Barbara Hazelton and Jo Briggs are empowering women through their own investigation into all of the questions surrounding divorce: legal, finanical, personal, parenting, dating, and many more.
They do their homework, interview experts, and help people navigate their way through what can be a daunting process.
My episode just aired and it is about preparing for your divorce before you even meet your lawyer.
While we look around at all of the people rushing to spend this holiday with loved ones, those families who are in transition – going through divorces or separations right now, or living with the decisions to do or not to do either of those things – might feel a little less grateful for their particular lot in life this week. No need! Divorce is an important time to count your blessings.
Here are 10 reasons to be grateful if you are divorced or separated this Thanksgiving:
You never have to eat your mother-in-law’s greasy mashed potatoes again.
If this is the year you do not have the kids, you have a day to yourself to finally watch the entire series of Breaking Bad in your bathrobe.
If this is the year you do have the kids, you can start making unconventional choices for the menu – rainbow marshmallows on the sweet potatoes, anyone?
No one insinuating you look fat by asking, “Is that what you are going to wear?”
No more worrying that your spouse is going to get drunk and embarrass you in front of your parents.
No more worrying that if you get drunk and say what is on your mind you’ll hear about how it affected your in-laws.
Whether it is true in India or not, in America we do not light our daughters-in-law on fire when they ask for a divorce.
Whether it is true in Iran or not, in America being divorced does not automatically mean you are also homeless, bankrupt, and un-marriageable.
Even if you just moved into the smallest apartment in town, you have a roof over your head; and you get to choose who does and does not walk in the front door.
If the whole idea of being divorced during Thanksgiving just turns your stomach – maybe you’ll lose a few pounds and be in “market-ready” condition at all the coming holiday parties! It is never too early to shop for a New Years’ outfit.
If you are not yet divorced or separated, but know in your heart-of-hearts that you need to get out of this relationship, use this holiday season as your internal farewell tour. Catalogue what you do not like, be it the menu, the guests, the smells, the pressure to buy expensive gifts, the complete disregard for the expensive gifts you bought, or anything else, and remind yourself – I will never have to do *this* again.
If you are healthy and safe and making choices for your own life, then you are more fortunate than 90% of the people who live on this planet today. Take a moment to stop and count your blessings. . . Then, please pass the greasy mashed potatoes.
What We Love: I have never actually tried rainbow marshmallows; but I do love the idea of them.
I represent a wife whose husband is in business with his brother. The wife believes that there is a lot of cash exchanged in the husband’s business. Even if she is correct that there is a substantial amount of cash exchanged in the husband’s business, there is still not a lot of money in that family. She does not have access to enough money to hire forensic accountants, private investigators and litigating attorneys to delve into these sorts of questions.
It is not so simple when money is tight. She wants to know how she can find out for herself whether he has cash hidden away or if there really is, as he claims, no cash. Or – even if there is not a stock pile of cash right now; is it possible that he can get paid off the books and avoid his financial obligations going forward?
I asked her to consider her husband’s purchases and lifestyle, and get a picture in her head of how much cash she thinks exists and is not being recorded. My suggested equation to her is if she believes that going through the discovery process will net her more than the cost of the professionals involved. She does not think so.
Here are some ideas for how to find money on your own, or with the help of a mediator. The basic process is known as “Discovery” and every state has a set of laws which direct divorcing parties to show each other and the court pertinent requested documents. Your mediator can help you request the documents. But remember – whatever questions you ask, you should be prepared to answer, as well! If you ask for bank account statements; be prepared to show all of your own bank account statements.
A stripped-down version of what a forensic accountant might do is to first request all of the records showing the jobs done by the business for the past year – calendars, receipts, invoices, work orders, materials ordered, etc. on one hand, and the bank records showing income on the other. Using this information, you would be able to draw a rough idea of how many jobs the company performed, when and where the jobs were done, and the approximate value of these jobs.
If, for example, the company averages 4 jobs per month at $5000 per job and you track that through the business records and income, but some months show the same number of purchases, the same timing of sub-contractors hired, and dispersed, but only 3 jobs’ worth of income, you could deduce that the fourth job was paid in cash, and pocketed. A pattern of this sort of discrepancy would be of interest to a judge and could alter the financial awards in the matter.
In another matter I handled, the husband showed income of $50,000 per year on his tax returns, but when we looked at copies of his annual credit card and debit card statements, he was spending closer to $100,000 per year – without going into additional debt.
