5 Month Mark – Grinding along.
Background - Wife stated she wanted to separate at the beginning of, but (until now) never physically moved out. She served me with divorce papers in early April. See previous posts for more information. At the core though, this is mostly a reference for myself, so if you don’t want to hear some random internet person’s experience, It's OK to move on.
So, continuing from my last post – I was indeed served papers; turns out that she’d already had them in motion when she talked to me about it, and it wasn’t more than a day or two to get them. First up after getting served, I talked to two lawyers – took about a week to get in. One was more of a generalist, and the other did mostly divorces. Ended up choosing the more generalist lawyer, as the divorce-specific one seemed more interested in finding extra money for my spouse than protecting my interests, and seemed less prepared on top of that. I don't actually know if it will affect the outcome at all, but I'm still glad I talked to two. The lawyer filed my response to the papers, and I spent the rest of the month collecting documents to back up what I'm planning on protecting as mine. Took an online coparenting class to satisfy the legal requirement, and turned that in via my lawyer as well.
Notably, both of the lawyers I talked to were on the same broad strokes page - What my wife was asking for in her original request is pie-in-the-sky stuff that is not going to happen unless I want it to. (Yes, the 401k amounts, and the fact that you owned the home going into the marriage matter.) Given our current incomes, child support/alimony are likely to be near 0 as well. On top of that, she'll likely be asked to help with half of daycare too, which she claimed she wasn't going to be responsible for, meaning that my costs might actually decrease when it's all said and done. Turns out when both spouses make similar amounts, but only one handles all the bills, trying to squeeze blood from a stone isn't likely to happen. (And before anyone asks, I tried NOT to sugar coat things for my lawyers - I went into those meetings with the mindset of laying out the realistic situation and did my best to explain both the positives and negatives.) Hopefully, there's no changes to the child situation once she realizes how the finances will look - we're both looking for 50/50, and while there's some scheduling to work out, we're both still pretty much on the same page about it.
Along with that, she’s now moved out too. It was not an easy week as she was packing her things. The child is having a rough week too, trying to get her head around exactly why mom and dad aren’t living together anymore. Hopefully that fades a little over time, and I don’t have to continually have her asking for mommy at bedtime. (that one hurts more than nearly anything) Thankfully, the stbx has been reasonably good at co-parenting so far. We got a pair of calendars synched up, so we can communicate schedules, and the moving process, while painful, didn’t have any major disagreements on what goes with who. Since I’m writing this on the first weekend she’s gone, it will be interesting to see what the first few weeks when we're physically separated look like.
My mental health has been… Not good the last week, to be completely honest. Actually, I don’t think any of ours has. I’m been depressed, my wife has appeared distressed, and the kiddo has been distressed too. While I actually felt better in month 4, I think it was more that I was scrambling to deal with lawyers and armoring up because of that. Therapy has helped me too - according to my therapist, i have a lot of codependency traits, and she might have even been financially abusive. So I'm learning how to work through that. That said, now that the initial legal stuff is slowing down for a while and the actual moving is commencing, it’s almost like I’m taking a couple steps backwards. It might be that moving out opens all the wounds again too for all I know, but I’m having all the bad feels all over again. Hopefully my therapist can help with that in the coming weeks.
We’ll see what month 5 brings. What’s in store is the first month being physically separated, along with the first results of the legal process, and a whole lot of financial stress since we’re both essentially paying for lawyers, and furnishing half a place at the same time.