Here, I'll expand on it.
For about 6 months, the situation was deteriorating with my marriage. She was becoming increasingly more irresponsible and unreasonable and I was trying to preserve a stable household for my kids. She would routine go out to run errands and be gone for 8-10 hours, and not answer calls/texts. Got to the point where I was texting her friends asking if they knew where she was. When she came home, she would say shit like "oh, sorry, I was petting cats at the humane society.' This is actually what came out of her mouth one time. For 8 hours? Who the fuck do you think believes this shit? I fucking don't. This happened on a regular basis.
So, I'm pissed, obviously. Pissed because I'm pretty fucking sure I know what's going on, and also pissed that she's lying to me about it and insulting my intelligence. Arguments became more common, and louder. One day I fuckin had enough and I told her I was leaving, she told me "no you're not" and I heard the drawer in the kitchen open as I was walking down the stairs towards the garage, and I turned around and she was following me down the stairs with a knife. I grabbed her wrist, she ended up cutting my hand in the process, I took the knife out of her hands and just held her wrists and told her to calm the fuck down while she screamed at the top of her lungs. I told her I'd let her go when she calmed down, because I wasn't letting her go just so she could keep fighting me. She got increasingly more agitated, because you can't ever really tell women to calm down with a good effect, and eventually I relented and just let her go, and she went and locked herself in our room for a few hours, crying or some shit or something. That was the point when everything really changed. From that day on, she started saying shit like she was scared of me, because I guess that was the point she figured out that all the movies and TV shows were lying to her and women can't really beat men in a fight. Bear in mind at no point did I hit her or hurt her beyond the point of physically restraining her. I just took the knife from her, and stopped her from hitting me.
Things ebbed and flowed for a few more months and it became obvious that this was absolutely not going to work because she refused to be reasonable about anything. I offered to rent her an apartment out of the household budget so she could get some space and maybe we could save the marriage, but she refused, didn't want that. But also didn't want to do anything around the house, wanted no responsibilities, didn't want to take care of the kids, and just wanted to do whatever she wanted to do whenever she wanted to do it. Eventually it got to the point where I had given up on everything except on paper. I told her I didn't care what she did as long as we maintained the appearance of married for the kids, and as long as we were both on the same page with managing the household financials.
Shortly thereafter it was either a new guy, or the old guy i never knew about, but I at least knew what the fuck was going on and where she was. What do you fucking do? I was making like half of what she was at that point, and for me, making sure my kids didn't have their lives disrupted was more important than anything else. Last thing I wanted to do was pack up and leave and move to some fucking 1 bedroom or some shit and either leave the kids there with her, who was clearly not interested in parenting, or pack them into said one bedroom and have me sleep on the couch. So, judge me for whatever you want at this point, I don't care. I made the choice I made to try to preserve the life my kids were living. Right or wrong, it's what I did.
Somewhere along the way, the roof was leaking down thru the bathroom fan, so I got up on the roof, ripped half the shingles off and replaced some boards up there and then reroofed the shit. In the middle of doing all that, I tore the meniscus so bad in my left knee it was folded over on itself. My daughter was working evenings in basically the "downtown" area of my suburb at that point at a thrift store. My ex of course wanted to go out with the new guy, so I told her "Alright, I'll pick the kiddo up tonight, but you've gotta pick her up tomorrow, because my knee is killing me" "okay."
Well, obviously this never happened. Got a text from the kid at 10:15 saying "hey, are you picking me up?" No, your mom is. "Well, she's not here." Well, alright, fuck, guess I'm picking you up. Got all the way there, picked her up, got all the way home and the kid got a text from her mom saying "Dammit, almost made it." 45 minutes is I guess "Almost made it."
This was the turning point for me. I can handle you treating me like shit. I cannot handle you ignoring your own fucking kids and the responsibilities involved in that. I cannot and will not ever choose anyone or anything over my kids. They're priority number 1, always will be, and to this day they're the reason I do almost everything I do. I was fucking livid. I told her that I don't give a shit what she does, but the second it interferes with the kids, it's over. She should be embarrassed that as a mother she chose literally anything over her kids. From that point on, I told her she was placing kids first and everything else second, or this arrangement was over. Amongst other things, she agreed she would never be out past bar close (2am) so she wasn't doing the walk of shame in front of the kids.
We had more ups and downs for the next few months, but things had kinda settled down and evened out. Then she started having some issues with the girly parts, and we ended up heading down to Mayo for the day so they could figure out what was going on. Ended up being bladder cancer. Spent a long time in the car talking, and I legitimately thought we might be able to make this work. I figured a health scare like this might be what she needed to figure out what's important in her life and we could get over this, patch shit up and maybe make everything work. When we got home, she said she was gonna go see Joe, and I said "well, that's fucking disappointing, but whatever I guess, I'll see you when you get home."
