Homelessness: I Never Thought It Could Happen to Me -- Could it Happen to You?

A very moving first-person account on financial abuse, and how it fits into the whole domestic violence abuse and control continuum. You still get accused of being "crazy," you still get drained dry by the court whores, you get challenged for child custody, the whole bit.

http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/2010/06/02/i-never-thought-it-could-happen-to-me-could-it-happen-to-you/

Homelessness: I Never Thought It Could Happen to Me — Could It Happen to You?
June 2, 2010
Kathryn A. Higgins

One might ask: how could an educated, responsible, bill-paying person such as myself end up facing homelessness and living off the labor (via Medicaid and tax benefits) of hardworking citizens such as yourself, dear reader.*

It’s a valid question. Why, just a few measly years ago I myself would have thought it impossible to be in such a situation. Back then I was driving my Lexus SUV and living in one of the most expensive towns in the country and imagining my own remodeled kitchen just like my friends’. I admit, I was a tad, well, smug. (I think back on this with shame.) I wasn’t particularly happy in my marriage, but I had worked hard and I was smart and I felt I deserved some things in life. Mostly I was happy about and diverted by my two young children, who, happily, still divert me.

Here’s what happened: I got caught in Irony. An onslaught of paradoxes that compounded so geometrically — they developed such a strong gravitational pull - that- they collapsed into a Black Hole of Irony and sucked me in.

If I had had superhero strength, I might have been able to resist. But the large and small ironies - and I will list just a few of them here for you - became too strong for me. I was done for. Can you imagine these things happening to you?

My main mistake: trusting my husband. I invested everything I had plus all my credit in his business - which he portrayed to me as “our family business.” He refused to pay off the debts - all in my name. It was slowly revealed to me that he was financially abusive. But by then it was too late. Would I now advise someone not to trust her husband? No, I couldn’t - you have to have some faith. But I would take precautions if I had it to do over again. Thus irony #1: I lost my money because I trusted my husband, and yet I still think one should trust.

When I finally became sick of the lousy marriage we mediated a divorce (it took an arrest for harassment to convince my husband I was serious). Since abusive spouses rarely want a divorce, because they would miss having someone around to kick (metaphorically), my husband was reluctant to proceed. So the mediating attorney, in an act of conciliation, made him the plaintiff and me the defendant. Despite the fact that I was the one who wanted the divorce. And these labels are not without significance, both practically and symbolically (eg., the “plaintiff” initiates court actions and etc.). I then had to endure being the “defendant” while my husband persecuted me via the civil injustice system for years.

While my husband was busy persecuting me, via lawyers and private investigators and etc., my lawyer insisted I take a defensive posture (haha, and I was the defendant). I had to prove that I was not crazy (abusive spouses always say the other spouse is “crazy” and they’re partially right because their abuse is, to some degree, driving the other nuts.) by putting up stoically with whatever abuse my husband and his lawyers could dish out. Verbal abuse, failure to show up at meetings, actual harassment for which my husband was arrested. I had to sit serenely through all of this. It’s a Catch 22 of craziness.

I was told by my lawyer to stop taking my children to church because my husband objected even though we had never ever gone to church together. This I refused, and, interestingly, it has resulted in my son singing for one of the top choirs in the country. If that’s not ironic enough, I am not really a religious person but I felt strongly that I and my children needed a church at that time. So here’s me, taking a stand about church.

The criminal justice is savvy to the whole domestic abuse thing. If someone is arrested for abusing his spouse, the courts will not listen to the spouse’s pleas to drop the charges because so often these pleas are coerced. So I, the doofus, tried to get charges dropped against my husband and the court did not drop them and my husband got really really pissed at me for the domestic violence classes they made him take.

The civil injustice system, on the other hand, thrives and grows on domestic abuse. It was through the civil injustice system that my husband wreaked his revenge for the domestic violence classes, among other things (just simply my desire to escape provoked his wrath). My divorce went on for years and cost, I estimate, over $300,000 because all of the lawyers and stenographers and clerks and copying companies and business evaluators and psychological evaluators and guardian ad litems are so eager to get on the gravy train of an expensive divorce. The only people I encountered in the civil injustice system who were irked by the proliferation of harassment were the judges, whom you rarely actually get to see.

I think there must be a special circle in Hell reserved for those who eagerly help a person persecute his family.

I am not permitted to know how much my divorce cost because I was the “non-working” (ie., stay at home with the babies) parent. I became the financial supplicant. This despite the fact that I had financed my husband’s business and all of the debt was in my name. Say what?

Here’s some more irony for you: when you are the financial supplicant in a divorce, you must keep your expenses as high as possible because that’s how they decide how much money you’ll get in the settlement. My lawyer kept advising me to keep my expenses up, and this I tried to do, even though I could see disaster up ahead (I never imagined it would be this bad).

As financial supplicant, every single expense you make is scrutinized by the courts and used to try to make you look bad (god forbid you charge a bottle of wine at a liquor store - I was harassed in court for twenty minutes for spending $6 at “Blue Line Spirts” which my husband’s lawyer took to be a liquor store. It wasn’t, it was a sports store - I had bought socks for my son to play hockey in. This really pissed off the judge, by the way).

Meanwhile, your tormenter does not have to show any expense, only his earnings. So my husband golfed and traveled and did whatever the hell he wanted - who knew? Meanwhile, he simply stopped working and let our business fail. (He stiffed vendors for hundreds of thousands of dollars without batting an eye - something that would come back to haunt him later).

