Subject: Have any of you ever had feelings like these? (Was Re: man shoots wife and attorney)

From: [email-masked] (aaron.l.hoffmeyer)
Date: 7 May 92 04:56:22 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Angela Morgan) writes:
>>> a man walked into a courtroom just before his divorce proceeding was to
>>> start and shot his wife and her attorney. she died.
>
>> I don't know which is sader, the tragedy of the death or the fact
>> that we can fairly confidently say that the deal he was getting is what
>> drove him to it.
>
>[I'm a female NCP, in case you've forgotten.]
>
>In the midst of my divorce, I got dangerously close to "blowing away" my
>husband.  The whole process up to that point had pretty well trashed me
>
>Well, anyway, to make a long story short, I completely "lost it."  I was
>so distraught at these accusations and at the entire process that I almost
>went nuts.  I wanted to kill him!  But I didn't (thank goodness).  However,
>I completely debased myself by getting down on my knees (literally) and
>begging him to believe me that none of it ever happened....  It's taken
>a very long time for my self-esteem to recover from the whole experience.
>
>Have any of you ever had feelings like these?

God.  Angela, like you I've been through an emotional wringer.  My ex2b
had charges of child endangerment filed against me for spanking my sons
on September 22, 1991.  Then she would not allow me to see my children
for three months - the court scheduled our next hearing over two months
after she filed the charges against me.  It was a ploy by her and her 
slime-bag attorney to keep me away from the children, cut me out of their 
lives, make her seem like the primary caretaker, make me out to be a
criminal.  She filed contempt charges against me for sending my sons
two letters and a birthday card.  She has lied over and over to anyone
who will listen.  She accused me of abusing her and my children
repeatedly, of raping her, of being a terrible tyrant of a husband and
father.  I did not get to see my children for three months - at all.

When I finally did get to see them, I had to pay $85 for the first hour
with them.  When they first saw me, they went completely spastic - they
ran up to me and hugged my legs - I was holding Christmas presents for
them.  I took them in the other room and hugged them and hugged them
and hugged them.  As I was hugging them, an incredible wave of emotions
washed over me.  I was hugging my oldest son (who turned 4 during the
time I didn't get to see them) and I started crying, saying, "Oh Alex
and Adam, I've missed you sooo much."  But I fought back the tears and
the crying jag - this was my first hour with them in 3 months, I wanted
it to be a happy time.  I fought very hard to make it a happy time.

Then for the next 3.5 months, I had supervised visitation.  I had to
pay $25 per hour to see my children.  In seven months I saw my two sons
for a total of 14 hours.  She repeatedly cancelled my visitations and
would not allow me to see them during the week, because it interferred
with "her" schedule.  She was able to get away with all this because
she filed charges against me.  (The charges will probably be dismissed
on May 14th - the Ohio Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is
filing an Amicus Brief on the unconstitutionality of the law under
which I was charged.  We've made one of the strongest motions for
dismissal of a misdemeanor in the history of Ohio law - probably over
100 pages of documentation related just to the dismissal.)  The
domestic relations court was not willing to give in one iota until the
criminal case is resolved.  I am guilty until proven innocent.  Of
course, she gets to be the primary caretaker all this time too.

What is her motivation for trying to destroy my life?  Is it the
children?  Does she want to save the children from the big, bad, mad
rapist father?  Let me let her answer this.  In a deposition on
February 4th, 1992, she stated that she had no problem with
me seeing my children 5 days a week.  She wanted me to be able to take
them to dinner on weeknights.  She did not seem concerned at all about
me being with them.  But there was the criminal case - the prosecution
had told her that there was to be minimal interaction with me until the
case was resolved.  But she said she wanted me to have a relationship
with them.  She also stated over and over that she did not want me to
have shared parenting because it would lower her child support
payments.  What I interpret from her statements is this:  She is not
willing to accept shared parenting because there is a possiblity that
the court would lower the amount of money I have to pay her if we end up
with "shared parenting".  I pay her $1034.22 per month plus poundage, plus
extraordinary expenses (medical, dental, etc.).  Does she want the
children?  Most definitely - if she gets the money to raise them too.
Does she want as much of my money as she can possibly get?  When she
filed she asked for alimony and sole custody and subsequently lied about
her income and the hours she worked.  Does the money matter to me?  At
first I said, "No."  But I have to be honest.  I can't afford the
current arrangements - she has all assets, I have all debts, she makes
almost twice as much as I make per month in net income - after she gets
my child support.  I'm broke.  I can't even afford to pay my bills.  I
make almost $50k per year gross - she makes less than $20k gross.  

