To whom it may concern:
I
have been asked to share my thoughts and feelings about my former husband and
some of the circumstances surrounding our marriage. I feel that K being married again will most likely be a
benefit to both me and my children. My main concern in all major decisions that
affect my children is their safety and happiness, and I believe that his new
partner is kind to them and shares the same morals and values as I do, and I
feel that having a stable influence when they are with their dad will be a good
thing. I have not heard or witnessed anything that has raised any concerns with
me about her behavior with them. I look forward to possibly having another
person to help facilitate better communication between K and I, and I think
that having someone who has a fresh perspective will help us have a more
effective co-parenting, ex-spouse relationship.
Unfortunately
being asked to write this letter in an open and honest matter also means that I
am forced to acknowledge the negative circumstances that still surround our
divorce. It has been very difficult for K and I to agree too many of the
terms we have tried to set. During two sessions of mediation, in which I
presented the extensive parenting plan and terms of support and alimony, K would not agree to anything or offer a counter opinion. We finally appeared
before a judge who granted us a bifurcated divorce, which means that the state
agrees to allow us to be divorced without settling on any terms or conditions. We
have a pending court date for August 2013. K was ordered to
provide financial documents showing the assets that we had at the time of our
separation and his check stubs or proof of income. He has refused to do so and
they have had to be subpoenaed by the court. K was supposed to file our
income taxes for 2012 and has still not done so. He also admitted that he had
made false claims on previous taxes that I was unaware of, and that the IRS is
demanding money from that. He refuses to acknowledge the joint savings and
checking accounts, and he won’t show the records for an account that he refused
to put my name on when we were married into which he was moving money into,
from our checking accounts and an individual savings account from me. We also
have bills from the hospital and doctors when I delivered our last child, that
total about $1,500.00. They are all under my name, because K had his name
removed from them when I left our house. He had told me multiple times that he
would pay these bills, and that we would use the tax refund to take care of
them, but they are now with debt collectors and are having negative effect on
my credit. He is now claiming that it is my fault that Medicaid did not pay
those bills and that I should have taken care if it before I left Kentucky,
though he was the one who had filed all the paperwork with Medicaid and the
applications were all in his name. We are both supposed to be responsible for
50% of the medical expenses for our children. I have not paid K for the
insurance premiums for the last few months because he has not paid his half for
the office co-pays, lab bills and prescription costs that have to be paid out
of pocket. We are still both unpaid in those areas, but the last two months
K has held back, against legal advice, the cost of the insurance premium
from his child support check. He has refused to provide paperwork about the
insurance when he changed it in January and I have no proof of the coverage
that is actually being provided. For now he has not paid $170.00. K has
said multiple times that he will pay for additional activities for the children
such as dance and preschool but he has not done so. We
have temporary orders in place but have not signed any permanent orders or
allocated any marital assets. When I have asked for personal possessions that
he unloaded from the moving truck without discussing it with me at his house,
he simply says he didn’t bring them from Kentucky, though my children have
personally seen many of the items I have asked to have returned at his current
residence. K kept the car he had been driving and I kept our mini-van,
which I have paid to maintain, register and insure, but he will not put my name
on the title.
I
wish that I could say that I felt like K would handle himself differently
in this marriage than he did ours, but I honestly cannot feel anything
different about him when I see him. I worry about his emotional and
psychological state entering into another marriage. K had struggled
immensely in maintaining boundaries with other women while married to me. He
saw no problem with emotional infidelity and it often was with girls who were
still in their teens, sending text messages and following them closely through
social media though I had expressed a number of concerns with his behavior. He
finds ways to be around them as a volunteer athletic coach but the last team he
was with asked him not to return after one season of coaching cross country
running. One girl quit the team because she could not deal with K’s
behavior and another family who had two girls on the team and who also attended
the church ward we were in has said they were very displeased with the way
K handled himself and his relationship to their daughters as a coach. K would use emotionally abusive tactics to get what he wanted from the girls,
including silent treatment, berating them in front of the team or telling them
their performance was inadequate. The parents felt that K struggled with a
great deal of immaturity and an inability to handle competition in a healthy
way. He spent a great deal of time one on one with female clients at the gym as
well, and told me that he sympathized with a man who was having an affair on
his wife because she did not provide for his sexual needs. K claims to have
suffered sexual abuse as a teenager from a family member but he will not talk
to his family about it or seek psychological treatment. I believe K has
deep resentment and power issues with females and I do not think he has the
ability to love someone in a selfless way. I worry about his treatment towards
our children as they are all girls. I have had many talks with my seven year
old about maintaining the standards she is comfortable with while under his
care. He listens to music that uses vulgarity or sexually suggestive lyrics and
he has makes the girls wear immodest bathing suits even though they have personally
expressed the desire for something that keeps their stomachs covered. Our
children often say they have a difficult time getting their father to listen to
them and he does not allow them to make choices for themselves. It is a very selfish
relationship and our daughters often resort to crying in order to get attention
for their needs. He has had anger management issues and has had a lot of
difficulty keeping a job because he refuses to comply with behavioral
expectations. He has been fired for grand theft, sexual harassment, and
complaints from patients or students about his behavior when working with them.
