An Offer

Math is not my favorite subject. Well, that's quite an understatement. I can have visceral reactions to math. I had many unpleasant mathematical experiences in school, not the least of which ended in me just wanting to pass Geometry in 10th grade. By the end of the school year I had completely given up any hope of understanding geometry and spent the time in the back of the class talking with Danny, who not only understood the subject matter but was ahead of the class. He was very bright, very self-assured, a talented musician, and has grown up to be extremely successful and wealthy. Ah, but that is not what this is about. I was supposed to be almost gifted in math but the gifts never unwrapped themselves, and my life after Geometry has been one of intentional math-avoidance. I have learned the hard way, that if you want your divorce to be over, you have to be the advocate for that. Otherwise, attorneys aren't tremendously motivated to bring things to a close. Courts have caught on to this and now set mandatory trial dates if divorces aren't finalized within a certain period of time. Case in point: Six months ago I told my attorney I wanted my divorce to be over in six weeks. And we still drag on. My divorce would, I knew, eventually involve some pretty advanced math. My attorney had me hire a forensic accountant to figure out what I was worth before the marriage, how much that worth grew during the marriage, what I was worth on the date of our separation, and what interest had grown on those portions after the separation. This required subpoenas, numerous phone calls, contact with experts, a lot of pushing from me, and more math than I ever wanted to re-encounter. What was such-and-such worth on the day you got married? What was the house worth? The tax-sheltered annuity? And so on. It took a lot of reconstructing. The accountant had to figure interest rates at certain times in the past, deduct previous values, talk to the retirement system. I had to meet with my first ex-husband for the first time in decades. It was a lot of work, work from which Bill will benefit and for which I paid. And I wondered, should I have had some kind of asset valuation on the date of our marriage? Will that be something that routinely happens in the future? California is a community-property state. Every penny you earn after your date of marriage then becomes a part of shared income. Everything you pay with your income after you get married is now considered community property. Every cent your retirement earns after marriage is community property as is every penny you put in any type of retirement account, except Social Security. If your marriage ends, the difference between what you are worth on the date of separation and what you were worth on the date you married is divided in two. You are entitled to half and your estranged spouse is entitled to the other half. So, in simple math, if you have $20,000 in a retirement account on the day you get married and $200,000 in that account on the day you separate from your spouse, the growth is $180,000 and you can have half of that. That means you get to keep $90,000 plus your original $20,000. Therefore, $110,000 of the account is for you and $90,000 is for your former husband or wife. If you owned a house on the day you got married and the house was worth $100,000 and you owed $60,000 on it on that day, then you had $40,000 in equity. If the house was worth $400,000 when you split up but then you owed $250,000, you have equity of $150,000. However, since you had $40,000 in equity when you got married, that is subtracted from the current equity of $150,000, leaving $110,000 for you to split in your settlement. That leaves you owing your 'ex' $55,000 for the house. But houses are tricky because house value is not determined by what the house was worth on the day you separated but on the date you settle your divorce. It's a weird inconsistency. Then there are cars and credit card debt and who is to pay them, whose car is worth more and the adding of the total value of those, dividing them down the middle, etc. It gets complicated. But in the end there is a fat number you offer your departed spouse and they come back with a counter-offer, I guess. It's a sad comment on unions and commitments, and the tenuous relationship many members of our society (apparently including myself) have with marriage, its promises, and the degree to which we devote ourselves to making marriage work. Early this week I was able to get a first offer to Bill's attorney. Since Bill is a wheeler-dealer, I figure I might have to go back and forth with offers. I figure his sense of entitlement will start with some demands I might consider to be outrageous, especially considering some of the things he has done thus far in this whole debacle. We have to return on his Order to Show Cause late next month, we have been assigned to a mediator sometime soon, and we will go to trial late the following month if we haven't reached a tentative settlement. I await a response from his side but guess they wouldn't have been able to get together this week to review it, or maybe Bill is too busy gambling, or his attorney was busy. There is a date by which the offer must be accepted They might let it pass but it helps get them going. In the meantime I wait and wonder.....what will he accept?......how much does he feel he is absolutely entitled to?......how desperate is he for a settlement? .......how well is he?......when, oh, when, will this be over?.....

