I feel mucky. Not like an all the time, down-in-the-dumps kind of yuck. Overall I am way happy. But these forgotten nooks and crannies inside of me still need cleaned out. Maybe it was the hint of spring cleaning and wanting to shake out the cobwebs, or the fact that we just had an awesome garage sale and it felt so good to de-junk and now it's time to clear my head, or it could be just the rolling on of the clock, just simply time to be D.O.N.E. It's like my compulsion to vacuum and detail my van before a road trip. I know it's going to get so messy along the way but I just love the feeling of climbing into a clean space to start the next adventure. It's not always a good idea but it makes me feel so much better so I do. So I need to toss out the muck and I have struggled with how to do that on here. I like to tie things up with sparkle, I don't want this to turn into a bash session. Because that isn't where I live my life. I don't think to much about him. I care even less. Yet the annoyance is always there, and it seems to know when I am ignoring him. And then the buzz gets bigger, and you keep swatting and it doesn't go away until all you can think about is smashing that dang mosquito into bits and pieces as hard as you can. So I plan to make this pretty. Don't lose faith and think I have turned into the recently accused "bitter ex-wife." I've got plenty of glitter and sparkle to throw at you all in a minute, like some really good stuff going on here, but first I am going to release the pressure valve and let some things out. Bear with me, I need a minute...and a really large flyswatter.

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!