This time I had a new support group, my Wednesday night cancer caregiver ladies. They showed me tremendous compassion. They said, "With the bipolar and the heart condition and the cancer, he has no right to ask you to endure more, especially gambling. Tell him he needs to sign over the house and the real property to you. Give him a choice. Tell him he can either sign over the real properties to you and give you a divorce on paper but you'll stay with him through everything or he can split everything down the middle and you can get a real divorce and go your own ways."
I liked that gutsy advice. It was time for you to pony up something for me. I have always been the financial rock in this relationship. You have frittered away any penny you've ever had. Your inheritance, in excess of $160,000, was squandered on toys and poker. The money you made from your business many years ago and the from the sale of properties you had owned, were completely gone. Not only were they completely gone but you had further encumbered yourself with student loans. I knew nothing of this before we got married. We got married before people commonly made financial disclosures before walking down the aisle. This turned out to be a critical mistake on my part. I should have asked you for a full financial accounting and a financial commitment to putting something into the house I owned. Ah, but hindsight is so crystal clear, isn't it?
I gave you several days to think about how you would protect me. I asked you periodically what you had come up with but all you could think of was getting a divorce, splitting everything down the middle, and remaining together like we have been. That way, you said, I'd be protected for 'my' half.
In 1993, during one of your most famous manic episodes, my dad had said that you were the most selfish person he'd ever known. Ah, yes, there's another one of those comments that lived on in my head, not because I was offended at what my father had said about my husband but because I had begun to feel it was true. Give me half??? Throw me a BONE!
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