I need help paying legal fees for my divorce.
My wife, V, and I began dating in April 2001. V was pregnant when we started dating, and A was born in August 2001. V was accepted to UT Dallas in fall 2004, and I applied and was accepted to the Electrical Engineering program at UTD for the same semester. We lived together in Dallas for two years, until I was accepted to the Architectural Engineering program at UT Austin in fall 2006. We lived separately while V finished her degree at UTD, and I began studies in Austin. A lived with V’s parents in Houston, while we were in school for these three years.
We were married in Houston on 8 June 2007, and moved in together in Austin in July of that year, with A. V worked at an insurance company while I completed my Bachelor’s Degree. In January 2009 I got a job in the field that became my career, as I completed my final undergraduate semester. I legally adopted A in August 2009. In September 2009 we purchased a townhouse. Our daughter J was born in February 2010.
I was accepted into the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Acoustics Program at UT Austin for the fall 2012 semester, and three weeks before the end of the semester, in November 2012, our son B was born. Also in November 2012, we closed on a house in northwest Austin, and moved in shortly thereafter.
The relationship has never been on very solid ground, with fights being somewhat common. During the fights, V has displayed a history of initiating physical and emotional violence, and has also been prone to emotional outbreaks at times of high stress:
- In around 2005, during an argument, V struck me with a metal candlestick, breaking the skin on my left arm and requiring stitches. We told the medical team and my parents that I cut myself while dumpster diving.
- In 2005 or 2006, I had been out of town on an audio recording session, and when I returned home he found evidence of heavy drinking at the apartment. Knowing that V very rarely drank alcohol, I inquired about what happened. V at first claimed that she had some friends over to study, but ultimately admitted that she and a male friend were studying alone, and that she offered him enough alcohol, including hard liquor and my homemade beer, that the friend was unable to drive home. V had also insisted that the friend sleep in bed with her, claiming to me that she wanted to be sure he did not choke on his own vomit.
- In 2008, I was completing a semester project that was keeping me at school more that V appreciated. I made special arrangements with the professor to complete his project at home, to maximize the amount of time I was able to be with my family, while still working on the project. Later, in a rage, V smashed part of the balsa wood model with a dictionary.
- In April of 2008, after I made an off-hand comment about V’s lactose intolerance while getting ice cream, V, A and I returned home. V locked herself in the bedroom and eventually came out screaming and being generally violent. I left the apartment with A because the environment was not safe. I did not have parental custody of A at the time, and V called the police, claiming that I had kidnapped her daughter. The police showed up, noticed some dried blood on my face from when V had scraped me with my glasses, and in the end, V was charged with domestic assault, and arrested. This resulted in a CPS visit, court ordered anger management classes for V, and a couple months of couples counseling. During the same incident, while A and I were away from the apartment, V took a thumb drive with files related to a group project I was working on and hid it, claiming at the time that she had thrown it out the porch to the wooded area. A and I searched the area, but could not find it. I got one of V’s friends from work to bail her out of jail, as I was unable to – being the subject of the attack – in hindsight this should have been a huge red flag. Upon returning home, V revealed that she had hidden the thumb drive in a drawer.
- Later in 2008 V began an affair with one of her coworkers that continued into early or mid 2009. I found instant messages open on our shared computer, which hinted about a meetup that the two were planning that very morning, and I looked further back and found evidence of previous meetups as well. I called V at work, and asked point blank if she was having an affair. V came home immediately to talk about it, but I left the house before she arrived. We worked things out with the help of couples counseling, although V was very hesitant to tell her counterpart that the affair was over. It is probable that the two of them continued a platonic relationship, if not a sexual one, until he was fired around 2010. V continues to put the onus of this affair on me.
- In 2002 I was witness to the murder of a friend. V has found that I am incredibly sensitive to this subject and she has consistently brought this subject up in the course of arguments about completely unrelated issues. V has repeatedly claimed to wish that the bullet that killed my friend had also hit me, or had hit me instead of my friend.
