Diaries
Diary 2: Chapter Three
The Law Will Dictate How We Proceed
You can read part two of the diary here
A few weeks after my husband advised he wanted to separate, I suggested that we sit down and figure out as much as we could on our own, without the lawyers.“I’m not allowed to meet you without my lawyer present,” he informed me.
I found his words almost comically officious. We were still living in the same house; why couldn’t we sit down and go over some spreadsheets, an exercise that happened to be well within our abilities? He informed me that he’d “hired the best family lawyer in town”. That’s fine, I thought. So, she’s the best lawyer. I had heard her name and reputation from a friend but advised she didn’t sound like the type of professional I would associate with. What difference could it really make? After all, this is simply a divorce, and if there was anything we didn’t agree on, the law will dictate how we must proceed.
To my former self, I can only say: you were so naive!
I followed my husband’s lead and hired a lawyer too, one theat I understood was more my type of professional. I was so busy with work commitments at the time that I didn’t look any further than the name of a lawyer a friend had given me.
But my husband continued to behave more and more erratically, and he simply would not speak to me about anything logistical. In early June,
I was shocked to notice that he had cleared out our joint U.S. bank account into his own account.
“I want to control the money,” he said, unapologetically, when I raised the issue. I told him, of course, that he had to put the money back, assuming that taking it for himself was illegal. My lawyer had told me not to undertake any unusual transactions and I assumed the law had addressed that to protect people. Wrong.
That same night, I discovered that he had acquired a new girlfriend a few weeks after we decided to separate. He’d attended a golf trip in Montana, and picked up a woman at the bar afterward. I’d noticed him emailing secretively outside and then discovered his stash of sweetheart notes. Couldn’t he have waited until we had told our daughter until we slept in separate houses and separate beds?
But, as my lawyer explained to me the next morning, it wasn’t illegal to empty joint accounts. Not only was my husband within his rights when he took our money, but my lawyer was apparently within her rights, too, when she responded to the situation merely by leaving a message with his lawyer and charging me $60 for 18 seconds of work that would amount to nothing. I was stuck in a meeting that morning, hoping in vain that my lawyer would protect me, wondering if he was liquidating all our other assets into his account as I sat there.
Between the money and girlfriend, I was reeling. Who had this person I’d been married to for so long become?
When I got out of that meeting, I immediately took care of the financial situation myself; I called a broker and ensured that he couldn’t move our assets without my say by having the broker tear up the power of attorney over the sizeable account in my name. When I questioned the efficacy of my lawyer’s tactics (on this and other matters), she fired me. I begged her finish the process with me-I assumed it would only take a few weeks- she said no. She said I had lost confidence in her and that she could no longer represent me. I’d had my first taste of working with a family lawyer, and now I had no legal representation and had no idea what my wasband (no longer my husband, not yet my ex-husband) would do next.
My wasband went on to steal my phone from our Calgary house and hide it in our Montana vacation home, where I’d find it months later. He took items from the house when I wasn’t home, stashing them away for himself. As soon as we told our daughter about our separation, which devastated her; he devastated her further by suggesting she meet his new (and, of course, short-term) girlfriend.
He had been a great dad, but now he had somehow lost his capacity for empathetic or appropriate behavior, and his relationship with our daughter grew strained, then alienated.
The litany of bizarre behavior goes on, and I recount some of it in the posts that follow.
Again, the psychologist I consulted told me that people often behave strangely during divorce, especially people who feel that their spouse made the decision for both of them. Though my wasband did decide to separate, he felt like he’d been dumped, and in a way that was true; I was the one who needed things to change.
“I never thought his character would change,” I told her. I showed her my list. “Here are eleven things he’s done since we separated that he would have found abhorrent in the past. These are now things he’s comfortable doing. How is this possible?”
My wasband and I had seen this same psychologist after we decided to separate, to help us figure out when and how to tell our daughter. Now I told her again how we had simply grown apart; even in March, as we decided to separate, I still completely trusted him and thought he was a person of integrity. But now, in September, I couldn’t believe how he was behaving. The stealing, the yelling, the swearing at me, the mistreatment of people. He had falsified a bank document to make his income appear lower than it was. He had taken funds from our joint account. He had launched at me in a physically threatening manner and pushed a door at me. He lied about small, pointless things. Worst of all, he wanted to fire our nanny and housekeeper of almost twenty years without severance — a woman who was our daughter’s third parent, who was so important in our lives, a woman we loved like family.
The psychologist explained that people behave this way when they feel like they’ve lost power and control in their lives. The yelling and swearing, the new girlfriend, and even hiding my possessions, fit with someone who was trying to gain the upper hand. She said he was overwhelmed at losing power, and that someone in this state of mind would not see the impacts of his actions on other people for at least a year.
“Even his daughter?” I asked, remembering how she had cried so hard she was gasping, telling me that her dad had tried to introduce her to his new girlfriend a few days after we told her about our separation.
“Even his daughter,” the psychologist conceded.
She said that he would gradually begin to see how his actions were affecting people like her, and that after three years, he had an 80 percent chance of resuming normalized relationships with people. At the time, I had no doubt he would be in the 80 percent.
That was three and a half years ago. Today I have no relationship with my former husband – he continues to pay his lawyer to manage all his communications and tactics – and he has lost many important relationships in his life. It’s been very sad and frustrating to watch.
