Spent a full hour on the phone with New Duck today (thank you, lady!). Both she and, before her, Lag Liv, encouraged me to tell you all why I’m getting divorced so that perhaps other women will feel like they aren’t alone. I feel like I’ve already been waaayyyy too much of a sharer on my blog. I intended for this blog to be a place where I could share fun and interesting tidbits about law school, not my full medical and marriage history. Bleech! But I’m sitting here with my left arm on fire (burns like a bitch!!!), unable to sleep, rashy and itchy from my stress-induced hives that STILL won’t go away and I’ve realized I could give a shit. Privacy be damned, this is my only outlet and if I can’t carve out time for a therapist right now, I’ll just share with the bloggy world. [Big wave to any classmates or relatives who might have found this.]
Here’s the sordid and humiliating and background on my divorce:
My husband has spent 8 years alienating me from everyone to the point where I don’t have many… well any… IRL friends that live near me (only a few who live far away that I can call or e-mail when he’s not around). It’s incredibly humiliating to admit. He calls me every morning on the way to work, keeps me on the phone on the way to school and then calls me the minute class ends to make sure I’m on my way home. I thought I loved him but now I realize that he’s just had me living in fear of angering him for so long.
The weekend before Memorial Day, I stole a rare few hours for myself to volunteer for something important for a few hours, leaving Pumpkinhead with my mother (and telling Chapin I was with her because he would have forbade me doing something alone). When he found out I’d lied, he called me a whore — no, actually he screamed it for about an hour, telling me that only whores will “abandon their children” so they can go run around the town where men are present. I have a lovely voicemail for posterity. When he got home a few hours later (he had been working), he came up to where I was in bed next to Pumpkinhead and ripped the covers off of both of us. Pumpkinhead dived under the covers to hide and Chapin raised his fists like he was going to hit me. He didn’t, but he called me a whore again and in front of our son. It was then that my heart broke for the final time and I knew I was completely done. Somehow I found strength in that moment.
Even my parents didn’t realize quite how much I was under his control. They knew he was jealous (he would call all the time when I was with my mother to check up on me), but they figured that I’d say something if it got really bad. I guess I always thought he would change. Once he got violent and did it in front of Pumpkinhead, I realized I couldn’t stand by him while he acted that way because otherwise I’d be insinuating to Pumpkinhead that it was okay for a man to treat a woman that way. No way!
Anyway, I’m not sure how I’m going to get through this but I’m just trying to put one foot in front of the other right now. Chapin refuses to move out right now and throwing him out would just cause more problems (i.e., I need him to work with me on mediating this so I need to stay on his “good” side.) So my Dad came over on Memorial Day and helped me move my office into Pumpkinhead’s room and move a double bed into the room that had been my office. This way at least Chapin is a bit further away from me and fortunately school started this week so I’ll be gone a lot. He is still trying to hug, kiss and otherwise manhandle me and is trying to barter sex for his signature on the divorce documents. 
He takes no responsibility in all of this and, when he shows his angry side, he tells me I’d be nothing without him and that he has made me what I am today. Thank God I know enough to know that isn’t true. If anything, the converse is more accurate. Still, my skin crawls when I see him because my heart has changed from allowing the control to being so close to tasting freedom I can hardly stand it. Hopefully he will sign the final agreement this week and then be out by the end of July (the temporary order says July 31).
So that’s what’s going on. I didn’t really want to post too many details because, as I said, it’s quite humiliating. I come across really strong and confident IRL but when my husband’s around it’s like I’m a different person. I even had to turn down a girls weekend with my cousins because my husband refuses to let me go anywhere overnight without my son as “chaperone.” Sigh… I definitely need to recover my backbone. I don’t even recognize myself.
We went to the bank for a notarized waiver of service of process and then I couriered everything over to my attorney for filing before he could change his mind.