Freud stated that one of the strange things about the way we communicate 
is that you can often take the negation of an affirmation and it can be 
true, too.  Strange, I know.  For example, "the money does not matter."  
Well, guess what?  It matters.

At that deposition on February 4th, we put into place an agreement
wherein I would start seeing the children 5 days per week with
overnights unsupervised to start by a hearing date that was scheduled
at the end of February.  We were both to get psychological evaluations
- each to pay for our own.  (It was my second one.)  Two days after she
agreed to these things on record, she fired her attorney and backed out
of the deal completely.  She called me and told me that if I wanted to
see my children, I had to pay.  We filed for contempt against her.  When 
we finally went to court, we got bumped - a custody trial from two days
earlier was still going on - and our referee was hearing the trial.  It
was the end of March before I was allowed to see my children
unsupervised - only for 8 hours at a time - no overnights.  Our
contempt charge - the court never said one word about it.  She's the
mother (temporary custodial parent), they can't throw her in jail.  
Things have improved a little in the last six weeks - I get my first 
overnight visitation this Saturday.

The one thing that I have left out in the telling of these events that 
is conspicuous is this:  This has been the most emotionally trying,
devastating experience in my life.  It is in some ways worse than the
death of a loved one - it lingers, it goes on, there are new injustices
every few weeks.  It seems she can literally get away with murder - the
court does not give one fat rat's ass about my feelings or the damage that
they are doing to the relationship that I had with my sons.  And the
very last thing on anyone's mind is the cost - emotional and financial.
She's being bankrolled by her parents and my child support payments -
she's got enough, so everything is fine.

On December 1st, three days after Thanksgiving and three days after I turned
29, I wrote a letter to my ex2b.  It reads just like a suicide note.  In
it I state things like:

	 I have never hurt like this before.  It is a terrible,
	 knife-like pain that envelopes my whole being.  I am dying.

	"The only difference between alimony and child support is that
         alimony is tax deductible."
		-- a man who killed himself after his wife filed charges 
                   against him for spanking his children 

The quote is real.  It is a statement made in one of these forums by a
man named Allen Wells.  His wife destroyed him as part of their divorce.
He had to pay $1356 per month child support and was not allowed to see
his children.  He took his life.  How much do his children get now?

I've had terrible dreams and terrible thoughts.  I had a dream in which
I wired a shotgun to her head and terrorized her for hours - then ended
it all.  I woke up crying - crying like a baby.  I cried for probably 30
minutes.  The things the subconscious mind will do while we sleep....

These images - conscious images - pop into my head.  Terrible images.
I suppress them and try to think clearer thoughts immediately.  It
works.  I can change the subject in my mind.  I don't often have these
kinds of thoughts - they usually creep up in reaction to some new bit
of injustice that I have been dealt.  But they happen.

I've thought, independently, most of the thoughts that I've seen
expressed here:  about blowing my brains out on the floor of the
legislature, of throwing down a rug in front of the courthouse and
starving myself until something is done to change the mess.  Then I
thought how it wouldn't work.  They would just get my ex and two
psychologists to say, "He's nuts (anyone sitting on a blanket in front
of a courthouse must be deranged)" and out would come the straight jacket
and I would probably never get to see my kids.  Gandhi didn't have to
deal with modern American psychology.

The pain is unreal.  It hurts very deeply - deeper than I could have
imagined.  My ex2b told me at a mediation meeting last Friday that I
was so emotional.  It is that evident.  She said that in reaction to
watching me during the mediation.  I wasn't watching her - I seated
myself so I couldn't see her - just in front of her.  She got to watch
the tears form in my eyes as the guardian talked about how, if we
couldn't find a way to be good parents to our two sons, how if they had
to witness two people fighting all the time in front of them, our
kids were going to turn out to be two of the shittiest people that ever
walked the earth.  Our parents weren't so hot at their roles, but they
didn't put us through the garbage that we are putting them through.

