I’ve read it, re-read it, scanned it, copied it, forwarded it, read it again…the order has arrived.
Friday at lunch I saw that my lawyer had emailed me. She stated that she thought I would be “pleased” with what the order contained. This may have set my expectations a little too high.
The order contained largely what I expected it to. The main points are:
* Week on and a week off for A.
*Each parent gets 2 non-consecutive weeks of vacation with the kids.
*Child support for me of $103.41 per week, retroactive to April 12 of 2013 when the court deemed it ‘reasonable’ that he should start supporting his kids after the ‘transition’ from school and bar study. This adds up to right around $4800.00.
*All rights and responsibilities remain shared, however if I email him he has 48 hours to respond, otherwise I can make a unilateral decision. Unfortunately, the timeliness of his bullshit responses to whatever I had to say about the kids was never really an issue.
*He is not allowed to contact D to arrange visitation, he is to go through me, then, contact with D will be alternating weekends, Friday at 5pm to Sunday at 5pm.
*The person receiving the child is to do the transportation.
*He is responsible for 52% of uninsured medical costs.
*His motion to enforce is denied, as it was made clear that I was within reason to not force D to go visit, considering how D felt about the whole thing.
D was not happy about this. Since the last time he visited, he doesn’t want to go anymore. His response when I told him about the order was, he’s hoping that dad never sees the order, and if he does, he hopes he doesn’t bother to email me about it.
A is fine with this. However, when I started talking about plans to go to Fl to see husband’s family (which we’ve been holding off on planning until we got the order) A is under the impression that we can’t go unless dad ‘consents’ to us going. “Dad won’t let us” is what he said. I told him that wasn’t accurate, we can do whatever we like, dad gets no say in it. When A says stuff like that, it really makes me wonder how much inaccurate control garbage he really spews at A when they are together.
This is bullshit, if you ask me. Why did I have to spend over $8000.00 on a fucking lawyer to get THIS as the result? Oh right…its because he is an abusive, manipulative, piece of shit, ass monkey.
And….as for my lawyer? I wouldn’t recommend her. She was expensive, and not particularly useful. She didn’t really grasp what kind of person we were dealing with. I could tell that she often thought, especially in the beginning, that I was overreacting to the shit asshat was doing. She somehow ‘forgot’ to put legal fees into the pretrial list of what we were asking for, even though she and I had talked about it specifically several times. This meant that it wasn’t up for discussion during the trial. She initially quoted me $1500.00 to take care of this. When that money was gone, she estimated another $2000.00. We got our final bill from her yesterday and we owe her $6600.00. We’d get bills monthly. We knew it was accumulating, but we had no way to stop it, not when she wanted to see every fucking email exchange. She was unclear about the amount of time we had for our trial. She’d prepared for 2 days, when we only got 1 day. I paid for prep that we didn’t need. She frequently would ask me “can you think of anything else I should be asking?” during the trial. Fuck man, I don’t know…isn’t this YOUR job? Isn’t this why I owe you so much money now? She even charged me $18.50 to read and respond to the email I sent her on the 27th asking if she’d heard anything about the order yet, as we were told we’d have it in 30 days, maybe less. I guess not really having a grasp on what we needed ourselves made it difficult to be able to choose the appropriate lawyer. Or maybe we just totally picked the wrong person. Or maybe she was a shitty lawyer. I don’t know.
Anyway. It’s over. I’ve got the order. $8000 dollars and 16 months later, It’s not what I wanted, but it’s about what I expected. This process has been complete and total bullshit from beginning to end.
The End.
Looking Forward 