Making It Legal

I grew up long enough ago to take a dim view of pregnancy before marriage. That's honest. I can't lie about it. I am a product of my upbringing. Even though I was part of the generation that promoted women's lib and dispelled traditional gender roles, fought the establishment, burnt our bras and protested the war in Vietnam (not to mention the shootings at Kent State), some old-fashioned values were drummed into my head by the strong females in my world. My aunt 'had' to get married at sixteen. It was an outrage. My grandmother's first comment was, "What will my friends think?!" She was as were all members of society at that time. Sex before marriage was a huge no-no and pregnancy was the ultimate indignity for 'getting caught'. My aunt was still in high school and her soon-to-be husband was a graduate of Stanford University. Nowadays that would be called statutory rape. He would eventually leave my aunt with two children, one of whom had crippling arthritis, for his secretary. It was more than a cautionary tale. My mother raised me to think my virginity was my trump card and that losing that put me out of the game. Getting caught was even worse. She had strong feelings. She saw a woman as without worth if she were not a virgin. I, in time, rankled against that notion and rebelled. Times have changed, and my daughter certainly exemplifies prevailing attitudes towards what used to be considered a mandatory sequence of marriage and childbirth, one that abortion allowed many of my generation to circumvent. She wanted to become a mother. She sees that as her primary desire in life. She wants to be a stay-at-home mom, and she wants it now. She can participate in delayed gratification to some degree but not to the degree that allows her to consistently stop and make wise decisions regarding her life's course. She chose to conceive a child before she was married. She felt her significant other was the mate for her life, so why not start a family now? As this pregnancy has played out, it has not been without difficulties, one of which was her realization that she wanted to be married to this child's father before the child left her womb. These were tenuous weeks, even months, with an impending engagement on and off the horizon. There were hurt feelings and arguments, and for a while I wondered whether or not the relationship was going south. I offered up my ring, hoping to both remove a financial impediment and see the ring I loved put to good use. Eventually the engagement happened, great sighs of relief were made, and steps were taken to get a license. On Tuesday they had an extremely small civil ceremony down on the bluffs above the ocean. It was a stunningly beautiful January day with only the two of them, me and the couple whose husband officiated in attendance. Once the engagement happened, they were both content with their fate. He now calls her his wife and me his mother-in-law. I am getting used to it. It does feel different than the role I felt I played in their lives before Tuesday. The level of connection is deeper, more permanent. I am trying to relax about it. After all, I don't have the most positive attitude about marriage at this point in time. I will try not to be a pessimist about my daughter's union. She and Kyle have to let it play out and do what they can to make it work. I try to sit back and breathe through my nose. It is done now. They are a family. The upside is that I have more of a feeling that I can now move forward with my own life. More on that later......

Dream #3

My dream life has calmed down over the past week, thankfully, but not before I had a third dream about Bill. If I had thought Dream #2 recapped a big issue, Dream #3 outdid it big time. Dream #3 seemed to hit several issues and, as I look back on it, one element it highlighted was my need to connect with like-minded people in whom I have trust. The dream started with me completing a school year somewhere abroad. Apparently I was working away from home for the ten months of school and then returning home in late June. The dream opened with me in bed with one of my coworkers. A female co-worker who is gay. But there was no physical contact. I'm not gay. I've never even been the slightest bit curious about intimacy with other women. The fact that there was no physical contact was clear in the dream. This woman has always been kind and supportive of me in my real life and she was the same in the dream. Did it make me uncomfortable to have dreamt about being in bed with another woman? Yes. Do I know what it all means? No. Do I think I might have a lesbian relationship in my future? No. If you don't have the ganas, you don't have the ganas. Y no tengo ganas de ser intima con otra mujer. I arrived back at my home where my husband, Bill, had been left in charge of the household, the pets, the bills and our daughter. When I came in, the house seemed chaotic. It was messy; even the drapes were askew. White gauzy curtains and their rods were hanging diagonally in the windows. How long ago the rods had come down at one end was not apparent. The carpet was a speckled gray and unraveling in random places. I asked Bill if he had paid certain bills. He answered yes to some and no to others. He seemed to show little affect regarding them. The dogs were in the house and they were having accidents on the carpets. Bill was saying that was okay, he'd wash the spots with Nature's Miracle, he'd take some sections of the carpet outside to clean, it was no problem. I went outside to find Laura. She was sleeping around a supporting post under the front porch. She was where the dogs were supposed to be. The dogs were in the house where she was supposed to be. I was saddened and upset. Why hadn't my husband been able to take care of the home and our child while I was away working to support us? I didn't see it as an unreasonable responsibility and, after all, it was an agreement we had made together. He hadn't upheld his end. He wasn't bothered by that. I was distressed. I was hurt that our child had been neglected and angry at myself for not having been there for her. I found myself talking to our neighbor, Jim. He seemed to understand. The dream ended with me finding a like-minded soul in my neighbor. In reality, I enjoy talking to Jim. He has a nice sense of humor and is very responsible. He has lived next door for 15 years. During that time he had a live-in girlfriend for 11 years who turned out to be anorexic and died suddenly on the elliptical trainer at the gym. She'd deprive herself of food and then spend two hours a night working out. She always looked like she was in a hurry. She didn't seem to be able to relax. Three years later, Jim married. His new wife was connecting with neighbors and he was becoming more interactive with all of us on the street. But he decided he had made a mistake and divorced her. He likes his private space. His home is his sanctuary. He is extremely clean and is a minimalist. But somehow in this dream, I found comfort in talking to him. Let me see if I can put into words another element of this dream. In it I am able to connect with people who seem sympathetic and supportive. But when I look at who those individuals really are, I see that this could only exist on a surface level. The larger issue for me, I think, is that it is far more difficult to count on someone and feel supported with them when your lives are intertwined by various commitments. Bill, too, was supportive and compassionate when we first met. I could tell him anything and felt he was 'there' for me. He was in my corner. He rescued me. But he couldn't go the distance and be there for me all the time. He lacked a consistency that existed despite love. He just couldn't do it continually.