- We bought a house in November 2012. Throughout 2013 and 2014, I would come home for lunch as often as possible to visit V and the kids. It was very common for V to be still in bed at lunchtime, with the kids unattended.
- It has always been my responsibility (and pleasure) to wake the kids up and get them ready for school, help them with their homework and musical instrument practice, and to read them a story and put them to bed at night. When I am unavailable for this, due to being out of town, etc., V has consistently refused to stick to the routines that the kids are used to, and instead wakes them up by flipping on the lights and announcing that it is time to wake up, and putting them to bed by playing games on her phone in our bed, then sending them to their rooms to tuck themselves in, or letting them sleep in our bed. They have never responded well to this. It was not uncommon for me to return from a late night at work to find the young children still awake, and in our bed, well after their bed time. On a related note, during a week-long period in January 2016, when I was out of town on business, my father came into town to ensure that the kids were at school on time, and taken care of in general. On Tuesday or Wednesday, V told my father that she could take care of them for the rest of the week, and he returned home to Houston. The kids did not make it to school on time for the rest of the week, and A ended up having to get a ride from the neighbor on Friday.
- It has also been my ongoing responsibility to do the grocery shopping, the laundry, and the dishes, not to mention the house maintenance and lawn care responsibilities. V's main family responsibilities were to make sure the bills were paid, the social calendar, and transporting children to their after-school activities.
- Several times (Mallie, Nano, Dobby, Strawberry, Blueberry) V has unilaterally adopted a dog which the family was then responsible for. V has consistently refused to feed the dogs or keep them watered, or to walk with them along with the rest of the family, leaving these responsibilities to me and the kids.
- Around June of 2016, V began a series of casual sex type affairs, with men she met on Craigslist. In July 2016, V asked me to look up something on her phone, and I found a very tawdry text message on her phone from some unknown male. V maintains that nothing happened between herself and the text messager.
- In March 2017 I returned from work to find that V had shredded many of my underwear, shirts , and (oddly) all three neckties that I owned, with scissors.
By early 2017, we had spent most of our savings, had maxed out several credit cards (and were participating in a debt reduction program), had taken out loans against most of the value of my life insurance, and had borrowed money from the kids’ accounts. In the previous almost ten years of marriage, the paying of the bills has always been V’s sole responsibility. This is understood to be a major source of V’s ongoing stress. Adding to this stress, in early April 2017 our air conditioning system required repair which was estimated at $1,850, and the couple’s tax preparer reported that we owed the IRS was owed approximately. These, on top of the expected expenses of A’s dual credit course at the local community college, and our planned trip to Grand Rapids in June (where I was presenting my MS thesis at an industry conference), were completely demolishing the family budget. I have had control of the family budget since early April 2017, when V made it clear that she would no longer be accepting this responsibility. It was after taking control of these matters that I realized that the money that V earned at her 2-3 days-per-week office job was not being deposited into the shared bank account, but instead into V’s private account, which was supposed to be used as a business account only, for her burgeoning crafting business.
V and I had a major fight on 18 April 2017, after I came home late from work due to needing to meet with my thesis advisor on campus after his lecture, and after my typical workday. I returned to the house to find that she had destroyed things around the house (she put scissors or a screwdriver through a painting that a former neighbor of mine made, had overturned a bookshelf that was full of recording and beer brewing equipment, had cut up more clothes, destroyed a photo album, etc.). She had this tantrum while the younger children were at home, and left as soon as I came home with A. She returned about a half hour later, saying that she needed to retrieve her laptop, but began to hit and punch me. I led her back to the bedroom to keep the children from seeing her in this state. As per usual, I left her in the bedroom, and locked myself out of the room (she was able at any time to unlock this door from the inside). This was to give her some space to calm down, and it had worked fairly often when she was in this kind of state. This day she came back out almost immediately, swinging her keys on a lanyard like a nun-chuck, and I brought her back to the bedroom. She came back out again, this time with a knife, and I grabbed her wrist and took the knife away, then grabbed her upper arm and took her back to the bedroom. I lifted her up and placed her on the bed, and stroked her legs in an attempt to calm her. It seemed to be having the intended effect, and she was in there for much longer this time. Eventually she calmed down enough for me to feel like she was not a danger to others on the road, and she left the house. She peeled out, and raced down the street, not stopping at the stop sign at the end of the road.
