He Arrives

This was a loooonnnnnggg day! The pitocin was started during the night. When I got to the hospital at 9:45 this morning, Laura was dilated to 5 centimeters. Kyle left to go home, shower and change his clothes. At 10:10 the anesthesiologist came in to set up the epidural. They kicked me out of the room for a half an hour. This was a great help. Laura lost all feeling of pain but could still had sensations for things like pressure and tightness. The midwife came in and broke her water at 12:45. The contractions started coming closer together. At 2:00 Kyle went to get something to eat. Then I went to get coffee. When I got back, the nurse was encouraging her to try pushing, but it was too soon. Jack arrived. We went into the room for a while. At 4:00 p.m. The nurse decided it was time to start pushing for real. Jack and I were kicked out for good. We hung out in the hall for a bit, Kyle's oldest brother showed up, and then some young nurse sent us to the waiting room. Sadly for Laura she inherited my family's tradition of long bouts of pushing. She pushed for over two hours. At 6:09 p.m. Kyle David Lipps, Jr., entered the world at a whopping 9 pounds, 4 ounces. He measures 21 inches and he looks just like his mother did when she was born.

A Boy!

March 14 was quite an eventful day. Bill's sister had arrived the night before and is going to be staying with us for an undetermined amount of time. I woke up before 5:00 a.m. Ugh! That's never the way I want to start a day.

It was also the annual Kindergarten Round Up at school. I had to look good, put my best foot forward, and give a little speech about early childhood development. The problem was that as I was getting my class ready for the day and getting myself ready for the roundup, my attorney called. He had just received a letter from Bill's attorney stating that on the day of the mediation Bill had been on chemo and Vicodin and therefore had not been cognitively aware of the content of the agreement we had made. For those reasons, he felt entitled to withdraw from the agreement. I was shocked! I didn't know what to say. My attorney felt we should go forward in trying to enforce the agreement.

I wasn't able to focus well at the roundup. I gave my talk but don't know exactly what I said. I know that parts of it went well but felt there was something strange in my closing sentences. As I was speaking, I looked out into the group of parents and there was Trevor, the young pastor from my church. What was his family doing there? It was a very weird experience.

My attorney called again right in the middle of the meeting. When I picked up his voice message it said that he had called the mediator's office only to find out that her husband had had a catastrophic heart attack the night before and was not expected to live. Let's face it, she's not going to be able to deal with this for a long time. This is the second time Bill has cried, 'Not fair! I want a do-over'. If that's the game he's going to play, then I will ask the court to have him declared mentally incompetent, have a conservator assigned to him, and I'll deal with the conservator. I kind of want to go to trial because I think I'll get ordered to pay him a lot less and I will ask that he pay two-thirds of my legal fees because I have a letter from him telling me that if I didn't 'cooperate' with him on doing a settlement his way, he'd run up my legal fees. And I've changed my mind about the life insurance policy. Why would I make a person against whom I have a restraining order the beneficiary on a big life insurance policy? The difference before was that I wasn't angry then. Now I'm all out of patience.

But the day wasn't over. Not nearly. I got a call from Laura at 11:30. She was at the doctor's and was calling to say they were going to induce her. How ironic it is that after days of having my phone on me constantly in the hopes of getting that 'It's Time' call, this one time I thought she was calling about what her dad had done.

However, it turned out not to be THE day. She spent the night in the hospital while they gave her something to thin the cervix and started her on Pitocin at 4:30 a.m.