Dream #2

Dream 2:

Bill and I are in the car. We're leaving a place where we've been.
He is driving. We are going to get onto a freeway from an onramp that is underneath the freeway. It involves heading south, turning left, and then getting on a northbound onramp. We head to a left turn lane under the freeway that will put us on the onramp to turn left onto the freeway. He goes too far left of the left turn lane, thus putting us in jeopardy of being hit by oncoming traffic. We go up the onramp and get on the freeway (but when we get up there it's more like a highway, like 101 as you go past Santa Barbara). This time we pass some cops and CHP's and then Bill goes too far left gain, goes off the highway, across where oncoming traffic would be and into a rutted muddy field. I think the car won't move. There's a slight break in my perception and somehow we are then off he field and coming to a diagonal parking spot on a business street in front of some stores. I know the cops will follow us. I ask him if he's having a heart attack. It seems like he is or like he's having a slight stroke. I tell him to say he's having a heart attack. We get out of the car and walk to the curb. He's saying, "I think I'm having a heart attack," falls down on the pavement, and it looks like he might be starting to twitch. I'm not sure if he's acting or not. I couldn't think of any other reason why he would have done those things in the car. In the meantime I'm yelling, "He's having a heart attack!" very loudly and I start to hyperventilate. A lot. I sit down. I am worried about what the consequences will be. I'm starting to pass out.

I wake up. I wonder if this dream is about me. I am trying to clean up the things Bill has done wrong. I try, always tried, to make sense of his behavior that never really made sense. Did I make excuses for him? Yes. What does this dream tell me about that?

My therapist tells me this is the most telling of the two dreams. She thinks both interpretations of the first dream are true; I am both the woman who is taking Bill home and the one who is left behind. But this dream is clear. It is clearly about how I let Bill jeopardize me time and time again, and I made excuses. For whatever bad behavior Bill did, I made excuses.

On 2011

As I reflect on 2011, I am awed by the enormity of changes it brought. It started with a great experience with family and local folk showing love and kindness as we celebrated and prayed-in the new year in Idaho. Laura became my classroom teaching assistant in January, and my classroom never ran so well. She is magical with children; they respond to and adore her. She gained the admiration of my co-workers and awed me with her abilities. She also started building a clientele for hair and babysitting. In March she had a burst ovarian cyst that required several trips to the emergency room. Then she had her wisdom teeth removed right after that. The amount of antibiotics she was given in these two events resulted in a pregnancy. She and Kyle were thrilled with that news but she miscarried after two months. Before I had a chance to have a little 'talk' with her about waiting for their lives to be a little more settled down before having children, she got pregnant again. This time by design. When next year wraps, I'll be a grandmother.

In the summer I celebrated my sixtieth birthday with many friends. I had hoped to take a trip but the reality of my time and finances didn't leave much room for that. I have not abandoned the idea of traveling. I certainly don't want to travel alone, and would like to find a travel partner. But I will travel again. There is no doubt in my mind. I am even intrigued by the idea of traveling for a reason, for a purpose or to do a certain job. Travel desires aside, I had a very nice dinner party with friends and even some family members to ring in the 60's. Let it not be said of me that I let the big 6-0 go by unnoticed.

