No More

There were times when I felt like the divorce was more difficult than the marriage.  Of all people, my husband hired a female attorney.  This was the man who believed all women were whores.
 The divorce was lengthy and at times so mentally draining I swore if I could just get out of this I would never get married again.
 It was not just challenging for me, but for Kimberly as well.  She was still very afraid of her father, yet the court said I had to take her over and drop her off at her father’s house every other weekend and one day a week. 
 Nothing will rip the heart from a mother as the pain of a child begging not to be left alone with the non-custodial parent.  The court did not seem to understand that; they just understood the law. Apparently, a child’s state of mind is not a consideration in an adult divorce matter. 
 I began to catch on to my husband’s thought process.  He only wanted Kimberly on the weekends because he knew it was hurting me to leave her like that.  I sat down with Kimberly and explained to her as best I could to make her, a nine year old child, understand we were going to try reverse psychology on her father.  If he thought he was helping me by keeping Kimberly on the weekends and I would have the weekends to myself, then he would not want to spend time with Kimberly, like he told the court he missed so much.  Kimberly understood and she quickly got ready to go.  She packed a big bag, brought her noisiest toys, and was ready to go.  When I pulled up to drop Kimberly off, Kimberly turned around and told me to have a good time this weekend.  She smiled and waived me off.  Before I could make it to the stop sign at the end of the street, her brother was waiving for me to come back.  Kimberly had told her father that I was making plans with friends on the weekends that she would be with her father so I would not have to spend those weekends alone.  That was all it took. Her father did not want her to stay with him that weekend saying he did not feel well. 
 The next weekend she was supposed to stay we got ready to do the same thing, but we did not have to leave the house this time because her father called and said he did not want Kimberly to come over this weekend.  This quickly became a habit and Kimberly saw her father on her terms, not his nor the court’s terms. 
 See, I was not violating a court order if he surrendered his weekends; I was only violating the court order if I did not take Kimberly to spend time with her father. 
 The power and strength we both gained from learning how to get what we wanted by tricking her father into saying it was okay, gave us the inner strength to move on with our lives in less and less fear with each passing day.
 We may have lost the battle at one point but we were determined to win the war.
 There were hearings for everything.  On many occasions the judge told him that he would go to jail if he kept up his actions in the courtroom.
There were financial affidavits to be completed, depositions always being done, and it took almost a year and a half from the time that I filed for divorce to actually get to a final hearing because of his antics in the courtroom. 
By the time the final hearing rolled around, I was prepared to ask the judge for the car, my wedding rings, and my maiden name back and I told the judge my husband could have everything else.
In that year and a half I had not received any financial assistance for the benefit of Kimberly, and even after the judge ordered it at one of the temporary hearings, her father still didn’t pay it. 
He told the court that it was Kimberly’s decision to leave, so she was not getting any money.  Needless to say, that comment cost him. The second most painful part of the divorce outside of putting Kimberly through all that, was the time when my father passed away. 
During the divorce proceedings, my ex-husband was still trying to find ways to hurt me. 
 Earlier I stated that my father had two heart attacks.  The part of his health we were not aware of was that he had cancer.
One morning in June of 1996 my father awoke and when he got out of bed he fell to his feet.  He was rushed to the hospital and within hours of him being assessed our family was told that he would be flown to a hospital in Tampa, Florida.  All that the doctors had told us before he was flown to Tampa was that my father had broken his neck and was parallelized from his neck down; he would never walk again.
It was at the hospital in Tampa that the family was advised my father had a tumor at the base of his brain that had put so much pressure on his neck that his neck was now broken. He was stabilized and monitored and within a few weeks he was moved back to the local hospital. He would be in need of round the clock care if he went home.  He never made it home.  Regretfully, on July 14, 1996 my father passed away.  Funeral arrangements were being made to bury my father on his favorite mountain in Pennsylvania.  I, like the rest of my family, was getting prepared for the trip when I received a call from my attorney.  There was an emergency hearing set by my ex-husband’s attorney wherein an order preventing me from taking Kimberly out of state was obtained. 
My ex-husband knew the reason for my leaving Florida and certainly knew it would be a few days, but he managed to hurt me once again by obtaining this order and not allowing me to say good-bye to my father.  By the time a hearing was held to explain this to the court, my family was returning from Pennsylvania. 
In many ways, not being able to attend the services hurt me much more than the nine years of physical abuse did.  I remember the pride showing on his face that day of the hearing and I wondered how any one person could be so evil.