I finally reviewed Lovey's latest separation agreement draft.
Let's review:
June 9, 2005 - Lovey announces she wants a divorce.
September 2005 - Lovey provides initial draft of separation agreement.
Late September 2005 - Frank and attorney redraft the entire agreement.
Early October 2005 - Lovey presented with the redrafted agreement.
Mid-October 2005 - Lovey goes rip! Accuses Frank of being everything but God's child!
Late July 2006 - Lovey gives Frank another draft of separation agreement and says that she wants to get all this "over with" as quickly as possible.
Late July 2006 - Frank informs Lovey that his attorney is out of the country until mid to late September.
It has been a year. Lovey is in a hurry.
Frank wanted all this over with a year ago.
So why all the rush now?
The draft as written makes me feel like I continue to live in the Twilight Zone! Where is Rod Serling when I need him?
Items I thought we had worked clearly are open for discussion.
For example, her draft says that she is the beneficiary on life insurance policies I maintain through work. She wants to be kept on those and as written, I am supposed to provide proof annually that she is still on the policies.
No way...
I have no such policies. The ones I have list my children as beneficiaries.
She knows this.
So, given this example and the fact that there are all kinds of other items in the agreement make me wonder: (a) did she ever bother to read my version? (b) did she pay attention to the myriad of discussions we have had about all this? (c) is she so self-absorbed that she thinks that she is the most important object in the universe? (d) or did she, the wonderful and godly minister, actually try to pull and old-fashioned fast one?
Hmmmmmmmm.
A friend of mine from the church I once attended came to my house a couple of days ago to welcome me home. I'm also doing some work on his computer and trying to get it to resurrect.
He saw my empty house and was rather amazed that Lovey would do that to me. He also made some rather interesting observations about her. It sort of makes me wonder if there are others within that congregation like him and if in her current congregations if she has had time to generate similar feelings and thoughts.
She is in her honeymoon period right now. Everything is wonderful and she's happy. However, when all the newness fades it will be a new story.
2 comments:
Who knows, this may be a lawyer in the middle problem (or at least aggravated by her lawyer) writing what is “standard and customary”. But this is where divorces get really messy – what is a fair distribution of the joint assets? I have never known a couple where both parties were satisfied – and it is the lawyer’s job to make sure his party wins.
It's easy for this stuff to become a cat-and-mouse game, with the parties changing sides on a regular basis. The many-month delays are long enough for attorneys to forget what happened previously. Whenever a client isn't diligent about monitoring what an attorney is doing, or not doing, they're likely to throw everything including the kitchen sink into the equation regardless of what has come before in the way of mediation or agreements. The attorneys are often used to having such inattentive or unresponsive clients that being productive means leaning toward asking forgiveness for mistakes over permission to move forward.
You may be surprised at how much you hear of the perceptions of others (like former peers at church), but it will happen over time. Reasonable people tend to be pretty perceptive of what's really going on, and yet they're also pretty cautious about expressing what they see until later.
The best part of all of this, though, even though it seems interminable now, is that it ENDS. Yeah, you might have old-news gripes and moans thrown at you 5 years down the road, or perhaps she will even develop some combination of a complex about being persecuted, a martyr, or just plain paranoid.
But you'll be in such better space, more grounded and balanced, that you'll brush it off with barely a smirk and go on about your business. You'll recognize it as old and tragic for her, but nothing to do with you because the pouty, petty, whining demonstrates that she remains in a small, fearful place and you've moved on to a more expansive, loving, generous understanding of yourself.
Take care of yourself... dinner last night was so sweet! (Just like you.)
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