Irony #10 (I’m not really counting, are you?): So, as the fiscally responsible person with the good credit that had financed our business, I had to go bankrupt during my divorce but my ex-husband did not. He discharged his car (it was in my name) and got himself a Porsche. He started a new company named after his favorite golf course. And he finally got caught embezzling.

Another irony: it is OK to steal from your spouse, but if you steal from other people you go to jail. And who suffers because you are in jail and not earning money? Your ex-spouse and children who you stiffed in the first place.

Another one: the state-mandated child custody class for divorcing parents. In which you must sit for six hours and listen to them tell you that you must NEVER say anything bad about the children’s other parent. Even as the other parent is running up internet debt in your child’s name. An especially unenlightened class run by a civil injustice system that seems to have no awareness of domestic abuse whatsoever.

There are so many ironies in an abusive divorce that it becomes hard to move forward and face the new ironies in your life. Such as:

Your ex-husband uses your address for all of his bills despite the “separation of ways” clause in the divorce contract. This annoyance somewhat mitigated by the fact that you intercept a check while the ex is in prison - More irony: your ex-husband had gotten a mortgage using embezzled money and the bank had to settle a nationwide lawsuit for unsavory practices and so sent him a check for $3,400. The check is made out to your ex-husband and not assignable. After you go through about a month of bureaucracy - getting power of attorney and copies of his driver’s license and etc. - you finally are able to deposit the check at your bank, whereupon they discover that he had left an overdrawn account there and so they take a big chunk of the check for themselves.

Your children have the last name of the author of all of your misery, the ex-husband. The ex-husband who tried to take them away from you just to torment you during the divorce, but years later when you sued for full custody he didn’t even show up in court to contest it. He hasn’t paid child support or participated at all in parenting. He hasn’t filled out one single bloody form for them - I’m convinced that form-filling-out is the main work of parenting. He has done everything in his power to ruin you and them financially. Yet they must keep his last name and, as a result, you are frequently called “Mrs. Persecutor’s Name” by innocent people. And why? Because until only very recently in our gracious civil injustice system children were considered the property of the father. It is absolutely unprecedented to have a contested minor name change succeed. Unprecedented! At least in Connecticut. Think about it. It wasn’t so long ago that women couldn’t vote. Woman are barely above property themselves, and the laws haven’t changed to reflect reality (If you don’t believe me, you should read Ann Jones’s Women Who Kill). So an abusive, abandoning sociopathic father can simply say, from prison via his lawyer, “no,” and you’re stuck with his last name in your family. And the abusive father WILL say “no,” because ownership and power is what abuse is all about. (I have a court hearing coming up on this soon, and am not optimistic.)

Here’s another irony: before you become homeless, you telephone the bank that owns your house to see if you can rent it when it forecloses. But even though your name is on the title to the foreclosed house, you are not permitted to even talk to the bank about that house because the mortgage is in your ex-husband’s name (it was part of the divorce agreement). You must get the ex-huband’s permission to talk to the bank. But he’s busy being imprisoned for fraud.

A fortuitous irony: the ex stops paying my mortgage (per the divorce agreement) in January of 2007, many months before the global financial meltdown. My mortgage non-payments got lost in a blizzard of mortgage non-payments. As a result, my kids and I end up living rent-free for over 2 ½ years. I start and complete graduate school during this time. Perhaps I will look back and consider myself lucky - at the time it felt like the sword of Damocles was hanging over my head for years.

One last irony: you decide to “break the law” and not heed the foreclosure agreement you signed because you have nowhere to go. You and your daughter “squat” in your house “illegally.” And, one day the foreclosure police arrive - but instead of being unsavory men in combat boots, they take the form of a cuddly woman in a grey cardigan. Her brother, the owner of the realty company that has been engaged by the bank to sell your home, gets the bank to give you another month and a half of residence and a check for $3,000 to help you get on your feet.

I can imagine that all you people who responsibly pay your loans might be dismayed by that last, but it was manna from heaven for us.

Each month, as you toss out the $50,000 past due bill from your divorce lawyer, you think that there is some truth to the adage that the Domestic Violence Crisis Center told you, that “if you give an abuser enough rope he’ll hang himself.” Yes, the ex finally got sent to prison, but it galls a little that it wasn’t on your behalf, but some else’s. Sideways justice. Then you ponder the fact that because he’s in prison he cannot contribute anything to child support and alimony. So their justice is actually costing you. And, because of that stupid state-mandated class you took telling you how important it was to foster a relationship between the children and their father, you let him call the kids at your house and you overhear them discussing how well he did during a basketball game that day and how much weight he’s lost walking the park-like grounds. He’s off the hook, enjoying sports and walks and losing weight and probably watching the playoffs. He’s at a spa for all you know (low security white collar prison).

OK, so do you think any of this might happen to you? I never thought it would happen to me. The good news is I am no longer guilty of feeling smug. Ever.

For those of you who have made comments, I want you to know that I’m reading them, and I thank you for reading. I do have an anger problem, it’s true. But I just want to point out that this is a “Financial Stress” column. This is not a “How Delightful My Children Are” column or a “How to Grow Roses” column. So I am laying out all the bad stuff here, partially with the hope that what I have experienced will warn at least one person not to make the same mistakes I made. Meanwhile, yes, there are good things that happen regularly in my life - stuff like my son’s amazing choir school and the wonderful friends I’ve made there and my daughter’s sense of humor and how much I love listening to music and reading good books. Things like people helping in unexpected ways. When you’re in trouble you encounter “angels” and that is always encouraging.

Perhaps I will add a Good Thing for the Day. My Good Thing for Today is the singer Frou Frou - I love working out to her.

* I did work for years and pay into the social services programs, so I am not a total slacker.