Afterall...This IS my Life

[Burgbud]

...don't you need a cooperative spouse for mediation?

You need a spouse willing to mediate instead of let the attorneys battle it out. If he has a lot of sh!t to do and not a lot of money for lawyers, mediation is in your H's own self-interest. Whether he's interested in pursuing his own self-interest is a separate matter.


He went on to say that real separation agreements are around 16 pages (as opposed to our 4)

Our Virginia SA (which I just got notarized yesterday *again* since she lost the first set) is about six pages. Her L doesn't much care for it and isn't going to recommend the mediator we used any more. And yes, it's full of loopholes. As my old boss used to say, a contract is only as good as the people you're contracting with. All contracts have clauses one of the parties can consider a loophole and if they do, back to court you go. Back to the point, despite the fact that her L doesn't care for our SA we're going with it. It doesn't need to be 16 pages long.


his L couldn't believe it came from an attorney and that it had 'malpractice' written all over it.

Whatever. Tell him he's free to get his uber-attorney to draft a document for your lawyer to make fun of. (Okay don't, but you get the point.) As I'm sure you know, you don't *have* to have a SA to move out. You want it, for sure, to spell out custody. If H will split custody without an SA then it's optional at this point. If he won't you can get a custody hearing separate from splitting your property but that takes awhile. You might be able to get an emergency custody hearing if he withholds the kids from you which, when I did it, took about three weeks. If it might come to that, talk to your lawyer now.

Good luck, Heather. I'm sorry you're dealing with this over the holidays. Eventually he'll realize that you're truly no longer available for him to jab into but it'll be awhile. Sit with your feelings and process them when you need to. Smile when you can!