It is easy to see in hindsight that our marriage was doomed, but I stubbornly tried to keep it together for the sake of the children, if nothing else. After she left in April I set forth three conditions that I insisted on, if our relationship was to continue: (1) I wanted V to get individual counseling, with someone qualified to diagnose her for suspected bipolar disorder, (2) I wanted us to get couples counseling, where we could discuss our situation, and V's promiscuity in a safe place with a third party present, and (3) I wanted V to keep the same schedule as the rest of the family; she had gotten into the habit of taking a late afternoon nap as the rest of the family ate dinner, then staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning, while never being available to help with the kids in the mornings.
After leaving on 18 April, she did not return to the house for several days, leaving me with three kids and four dogs. After that, she came back periodically, when she needed to do the laundry, take a shower, get something to eat, use the internet, etc., and even spent the night on occasion. She joined me on our planned trip to Grand Rapids, MI in June (it had been planned since February), and when she told me towards the end of the trip that she had a good time and was glad she came, I thought that we would likely get back together afterwards. She left again the day after we got back to town.
I took her out to dinner on her birthday, 31 July, and we had great conversation, staying at the restaurant until after it had closed and they asked us to leave, then spending about a half hour in the parking lot chatting and dancing while I sang our wedding song. The very next day, 1 August, she filed papers, and on 2 August I was served with a Petition for Divorce (somewhat expected), and also an Ex-Parte Protective Order (not at all expected), in which she claimed that I had been beating her regularly for years, and had sexually assaulted her. She claimed that I was a danger to her and the children. Her evidence was photos of bruises on her wrist and bicep, from when I had grabbed her to secure the knife and take her back to the bedroom to calm down. I had been watching the kids virtually single handedly for approximately 3.5 months at this point. Luckily, when I received these papers, the kids were visiting grandparents out of town, or I would have been forced out of the house immediately upon receiving the Protective Order.
I spent approximately $4,500 in a week preparing for trial, and getting her to agree that I was not a danger to the children. I spent an additional $10,000 preparing for and participating in the 3-day trail. During the trial, V's mother testified that she had seen V slap A across the face when she was talking back to me about math homework, and that there was occasion when V was a teenager that she hit her mother with a shoe, while her mother was driving, and that the blow was severe enough to draw blood (I had not been aware of this incident until the trial). Also at the trial, A talked to the judge in her chambers, and told her that she wanted to live with me, and that V was abusive. I was told by multiple people that our minor child,above the age of twelve, would be able to talk to the judge in chambers, and that her testimony would be considered in the ruling, but that we would not find out specifically what was said. This turned out to be inaccurate, as the judge told us major parts of A's testimony, and yet ruled that V and I were to split the house 3.5 days a week each, while the children stayed put (this is referred to as a "nesting arrangement"). Another part of the ruling required V to attend anger management counseling, and the last major portion of the ruling required my to pay for both sets of legal fees, as V was claiming an income of only $800 per month. The judge did make clear that she did not believe that I was abusive towards V or the kids, noting that if this was true she would expect to see "a broken jaw" when I discovered her affairs, as opposed to the couples counseling that I always reverted to; the protective order was thrown away.
We have been in this nesting arrangement since late August, and it is not immediately clear when this will be over. We will either end up in mediation, or back at trial.
I am attempting to raise enough money to either see us through trial, where we will almost certainly be forced to sell the house, or through mediation, where I intend to use the remaining funds to pay V off on her portion of the equity that we have in the house so that I can keep the kids at the house.
Thank you for your time in reading this, and for your generosity in donating.
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