Wednesday, March 1, 2017

March 1, 2017

The reality of what has just happened has sunk in. I cannot no longer hope for anything good to come of any of the past seven years since I met Nick. Actually it will be eight years in July.
I can feel my head starting to pound now, I am surprised it hasn't already exploded. I know my heart is in a million pieces. Not just in the usual way, as in when a love relationship comes to an end. More like when your life comes to an end.

One moment I am semi-rational and I begin to mentally sort through what I must do and the sequence of what I will do first and next and after that. And the following moment I catch myself wondering 'if maybe'. Completely self-destructive. I have to get it into my head once and for all that I am clinging to a ledge on the side of a bottomless pit and if I don't soon start to attempt to climb upwards, even if I am only able to hold on with my fingernails, then I most certainly will fall further and further downward. The reason a bottomless pit is called bottomless is because no matter how far down you are, you can still go lower. Forever.

We are running out of hay. I have asked Nick dozens of times to find out if we owe any more on the hay we are just about out of. The last payment of $800 that I scraped together he left under a milk can on the doorstep of the guy we buy our hay from. When I found that out I was thinking the next thing would be that the money went missing. But Nick told me the other night when I asked if he had dropped the money off that the fellow's wife had called to say the money had been safely retrieved and that 'this must almost make us square'. I want to know for sure so I can go ahead and have my daughter's car fixed with my next paycheque.

Tomorrow is going to be a difficult day. I am going to try to get Nick to sign something that spells out in writing the terms of the verbal contract we made concerning how money would be spent and what belongs to who, although just about everything has both of our names on it. I have to make a concrete and water-tight agreement with him. I wonder if that is even possible. He is so much more sophisticated when it comes to legal matters and divorce. I have hesitated to ask my daughter for advice because I am so ashamed of the situation I have found myself in but to hesitate any longer is just stupid after what has happened at the bank. I even thought about suicide this morning after I woke up and remembered what I was going to have to do today. How easy that would be. But how hard on my mother and my daughters. I suppose there is some solace in the fact I have a life insurance policy that is paid in full which will only go to my girls. It isn't a huge amount of money but it will be about $100,000.00 for each of them and it will be non-taxable. At the very least I will get 60% of the equity in the farm but I am going to do everything I can to get my down payment of $90,000.00 back. It is all that is really left of the proceeds of my previous home that I worked so hard to pay off over the thirteen years I lived there. I should be entitled to half of what we have paid down on the mortgage here in the last 5 years - actually more than half because I have been contributing $1000.00 each month compared to his $800.00 - but my portion of the $31,000.00 or so is likely long gone now. I was thinking last night that if I had known it was possible to do such a thing, how sweet it would have been if I had been the one to take that money. But I am not like that. I am fair to a fault. I see no reason to take what doesn't belong to me. In the end, I just want what's mine.

The horses have to go ASAP. I can no longer wait for Nick to do it on his own schedule. We agreed a year ago in October to re-home at least half of them by April, which was just about a year ago now. He keeps pleading that his injured back prevented him from working the horses, but I don't understand why his doctor wouldn't give him anything for it. I know he saw the duty doctor once who gave him a prescription for a strong muscle relaxant, but he didn't ever get anything for pain. No physiotherapy or anything like that. Apparently he had two TENS machines here but I don't know if he ever used them. I only know he had them here because he borrowed them from his ex-wife and that he couldn't find them when she asked him to return them to her. I looked around and I found one of them but I couldn't find the second one. I am guessing he had two here because he couldn't find one of them either.

Once the livestock is gone then I can manage here without Nick and I can sell the tractor, but I suppose it would be to my advantage to wait until the door is fixed. He told me that is being put through insurance. I told him I would pay half of the deductible, of which my half is $125.00. Which is probably stupid of me but it is fair. I don't want to stoop to his level. I read something from the internet last night at work (that my co-worker printed off for me) that a judge can award one party more than 50% if there is evidence of reckless spending, etc. on the part of one of the spouses. That is certainly the case here. I am going to have to go to the bank and see what I have to do to prevent Nick from withdrawing any more funds against the house and I also have to see a lawyer. I would like to retain the family law lawyer that my daughter articled for, who also happens to be the same lawyer that Nick's previous wife used. She is very good - the lawyer I mean - although expensive, but the advantage I think is that she will know if Nick's behavior follows the same pattern as before and this will work in my favour. She is the type of woman who despises men like Nick and cranks things up a notch because of this. She was very pleased with my daughter's work with her and they parted on very good terms when my daughter left to join a criminal law firm, which is the type of law she has always been interested in. This woman attended my daughter's 'call to the bar' ceremony and I was introduced to her then. Although my feeling on lawyers is that it is too bad they need to be hired to settle matters like mine but the courts are not sympathetic to those who fail to realize the need for legal counsel when faced with legal problems. If they weren't so expensive! That being said I have paid for eight year's of university for my daughter and she has worked extremely hard to get where she is today. I will admit she probably worked harder than I did at my education, and I worked pretty hard at mine. Not to mention the 16,000.00 per year tuition for law school, the mandatory LSAT admission exam and the four-year undergraduate degree.

I feel a bit better and somewhat calmer after making something of a plan of action that I hope will begin to clear a path out of this marriage to Nick. I have to keep reminding myself that he is not of sound mind and that I cannot and must not expect or even hope that he will react or act in a predictable or even in a reasonable manner. There is also the glaring disconnect that gnaws away at me everyday and especially in the dark hours of the night - how and why can I continue to have feelings for Nick after all of the deception and lies?