I always figured a blog was something that certain types of people who weren't me would get into... I never really figured myself as a guy who needed to "express himself". I never wanted to express myself, in fact my wife says that I'd rather gnaw off a limb than talk about my "feelings".
For the sake of clarity, let me point out that my wife is one of the only really good things I've got going on right now, and for the life of me I can't figure out why she's sticking around. But she is, and I'm trying to keep that in perspective and show the appropriate appreciation for her just being here.
No, the subject of my intense feelings of anger and "dislike" are my ex-wife. Because using "ex-wife" over and over again is going to get boring, I may from time to time refer to her as "the whore", "that bitch", but I will do my best to keep the really bad epithets to myself for the sake of propriety.
Now, you might want to point out that these feelings of angst are normal after a divorce. You might want to reassure me that it's going to pass and things can get better with time. My question to you would have to be, "how much time?" I've been divorced for going on ten years!
"Dude, Cage, how long can you possibly hold onto this grudge? Let it go, bro..."
I know, and you're right. But in all honesty, I don't believe I'm the problem here. I've done my level best to keep things civil between the two of us, mostly for the sake of our kids. It's this other person who, every time I seem to get a step up, she finds out about it and goes out of her way to make sure I get shoved back down into my place.
I know you're not all going to believe that. Hell, I have a tough time wrapping my head around it myself. It's been ten years, get over it already! Move on. For chrissake, get laid already!
Okay, time for the rundown... For the last ten years, I've done everything I can to make sure that I've done what I'm supposed to do. My child support ($757/month, added up and spread out over the entire year in bi-weekly payments of $349) gets paid every two weeks like clockwork, through a direct deposit we both agreed to after the divorce. It comes straight out of my paycheck and gets dropped right into her checking account, without fail. When she's asked me for something extra for the kids, for sports or school, I've tried my level best to get it to them if I've had it. I don't make a lot of money, but for the most part I think I've been pretty liberal about it. I've never bad mouthed her in front of our kids, even though I've heard from the kids that she doesn't have the same level of impulse control, and I've supported her when the kids call me whining about being grounded. We've lived in separate states (me in the Mid West, her and the kids on the West Coast) the whole time, and I see my kids over the summers and every other Christmas. I've tried to make it work, tried to be a good Dad and set the decent example. For the most part, we have two pretty good kids, God bless them both.
Now we flashfoward to the present. My daughter has decided to come here to live with me and my wife (married again for five years) to go to college. When the idea first popped up, my ex did what she could to discourage the idea. She had our daughter looking into other colleges in Oregon and California, which isn't a bad idea in itself, but the colleges she had her looking at were expensive as all get out. Jeeze, one was so pricey, she could have gone to Harvard for $5000 a year more...
In the end, my daughter did make up her mind to come here for school... which brings us to the current state of affairs.
With my daughter here, and my son still living with his mom in Oregon, my thought was to call the child support a wash. We haven't had an active file in Oregon because we've been handling the support payments through our own direct deposits, so it wouldn't be a big deal at all to just stop the payments. I'd be able to support our daughter and put her through college, and she'd still have our teenage son to corrupt and destroy emotionally.
When I put my idea out to the Whore, she completely shot it down. She said that she'd agree to cutting the support in half, but that was it. So in her mind, me supporting our whole daughter and half of our son was completely reasonable and fair. I disagreed, and told her so. I further explained that if she'd just look at the math, she'd see that this wasn't a bad idea at all. It wasn't like I was actually saving money on the whole deal, between paying for my daughter's day to day needs, plus her full college tuition. If it was just about the money for me, I'd be better off with her still in Oregon living under the rule of Satan's Trollop.
I didn't hear back from my ex again. She completely ignored the subject, apparently in the hopes that it would go away. But it didn't go away. My daughter turned 18, moved out here to Wisconsin, and is currently enrolled in a UW college. When she turned 18, as per my wife's suggestion, I halved the child support. As to the rest, I had consulted the department of family services in Oregon to ask about officially modifying the support, and they said that because the case was so old, and hadn't been active in so long, they couldn't do anything about it without opening up an new case. They even told me that I sounded totally reasonable, and that I should stop payment on the child support when my daughter moved in with me, then the support modification case could start.
Boy, did they feed me a line of shit.
My ex-wife bypassed Family Services, and went right to the District Attorney's office. An order of withholding was put into affect for the FULL AMOUNT OF THE CHILD SUPPORT ORIGINALLY ORDERED FOR TWO KIDS, and my wages were garnished. Now, one lawyer's retainer and five months later, my ex is still dragging this out, I'm still paying out the full $349 ever two weeks, my daughter is still going to college (cuz I'm still trying to keep this from affecting her) and expecting to be fed regularly, my wife (God bless her) and I are still paying for it all, and there's no end at all in sight.
So I spend my days walking around, angry all the damn time and trying my best not to act like it. I'm irritable and short tempered, and losing the fight to keep it together fast. And the whole time, my ex-wife (may she rot in a pool of feces and maggots) is sitting very well off in Oregon, as she continues to get the full amount of the child support and refuses to send a dime of it back for our daughter.
