Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me! We all know that phrase from childhood, I first heard it on the Brady Bunch. In the adult arena of divorce settlement negotiations it takes on a completely new and different meaning.
I've been wanting to write about this part of the settlement negotiation for a long time but each time I would sit down at my computer it was too painful to put into words, so I would stop. I am still having a hard time grappling with the fact that I was sitting across the table with this man that I shared my bed with for eighteen years and what was staring back at me was a look of pure evil, if his eyes were laser beams, and his word were bullets, I was as good as dead. It was the first time in four years that we were in a small room sitting at one table together. I was surrounded by five men and one woman. Two of those men were
my attorneys, the female, was a intern at my lawyers firm, one man was his attorney and the other male was a "neutral mediator. Sitting at that table I was various names, belittled by my ex-spouse and not one of those men put a stop to it. In this era, with the knowledge and publicity regarding sexual harassment and abuse, one would think that either of those men would have had the balls to stop the denigration. Instead, I was shushed when I spoke up to defend myself. I never came from a place of hate, and even after everything I still don't. Yet I felt that hate emanating towards me with every essence of my being. I truly don't understand how someone that I had two children with, claimed to love me, yet do what he did to me during the whole divorce process. Is it ego?, the fact that I dared to leave him for the second time? Truth is, I don't really care to know the answer.
Leaving that negotiation left me feeling downtrodden, abused and sad for the system that allows the bully to continue the bullying. I may have left an abusive marriage but the courts allowed the bully to wield his power over me every step of the process. The law student intern looked at me after that meeting and told me that as a woman, she was personally offended as well. My friends call me strong, but at that moment, in that room, I felt anything but.
Beginning the divorce process is akin to being blindfolded and thrown in a den filled with snakes, lions, and tigers, and only the strongest survive. You don't know what to expect and only people that have gone through the process know what I am talking about. I went to Law School, am an admitted attorney, but that did nothing to prepare me for the Devil's that I encountered.
I may have been beaten down, cried too many times to count, dealt with things that I only thought happened in fiction novels, but I am still standing here to tell my story so that others won't endure what I did.
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