divided loyalties (or just 'oh fuck!')

good news: the girls dad has split from his woman friend of five years and her apparently 'horrid' boy children (his explanation not mine) and may be moving back to Adelaide.

bad news: (actually very very bad news) the girls dad has split from his woman friend of five years and her apparently 'horrid' boy children (his explanation not mine) and may be moving back to Adelaide.

Take your pick depending upon which side of the fence you may sit. The man just upped it and left to follow her to QLD, leaving his children behind. No job as a justifier to them, no climbing the ladder, etc, just another woman and her kids.

To me it screams the end of peace, continuity, consistency and stability. The judge ordered him nothing as he failed to turn up at the custody hearing (how can you not turn up at the custody hearing FOR YOUR OWN CHILDREN!?) he has already started on the girls 'if your mother lets me see you'. ugh.
Ding ding. Round ...umm ...lost count.

a good larf

Chatting at home with Simon last night about a colleague who is going through the family court at the moment reminded me of the drama that is seperating one life unit into two. It also rekindled a memory of the depths ex partners can go to to seek revenge on a spouse, to try and equal the pain of the heart. This story is funny and despite the agony at the time i did manage a very good larf.

The crux of the amusement stems from the fact that my ex husbands name is Simon and my then boyfriend (now my husband) is also named Simon and that additionally, my surname is X and my boyfriend (now husband) also has the surname X. My ex husband has a different surname.

The circumstance that i found myself in is that i recieved a letter from the government stating that a certain department had been trying to contact me, unsuccessfully, by phone and had also twice sent someone around to my house to 'interview' me. I had remained uncontactable, hence the letter and would i please call this department for an interview about my current living arrangements.

???
So i call.

The woman who is in charge of my 'case' informs me that they have had an 'anonymous' tip off that i am in fact co-habiting with someone yet recieving extra government allowance allocated for people parenting solo. Could I please confirm that my ex husband had moved back into the house. What the!? That sounds horriffic! NO!

I tell her that but she also informs me that the tip off has included details about a vehicle being seen frequently at the house etc and being there for a few days. I say 'well my ex husband drop the kids off every week but he doesnt even come inside the house and that this tip off is a bit of a mystery to me coz there is no way on earth we are back in a relationship together'.

She asks me a few more questions... my mind is racing around trying to figure out who on earth would make a 'tip off' like this; that my ex and i are back together...its ludicrous! Nuts. A really awful notion! The only person who i think would make a tip off about me being in a relationship (and hence 'concerned' about co-habitation with another man) would be my ex husband but he is the one being tipped off! Im confused. Then the lightbulb goes off. I ask her a few questions about the names she has in front of her...

Is the reported name of involved person Simon? "yes"
Is the surname reported X? "yes"
I tell her that Simon X is not my ex husband, despite the name, that he is my boyfriend and the name of the person doing the tip off would be my ex husband Simon? "Umm I cant reveal that."

I tell her that what has happenned is that someone in the department has seen the names involved and become confused and has assumed that the boyfriend is the exhusband and the ex husband is the boyfriend. It gets really special here as the natural effect of such confusion is that the ex husband has now also implicated himself inadvertently as a co-conspirator in this 'defrauding'. He has, by his own doing, sent the goverment dudes around to his place to answer the same questions i am getting and go through the burecratic nightmare that was required to prove his innocence! Priceless. Boy , did that woman and i have a belly laugh on the phone that day. I really, really would have loved to have been a fly on the wall the day the ex realised what a totally botched job he had made of his attempt to make life difficult for me.

There was no defrauding on my part. Sleepovers dont count. I could have told him that. Ahhh, revenge gone wrong. Sweet enough for me.

i have a [reocurring] dream..

well its a bit of a nightmare really. I have it all the time and have done for the last five years. Its a kind of nightmare to start with but the ending is great! I always wake up happy and at peace. I had it again for the second time in the week last night. Its always the same theme but I havent had a recurring dream sequence like this since i was a kid.