Well, with all the shit we found out that day, I ended up not sleeping much at all, and the hours dragged on. 2am. 3am. 4am. Finally, 5am she walks in the door. I am unbelievably pissed because I can't believe that I just spend all day driving 300 miles and sitting with this bitch in a hospital trying to figure out if she was gonna fucking die or not and this is how she repays me. I asked her "what happened to you being home at bar close?" and her reply was "I changed that rule." My jaw probably hit the floor. I couldn't believe she could possibly say something so fucking dumb and disrespectful. At this point in our relationship, when we would have arguments, she would call her mom for some reason. She would literally sit on the fucking phone with her mom while we're arguing. So, she heads downstairs and grabs the phone (old style, one that plugs into the wall). I said "oh no, not this fucking time, we're sorting this shit out" and I ripped the phone cord out of the wall. She ran upstairs, starts the whole screaming process, I follow her, she starts throwing shit at me, and for a split second, I actually was going to hit her just to stop her from hitting me with shit, raised my hand, then realized what I was about to do and stopped. And then she yells "Call 911!" and I see that my daughter has followed us upstairs, and then runs back downstairs.
At this point I think, "Well, shit. I guess this is happening,' and I'm still in my boxers. I walk over to the bedroom, grab my jeans off the closet door and put them on, then walk out to the living room and my front door opens and 3 cops barge in. My German Shepherd does what German Shepherds do and bolts for the door so the very first thing the cops see when they come in the door is me and my 80lbs dog coming around the corner. I'm still fucking surprised that the dog or I didn't get fucking shot. They threatened it, but I had nothing in my hands, and i was able to get the dog under control pretty quickly. It literally happened just like that, at that time scale. I was super fucking confused.
The cops separate us and talk to us both. They ask her if I hit her, she says no. They ask me, I said yes. I've got all kinds of defensive wounds on my arms from the shit she threw at me. They ask me if I want to press charges, and I said no, because I didn't want the kids to see their mother dragged off to jail. They talk to us both for a bit more and say "Alright, well, there's nothing we've got here, so we're gonna get outta here, but if we have to come back here, one or both of you is going to jail." Alright, crisis averted, I guess we're okay. At this point the Sergeant comes downstairs to me and says "Who called 911?" I told him my daughter did, and he goes "No no no, the first time."
The first time?
It's at that point that the realization hits me that she did not call her mom. She called 911, it connected, I ripped the phone cord out of the wall. Interference with a 911 call is a gross misdemeanor, and is classed as a DV charge, however, it is almost never charged alone. It's usually an addon charge, like the guy is beating the bitch and she tries calling 911 and he chokes her with the phone cord or some shit.
Queue up 4 days in jail, because this was 5am Saturday morning, and they do bail hearings for misdemeanors on Monday, and gross misdemeanors on Tuesday. By the time I got out, some DV counselor had gotten with her and filled out some questionnaire about domestic violence, and that's when she said she was scared of me (Stemming from the incident where she found out she couldn't attack me with a knife for free) and when she got to the question asking "Does he have access to any firearms?" (I did not own any guns at this time, and she knew that) she answered "Well, yeah, he can just go to the store and buy one" and they marked "yes" on that box. Because of that, the motion for the order for protection was granted because she was scared of me and I had access to firearms. That is clearly not the intent of that question and she fucking knew it, but it got her what she wanted, which was me out of the house so she could do whatever she wanted.
I was outta the house for 5 months after that. The kids said she never even turned on the stove in all that time. I took the girls grocery shopping multiple times once I could see them again because there wasn't any food in the house, and she would just disappear for entire days. (longer story, but basically we got the court to agree to decide custody in divorce court and to not decide it at the OFP hearing, primarily because of her neglect). She stopped working because of "trauma as a result of her DV incident" and her work denied her disability claims, maybe because they actually read the police report, who knows.
My lawyer was actually pretty pissed. I had pictures of the house, my oldest knew exactly what was going on and was willing to testify for me at trial. My lawyer just couldn't get over how bold she was that I was taking care of the kids while she was out fucking around and I was the one who caught a charge out of all of this. He wanted to go to trial, because he could put her up on the stand and just rip her up one side and down the other with all of this shit. We could put me on the stand or we didn't have to, but he could basically make her look like the human garbage she is to a jury, and he was absolutely positive that I would walk away.
When the time came, I decided I wasn't gonna put my daughter thru that, so I plead guilty. Lawyer was super disappointed again. I remember him telling me "Dude, this is never how it goes. Normally it's the lawyer saying 'Eh, I'm thinking we gotta see what we can get out of a plea deal here because this looks pretty bad,' and it's the client saying 'No man, we gotta fight this bullshit!' and this time it's the complete opposite." I owe that guy a lot. He was a fantastic lawyer and exactly what I needed at that point in my life. If you're even in that situation, get a fucking lawyer. Don't cheap out either. The 6k or some shit I ended up paying that guy to navigate the OFP and the criminal charge was well worth it. You are not in the right headspace to be making decisions regarding your future. The entire reason I came out of that with no criminal record and I can buy guns today is because I shut my fucking mouth and let him handle it.
So, there you go. That's the story.