Things at work actually improved for me this year, and I rejoice in that. I have administrators who are efficient, effective, conscientious and kind human beings. They are capable and supportive. The office is a sane place where parents, students, teachers and problems get handled appropriately. (That's a nice way of saying that our psycho assistant principal left and somebody really, really good took her place). I like the changes there, the office manager, the librarian, the new special support staff, and the STEM coordinator (a science teacher +++ other responsibilities). My newest crop of parents is amazing. They take care of business like no group I can remember in recent history. I have a strong group of six or seven students who have begun to read simple books and recognize large numbers. My new aide doesn't have a lot of Laura's strengths but he is good with the children and plays organized games with them at recess and at lunch. I can hear him coaching them in basketball when I'm working in the room during lunchtime, and he and the other school coaches take the kindergarten classes out for P.E. once a week. He's different but he's good.

My divorce dragged on and on. My attorney spent much of the year not getting me closer to a settlement. I am getting resentful about this. I gave a deposition at Bill's attorney's office and then, before Bill could give his depo, his attorney got rear-ended, had to have surgery, and eventually left his practice. In the meantime Bill got manicky again and filed an Order to Show Cause which is another way of telling me to prove why I shouldn't have to give him a lot more money per month. Bill hired a strange and unethical attorney, and I have been villainized in court. I am now pushing my attorney, in a not-too-subtle way, to get this all over. He is brilliant in the courtroom, absolutely awe-inspiring, and has a way of weaving words, testimonies and evidence into pure gold. But I have paid him too much money and need to both close this deal and move on with my life. Will I be able to afford to keep my house and pay off Bill? It is the question that occupies too much of my mental energy.

Laura, Kyle and Dad stayed here with me all year. Dad continued to be critical and eventually alienated Kyle, as he has managed to do with all alpha personalities who don't play his control game. He exhausted his retirement plan and is now into his savings. He continues to be quietly stubborn. As my first ex-husband asked me, "Do you expect him to change?" He's right about that. I guess I should not have that expectation. My ex also said, when I told him that I was surprised by how continually critical Dad is, that I had never really lived with Dad and that maybe Dad had always been that way. He said, "You were really only with your dad for a few days at a time. It might have been easy for him to be pleasant for a few days at a time when the real person was negative." I can remember times when Dad took us up to the ranch in Angwin and, how after a week or so, he would get pretty tough. Once I was made to wash all the dinner dishes because I hadn't adequately cleaned my knife and the sink area at lunch that day. Lately, Dad's short-term memory has gone south and is starting to take his long-term memory with it, also in a critical way. He is losing it but, to his credit, he recognizes his propensity for criticism and wants, on some levels, not to do it any more. I just don't think he can at this point.

I got up-close and personal with my retirement system and am seriously considering retirement in June. I both look forward to and dread this possibility. I worry that I'll have too much time and too little money when I retire, that I might regret leaving, and that I might not be able to replace the teaching with anything I enjoy as much and that that will cause me to feel depressed. But I am hopeful retirement will suit me nicely. I will get to spend more time with my grandchild and won't have to hit the ground running five days a week. I do feel the pull to slow down a bit but the divorce might put me in a situation where I have to do some substitute teaching in orders to make ends meet.

I lost a co-worker and friend in July, on Carmi's birthday. It shook me more than I thought it would; sometimes her absence is acutely painful. Sometimes I miss her gutsy, in-your-face style. She was a good contrast to me at times.

One of my sisters got angry at the other. I tried to gently mediate and the offended sister said I didn't support her enough therefore deciding that my behavior had driven a wedge into our previously devoted relationship. I was trying to be a neutral party; it didn't work.

I fear I can't overcome the downward pull of so many things that have happened to me. I am now considering asking for medication to help me through these times. I have an appointment next month and inwardly hope I feel a lot better by then and am on the road to a better mental state of mind so that I don't have to start messing with meds. I have enough trouble dealing with meds to help me sleep; I don't want to throw something else into the mix.

My spiritual life is challenged. I don't feel like I have a church home now. The morning service is too dull and the evening service too unpredictable and, frankly, a little too young for me. I have continued with two Bible study groups this year and find they are the only places where I feel I am being spiritually educated. I have committed to reading a daily devotions book and a daily walk Bible for 2012, and I will somehow continue to look for a church service that gives me a feeling that my needs are being met. On top of that, I am angry with God. I think a person can still praise God and be angry with him at the same time. At least that's what I think is happening to me. I don't have the same undercurrent of secure faith I had a year ago, and it cuts into most of the other things in my life.

There are certain years I don't mind ushering out of existence and into the history books. 2011 is one of them.