My eyes filled with tears again when the guardian talked of how we had
both expressed to him separately how deeply we had been in love at first,
how we were soul mates, how we had spent every waking and sleeping hour
together for almost two years, how we had loved probably more in that
time than most people do in a lifetime, how the hottest flames burn out
the quickest.

My ex2b can at least tell that I have been wounded.  But she will never
know how badly.

Saturday, I went to see an old friend.  He is unique among my friends.
He didn't even graduate from high school.  Most of my friends have
advanced degrees.  This man lives a couple of blocks away from
my mother's old house - the house I grew up in.  It was boring Saturday
night, there was nothing to do, I knew this man would be home (his wife
works Saturday nights and he watches the kids).  It was late when I
went to his house - almost 11:00pm.  I helped him wire two speaker
banks to his stereo TV and run the audio of his VCR through his stereo
(this guy owns six huge speakers).  He and his wife together make less
than half what I make, yet I was always amazed at how they always
seemed to have more stuff than my ex2b and I.  I couldn't understand
it, motorcycles, cars, two kids, a house, stereo, VCRs, stereo TV, six
huge speakers, Nintendo, toys everywhere, camping equipment.   They are
not even close to well-off, yet they worked together to save money and
buy the things they wanted.  They worked off-setting hours so they
wouldn't have to pay for babysitters.  They are both equal parents and
bread-winners.  Anyway, I helped him do some things around the house.

Then I remembered that I had one of my books out in the car.  It is the
*System Administration Guide* for the operating system that manages
AT&T's long-distance network.  It is almost 1000 pages long.  I wrote
it and phototypeset it - first in troff, then converted it to
FrameMaker and in the process helped to create and define AT&T's
Multiweight Design (look and feel) template for FrameMaker and helped
create a filter to convert troff mm documents to this template design
in FrameMaker.  It was one of the first two books in AT&T to be
converted this way.  The book is amazing - even to me.  It describes
how to fine-tune one of the most complicated software systems ever
written.  It describes how to keep the hardware up and running -
millions and millions of dollars worth of hardware.  The project is an
AT&T showpiece.  There was a PBS special on last week that described it
in some detail.  And I (with the help of 69 developers, 15 system
engineers, system administrators and operators) wrote the book that
tells how to keep it up and running - running at peak performance
levels - running all the time.  It is one of several books that I am
working on - but to me, its "The" book.  It's my crowning achievement.

I asked him if I had ever showed it to him before.  He said, "No."   I
asked if he wanted to see it - I've known him 13 years, maybe he would
be interested in what I have been doing for the last two.  He said,
"Sure."  I went out and got it.

He looked through it for about 20 minutes - asking me if I had drawn
the pictures, trying to get a feel for what it was describing, some
high-level overview.  I gave him the highest-level overview - the one I
just gave you.  All he could say was, "Incredible."  He finally handed
it back to me.  

I leafed through it and sat there thinking for a minute.  Finally I
said as my voice cracked and the tears started running down my face, "I
can write this, I can write one of the most comprehensive books ever
written, but I'm not a good enough person to have a relationship with
my children.  I read books written by the most intelligent authors that
I can find.  I've read probably 15 Nobel Prize winners and as many
Pulitzer Prize winning books.  I know how things work - complicated
things and things that seem simple but most people don't know - like
why the sky is blue.  I know!  I know high-level philosophy.  I know
calculus, I know chemistry.  I know psychology.   I can teach my
children so many things about the world, I could help to insure that
they would be very positive and contributing members of society, but my
wife has convinced everyone that I'm some terrible monster - a monster
who doesn't deserve to have a relationship with his two sons.  All she
has to do is say it, the court buys it and I'm screwed.  She's a mother
looking out for her children, and I'm just another fucking deadbeat
dad - an abusive deadbeat dad!"  I closed the book and got up and left - 
going back to my mother's house.  I didn't want him to see me crying 
any longer.

Aaron L. Hoffmeyer
[email-masked]