His relationship with me has continued to be very difficult and contentious
throughout our separation and divorce. He will often not respond when I ask
about scheduling with the girls or questions about them when they are with him.
He won’t acknowledge me when we are in physical proximity. I have tried to
include him in activities for the girls, I believe it would be beneficial for
them to see us interacting peaceably, but he will not come or he tries to
illicit an explosive reaction from me when people are around. It is unfortunate
because he misses a lot of things he could be involved in if he was able to
handle it more maturely, but I refuse to put our children in a place where they
are exposed to negative or manipulative behavior.
The
events that led up to my leaving our marriage were a very long process. K has struggled with an addiction to pornography since before we got married. I
wasn’t aware of it until we had our first child and we spent some time
separated then. After our second child he was still viewing pornography, and I
found out about an inappropriate relationship he was having with a fellow
female student, and one night I found him on the porch with a 14 year old girl
from our ward. He was also moving money from our savings account into a secret
account so he could spend it without accounting to me. We spent eight months
living apart and we both attended counseling and after extensive work with the
bishop and counselor, we got back together. He moved our family to Georgia
where he failed out of the school program he was in. He got a job at a
waterpark where he would not speak to us or acknowledge us as his family when
we went to swim there. After losing that job he lied about interviewing for a
job in Utah that did not even exist. He flew to California under the pretense
of an interview that did not actually occur. We packed all of our belongings
and drove not knowing where we were even going. He found a job in Kentucky
working at a gym and proceeded to be involved in the same behaviors, again
moving money into an account without my knowledge and buying almost $6,000 in
stuff for himself even though we were taking out student loans to pay our rent.
While I was pregnant with our third child K and I had almost no interaction
in our daily lives. He was uninvolved in any activities due to an overnight
work schedule and the fact he spent all his free time with the high school
athletes he volunteered to coach. He would be gone for an entire day and I
would have no idea where he was, when he was returning. After the birth, K made threats to my physical safety, even inferring that he would kill me, and
tried to say it was a joke when I got upset. When my parents came to visit he
took money from my mother to pay for our heating bill and then proceeded to
have hundreds of dollars of sporting equipment and clothing delivered to our
house. He bought a bike without my permission and said he paid $200 for it, he
really paid $1,400. He continued to lie about where the stuff and the money was
coming from and when I confronted him his only defense was to tell me I would
never get a temple divorce over this if I left him.
He
quit his job to move closer to where I was staying with family after we
seperated. Both he and his family spent less than ten minutes with our youngest
child during the first six months of her life. Only after the mediator and both
lawyers told him he had to make an effort to have some sort of relationship
with her did he even try to spend any time with her. He has tried to be
consistent with his visiting times, he never fails to show up and I don’t think
the girls are going to be harmed intentionally while with him but he will not
make plans ahead of time, he expects everyone to work around his schedule on
very short notice and he continues to make threats about money and legal
proceedings when he doesn’t get his way. It is a very selfish relationship and
unless someone is telling him how great he is he doesn’t have a very deep
interest in their lives beyond what they provide for him. He began attending
the singles ward before our divorce was finalized, accepting a calling and
speaking assignments because he claimed that when he met Elder Holland, in a
parking lot while on a vacation, that he told him it would be okay to do so.
Only after my bishop contacted his (under his own discretion, I had nothing to
do with this call) did K finally cooperate in getting our divorce done.
I
believe K lives his life in a self-serving way. I believe this marriage is
happening because it can provide for some of his needs at this time, but I
don’t believe he is capable of having a fulfilling and success relationship
until he begins to think of others before himself. He has never acknowledged or
apologized for any of his behaviors towards me, I do not think he used this
experience to learn or progress; he continuously blames me or other
circumstances for our divorce. I hope with all my heart that he is able to make
his next marriage work. I think he has found a very nice girl who deserves all
the happiness she has always believed she deserves from a husband. Nothing
would be more detrimental to my children than having to endure another ugly
demise of a relationship in their parent’s lives but it is unfair for K to
attempt to start another relationship with another person, who deserves a
husband who is fully invested in her and their marriage, while he still has
unfinished issues in ours. It is time to be responsible and take care of these
things, we all need it to be finished so that we may attempt to move on and
make something more of our lives.
Sincerely,
Me
-I don't want this to be our script anymore. I don't want to think about the past when I see him. I don't want to judge every move he makes through this filter. I want it to be better. I believe it can be and it should be. We are better than this. So as easy as it is to repair a relationship with only one person (not!) I am going to keep trying. Because it is good for me. I don't like hating him. I don't like being angry, or impatient or cynical. I like being me. I feel good in that skin and that is not a bitter anything. After a few days of tubing and jumping off things and playing at Lake Powell last summer, my youngest brother said, "Who is this new Heather??" He didn't remember much of me before I was the wife and mom and not quite myself all the time but my sister piped up and answered, "This was always how Heather has been. Now she's just free to be it." Best feeling ever knowing that you actually get to be yourself in your own life! I can't believe I ever let someone steal that from me. Never again, and now I am going to shake out the dust, tie up the knots, and let this piece of history crumble into my past. It's not going to be pretty but its mine, and I don't have any room for muck anymore!