It starts with me in a situation; a party, a dinner, a household moment where i am back in a relationship with my ex husband. The kids are usually involved in the dream but always in the 'backgroud'. The main component of the dream at this stage is the sinking feeling im experiencing at the realisation that i am not happy and feel that the rest of my life is a death sentence and i have to share it with this man. Its the re-expereincing of the real life feeling i had the day he moved back into the house after we decided to get back together after a seperation of six months. Dread. Despair. Heavy. Hopeless. Stuck. Dark. Misery. Anger. Death. So i revel in these emotions in the dream a little before the good bit arrives when i realise that Im no longer sharing my life with this Si but the new version, Mark II; the one that actually fits! The new Si usually walks into the dream room as i have this realisation. This moment marks the pinnacle of the dream.

My heart soars, my despair and dread lift and a feeling of pure joy and love rise up in me when i become aware in the dream that I have done the hard work, that those emotions belong to the past and that I am no longer bonded to a life of misery and 'smallness'. That expansiveness and hope are now a part of my living vocabulary. Then I wake up. Smile. The nightmare has gone...

I really love having this dream.

be careful what you wish for

I used to say about my ex husband that life would be so much easier if he just got hit by a bus. Not very karmic or Zen i know, but at the time the children were experiencing so much pain and confusion that my rational and 'big' self got consumed by the emotional and insular self that exists within me.

But the guy has gone and driven over himself with his very own mini-bus for hire jam packed to the roof with narcissism, selfishness and a huge lot of emotional baggage! Flattened himself and the kids with so much parental incompetence that they came home shocked, depressed and full of confusion brought about by the huge amount negative feelings towards him that spending a month with him engendered.

What do you do when your child speaks about divorcing their dad? about having no respect left and thinking him stupid and incompetent to the degree that they say they no longer like him? I wasnt ready for that conversation with B1; it winded me, made my heart race and my brain shut down. In these moments of honesty spoken by a child you have to put aside your feelings of rage, hurt, whatever leftovers you may harbour and current circumstances you have to navigate and just hear their words and help them ,without agenda. Its hard. it takes clarity and linearity which just dont come easily when im talking about their dad and his incomprehensible, bipolar, personality disordered ways. But, for them, i have to be detatched from myself to some degree in order to respect them and their relationship with him, which exists independently of me.

Fark!

He has enough rage towards me without having this situation come about, where he will no doubt believe to some degree that i may have had something to do with the current dilemma.

The girls dont want to tell him themselves that they never want to go visit him again, that they were so bored out of their brains and felt deeply disrespected by his lack of planning, interest and maturity that they dont really care if they see him again this year. The guy banned them from visiting the only friends they have in QLD, friends they have had since birth, because their mother is a long time friend of mine. He banned them from hanging out with their step brothers while he went to work as he thinks they are a bad influence, so they stayed home, alone, on weekdays, for 4 weeks and went on out to the movies with him twice. I cant send them back to experience neglect like that. So they want me to do it, tell him they refuse to visit again. Im so unsure about the best way to approach this problem. Im damned if i do and they are damned if they do.

Its difficult when you co-parent with some one who really isn't capable or competent of filling the role.

eat pray love

apparently its a no 1 best seller and everyone is talking about it - well,anyway that's what the jacket said. Im so yesterday. I love this style of writing; self deprecating, laconic, colloquial, ironic, and funny, very very funny. Its such an honest, naked piece of writing filled for me with moments of extreme identification as the writer takes us with her on her journey of clambering her way out of a messy and hard divorce through a process of self discovery of various means. She eats her way through Italy to find self acceptance, prays her way forward to self realisation in India and finds love in her consolidation journey in Indonesia. Dog eared pages fill my book where i have marked inspiring passages but there's just a few too many. Im going to have to read it again. Its one of those books where i nod my way through amidst the laughter. Not many books have me laughing out aloud but this ones irresistable, effortlessy swinging from the spiritual to the front bar. Not having any divorced friends, i found the book an affirming companion.

what i had waited for for so long was to have an actual conversation with my ex-husband, but this was obviously never going to happen What i had been craving was a resoloution, a peace summit, from which we could emerge with a united understanding of what had occourred in our marriage and a mutual forgiveness for the ugliness of our divorce. This obviously wasn't going to happen. How do survivors of terminated relationships ever endure the pain of unfinished business...you finish the business yourself. Its not only posible, its essential.

i swung that phantom limb of divorce around quite a bit after the amputation. It took a while to feel whole again.