How can he involve the kids so much!

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-06-2005
How can he involve the kids so much!
1
Wed, 02-28-2007 - 12:33am

Ok over the past year since my husband left I've checked in and out and I know I'm moving to a better place in my life. I come here now and then to vent but today is beyond anything I ever thought he'd do.

Thursday is my court date, a court date that I had to request after my ex filed for divorce and then never moved forward to settle. I had to attempt to give settlement suggestions to which he never responded so now here we are....going to court.

During our marriage my husband was emotionally and verbally abusive, he was frequently gone and very cruel to me when he was around. I attempted to ask my lawyer to leave this out and I stated over and over again I did not want to bring these aspects into court. However, my stbx has been very cruel, has a 25 yr old girlfriend, is attempting to take the girls from me and convinced one of our girls to move in with him because he was lonely, has provided no support, quit one of his jobs, is lying about the amount of hours he works, has attempted to remove me from our home by selling it out from under me, he refinanced our house one month before he left, I've had to change lawyers three times because of conflict of interests that he cause and he has spent very little time with our girls. My lawyer felt to better show my case I needed to bring these things out, I reluctantly agreed but I will say it felt better to tell these things finally. Only my kids knew what had happened, I kept to myself and protected him.

One of my daughters approached me a few weeks ago and asked if she could talk to the judge. She felt that she was the only one that could represent them. I didn't want her to because my kids never dealt with the things that happened and I told her that it wouldn't be right to do this for the first time with a judge. I have been very careful to not talk to any of my girls about anything, I've told them it's none of their business and that this is between us only. So I've told them nothing about what I said.

In addition, my husband never did any disclosure for the court date, his lawyer I think forgot. They took me to court two weeks ago to try and extend the case (it took over 6 months to get this date) because he has left me with no money and there are serious financial issues, including him allowing our house to go to foreclosure the judge said no.

Fast forward to today, yesterday they received the pretrial memo. The pretrial states about the abuse and about the event my daughter wanted to talk about. It also showed she was a possible witness (he had placed one of our other daughters as an absolute witness). His pretrial says very little in fact nothing about our relationship, its mostly name rank and serial number and oh yeah he's destitute.

So where is my problem. He had our 18 yr old read my pretrial memo, he called our other daughter (16) the one who wants to testify and read that section of the pretrial to her over the phone and talked to her about what he recalled as the details of that night. Now they are retailiating and putting all three of our girls on the stand including our 13 yr old. We have gotten them to agree to in chambers but I can't believe he is going to use our girls as pawns!! The two older ones were upset with me and he exaggeratted what was in the pretrial to our 16 yr old.

I continue to maintain it's not their business. I'm not surprised by this as he has let them read the documents the entire time through this process. Including one night when he made them come to his place after a settlement agreement, a very good one in fact, and asked them where they wanted to live.

I do feel a little sorry for him even though I should not, he's using a property attorney for his divorce attorney because it was his parents lawyer for their business.

I feel awful about how this has all ended, it was never to be this way and I never wanted to destroy him. I feel like that is exactly what I have done. In the same I have to remind myself all that he did to me over the year, he's left us destitute, didn't care if we had a place to live or if we could pay our bills. I just don't know what to do now. I'm trying to maintain and keep my kids sanity and not destroy them. This is so awful!

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-19-2006
Wed, 02-28-2007 - 7:59am

I'm so sorry you are going through this and that your beautiful girls are getting caught in the middle despite your best efforts to protect them.

Vent away. Sometimes just getting it out helps even if you can't change what is going on. Unfortunately you can't control what he does, only what you do. Try to stay focused on what is important (seems like you are doing that) and know that you and your girls will get through this and build a life for yourselves.

hugs to you.

M