been all along, and yet my raw little heart felt that pain again last night. I tossed and turned all night despite finally having the chance to sleep in without any kids demanding anything. It's the wound of the broken arm -- it hurts and aches again and you have to remind yourself that that's the same wound. It's not a new one, nothing is going to get broken again. I am tired of fighting H's darkness, but I keep trying to tell myself all day today as I finally do the deep clean of this place I can never do when the kids are here, that all I have to do is focus on the light, walk with faith and grace, not succumb to despair or rage or bitterness, and that it may not work, but that this is what it means to do battle with darkness, the darkness in me and the darkness in H. I don't know the answer and that little demon of disbelief is still sitting on the windowsill grimacing at me but I think there is a light in telling those LBS who are earlier in this journey that you can't have as your goal to never feel sad or heartbroken again. You just have to have as your goal the ability to face it without fear.