My buddy, Grog, is divorced with two kids.
To say that he was in a bad place after losing his job, then his wife then his house is putting it mildly.
Happily, he managed to pull out of the dive and get his shit back together.
Like most people who recover from such, he's still got a long climb, but he's being realistic about it even while being ambitious.
While he was in the depths of despair, he crawled into a bottle and wasn't paying child support.
Because of his lack of employment, that support bill was an "easy" $50 a month.
Isn't it interesting that when you're homeless and your income is $0 a month, they think you should pay $50?
But he got sober, got assistance, got some training and got a job. Not a great job, but sufficient.
He took that job and attacked the arrears of his child support with gusto and started paying $250 a month extra too.
His ex-wife, The Whore, is a piece of work. She's horrible with money, horrible with time and can't hold a job longer than a year, averaging six months.
She's constantly bitching that he's not paying enough.
It appears that she decided to involve The State because they will probably say that he owes $600 a month.
When you file this in the state they live in, The State sends her a check directly and bills him every month.
Guess how much they're sending her! $50.
Now she's calling him a deadbeat for not mailing her the remaining $250 he had been sending.
He's like, "I am fulfilling my full legal obligation to you at the level they are garnishing." By the way, she's committed fraud to get on child support recovery. He's regretting "making it easier" by paying cash instead of an instrument that proves he paid her. I told him to tell her, "your inability to cash the check doesn't constitute a crisis on my end."
He's decided to spend it on the kids directly rather than filtering it through The Whore. Smart, I think.
As soon as the eviction moratorium ends where they live, he's going to get his own place and custody of the younger kid, who's expressed no love for The Whore. That should really upend her dreams of free money from garnishment!
We're pulling for you Grog!
Good thoughts to him, who is not me.
ReplyDeletechuckling
Sounds like my ex, except for no kids.
Sometimes I'm highly glad I never had any kids.
ReplyDeleteSad that a woman can use her kids as pawns like that. Even more sad that this story is way to common.
Been there done that too, a man can't get no breaks... I only had to pay $250 a month and I ate a lot of plain ass cheese sammichs I had to fix dry, you ever eat dry plain ass cheap cheese sammichs on cheap ass day old white bread? Sucks sewer water. I could have used a beer, or three.
ReplyDeleteI caught a 30-day Facebook ban for typing the word whore in a reply to one of those "Hey handsome!" comment spammers.
ReplyDeleteThis sort of thing (Men getting reamed in divorce court and child-support) is one reason I'm not as wistful as I might be about never having been married. The woman I married might not break bad...but she also might, probably for reasons I find incomprehensible at best. And once in court, I'd have about as much chance as a Trotskyist in a Soviet courtroom.
ReplyDelete