Settled

We had a mandatory mediation date set. It was last Thursday. Bill and I had had a couple of counter-offers, and we were very far apart. In fact, Bill had not modified his first counter offer. Not at all. It was as if he hadn't heard what I was offering and didn't care about what everything was worth. Driving to the appointment, I saw myself as wasting my day in the mediation. Why bother? He wasn't budging on his demands. The mediator was a well-heeled older woman. She had the dignified and aristocratic look of one born into money and innately high IQ's. She wore a simple, dignified pant suit, a female version of a navy blue Brooks Brothers. She brought us all into a glass conference room and explained what she was hoping to do. She would set the rules. She would work with us for two hours. We were to make offers in good faith and, if we reached a settlement, whatever we agreed to would be irrevocable. She also explained she had practiced family law for 35 years before deciding mediation was a better way to end marriages. She then dismissed us all, except for my attorney, with whom she wanted to meet first. Bill, his attorney, and I were to wait in the large waiting room. Bill and his counsel conferred for a few minutes and then Bill moseyed right on over to where I was and started chatting. "How do you like that Kindle?" "It's an old iPad and I like it a lot. I got it through work." "How's Laura?" "She's miserable." "Did Kyle finish his course?" "No." "No?" "No." "Why not?" "He got sick." "He got sick?" "Yes, he got sick." "Does he have a job?" "Laura is the biggest pregnant woman I have ever seen. The baby is going to be huge." "Is she well?" "As well as can be. She's ready to not be pregnant anymore. This kid is going to be Baby Sasqwatch." "I sure hope we can make a settlement today." "I hope so too, Bill, but you've got to be willing to compromise, and so far you've haven't been willing. I spent a lot of money on a forensic accountant and you have ignored her work." "Well, I don't trust her calculations. My attorney and I are thinking of hiring our own person." "Go right ahead." "It would be a shame to have to go to trial. This has already cost you over $60,000 and going to trial could take it up to $100,000." "Well, if we have to go to trial, then we will. It's okay with me." My attorney and I had met and decided that our game plan was to let them know we were not afraid of going to trial. There was a part of me that would rather have given the money to a court and lawyers than to put it in Bill's hands. "How's your gambling going?" "Oh, I haven't gambled five times this year." "Why not?" "No money." "You chose gambling, Bill." "What?" "We're getting this divorce because you chose gambling over protecting me." "I didn't know that. If you had asked me to stop gambling, I would have." And with the sweetest look on his face, my ex-husband stood there and lied to me. It was at that point I realized I had been terribly wrong in my estimations of him. Throughout our marriage, I thought the particular look he had, this relaxed and sweet face, was the face of Bill when he would never lie to me. This time, wwwaaaaayyyy too late, I discovered that Bill doesn't have a sweet, honest side. Like his old girlfriend said, Bill is a liar. He stood there in the waiting area, casually leaning against the receptionist's counter, talking like a nice guy, and lying like crazy. If I had asked him to stop gambling, he would have??? Who is he kidding? Does he also have a bridge he wants to sell me? My attorney came out. Bill's attorney was asked in. Bill left me alone. My attorney and I went outside so he could talk to me about what the mediator had said. She told him our stuff was really good, that our offer had made sense, and that she hadn't even needed a mediation brief because the numbers in our settlement offer were so well-prepared. My attorney had given her another offer to present to Bill. When Bill's attorney came out, she took him and Bill down the hall to a meeting room to consider what they had discussed. After fifteen minutes or so, Bill and his attorney went into the conference room. They stayed for a long time. She seemed to be talking to Bill a lot. Then she came out with an offer. We had to go back and forth a little bit, but, in the end, we reached an agreement. And this is what it is: I have to pay him $3250 a month spousal support until he dies. That's going to be tough. I have to pay him $125,000 by October 1 of this year. That's going to be really tough. I have to put him on as the primary beneficiary on my life insurance policy. In return, I get the house and all of my retirement. I get to keep my restraining order. In addition, the spousal support is non-modifiable and, no matter where I go or how much money I ever make in the future, he can never come back and try to get more money from me. When he dies, Laura will be the beneficiary on my life insurance again and he will make me the executor of his estate. (Believe me, it will be a huge headache and I have no expectation that there will be any money when he goes.) Since we made that settlement, I have felt not only a tremendous sense of relief but like a different person. I feel completely different. I knew I would, I just didn't know in what way. My life is going to be my own now, and it gives me great peace. I feel solid and ready to move on. I know I can take care of myself, and it feels good.

Counter with That Sense of Entitlement

I received a counter offer for the offer I made Bill. It is strikingly reminiscent of the interactions that went on between Bill and his sister as they settled their parents' estate. Bill waited for her to lead off, then countered with a suckerpunch. He wanted to see how much she'd offer. He told me that much. But in the end, it didn't matter what she came up with, he knew what he was going to do. His response to my offer sounded much the same. He countered with a ridiculous demand. Why did I pay all that money to a forensic accountant to carefully go over the values of the house, the retirement and the tax sheltered annuity when he was just going to respond with a demand that reflected how much money he wants for himself? It doesn't really have to do with what things are really worth. Bill just basically said he wants a one-time lump sum of $165,000 and $4500 a month until he dies. He wants to be the beneficiary on my life insurance policy, he wants the restraining order lifted, and he wants to be able to go to the police station and pick up his guns. It's all outrageous to me. And then, in the end, he said that if I didn't acquiesce to his demands, he would get a QDRO and have the retirement system give him the cash value of what he is due. My attorney said he has some ideas for a response. I can't wait to hear what they are.

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.