So, we have covered one question: will a treasure hunt cost more than the amount of treasure you find?
The other question to consider is whether hiding assets is worth the suspicion it raises. If the husband and his brother really do hide a $5000 job in cash once every month or so, and can each get themselves an extra $20,000 in cash that way; is it worth it once the Wife (or, worse – the IRS) – goes snooping? Maybe just giving the wife more than she can prove will keep her from trying to prove the bigger questions?
What We Love: Most decisions come down to the teeter-totter balancing of potential cost versus probable reward. Adding weight to one side of that scale might be a good way to keep your own balances in check.
I sat across from a very happy man. He is recently separated from his wife of 25 years. His children, through with their education, are ready for the next phase of their lives and so was he. I had known my friend for more than 20 years and this was the happiest I had ever seen him. He had nothing bad to say about his wife. Not then, and not now. Now, after waiting patiently for 2 decades he is ready to move on with his life. He is not in a hurry. He is not dating. He is living in a world where nobody is mad at him. He wakes up in the morning and eats what he likes for breakfast that day. All day every day, he makes his decisions, he goes about his days, he does his work, and he pays the bills. But now he does all of that out of the shadow of his angry and judging wife.
Still, 20 years down the tubes can’t be easy for anyone. I asked him what he thought now that he was seeing the light at the end of this particular tunnel, of all that had happened before. He was beaming. The happiness he feels at just being alone cannot be contained or concealed. He said, “It is not anyone’s fault. We were not the right fit for each other. I love her, I will always love her. She raised my children. In fact, in many ways, she raised me. But I am looking forward to someday falling in love with somebody who is madly in love with me.”
These are not spring chickens, and dismantling a lifestyle is difficult work, but they are doing it at their own pace. They will sell their house, establish two new residences; divide their belongings and their debts. They will do all of that over the course of the next 6 to twelve months, one step at a time. And, when they have completed this work, they will file for divorce. No judge will be able to tell them who lives in what house; or how to distribute the assets. These are wise people who have made decisions together for half of their lives. This final batch of decisions – the ones in which they create their own ending – may be the most critical ones they have ever made. By refusing to blame each other, hate anyone, or make things tumultuous, they are creating a future in which they will always be able to respect each other.
Sometimes the decision to divorce is a rushed and emotional result of an unhappy moment, or series of moments. Sometimes it is a patient conclusion to a lifetime of causes and effects. Either way, the process of divorce can still be a time to carefully consider the best alternatives for everyone involved – spouses and children, even adult children. When we focus our attention on the culprit, look for a bad guy, and aim for retribution, we risk missing the delicate and somewhat beautiful opportunity to see a bigger picture and a wider world.
What We Love: Whoever said that patience is a virtue missed the fact that it is also a gift to one’s self.
World War 2 medic Henry Beecher had a limited amount of morphine in his bag. He walked across a battlefield strewn with wounded soldiers, some rolling around or crying out in pain; others lying still, quietly bleeding into the earth. Trying to figure out which ones needed his limited supply most, he would walk up to each soldier and ask him, “Are you ok? Are you in pain? Do you need morphine?”
Lying on that battlefield, soldier after soldier would take stock internally, assess the damage, and say, “No, no I’m fine. Save the morphine for someone who needs it more.”
Years later when Dr. Beecher met gunshot wound victims in the hospital Emergency Room where he worked, he often noticed that civilians with less severe injuries would experience much greater pain than the soldiers he had known.
Dr. Beecher’s work led to his discovery of the placebo effect; which is still being explored and investigated by scientists, doctors, pharmacists, and even economists to continue unraveling the complexities of the human brain.
For me, though, it comes down to “the stories we tell ourselves.” One description I have heard of Beecher’s work is that the soldiers on the battlefield, with their gunshot wounds, just got themselves a ticket home. By being injured, but not killed, in battle, they would be able to return to their homes and families. For each of them the war was over, and their real lives could resume where they left off. Sure, there would be surgery, transport, paperwork, and recovery – but it would all lead to the outcome every soldier dreams about the most – being home with family, friends, and decent work. The gunshot in this story is almost a gift.
For the ER victims, however, the movie playing in their heads would be running in the opposite direction. The victim of a hold-up in his drug store, for example, begins to think about the gunshot wound and picture hours of surgery, paperwork, increased insurance premiums, weeks of lost work during the recovery process; an inability to go back to work, provide for the family, or maybe even the loss of the family business. The gunshot wound in this story is the beginning of the end of happiness.
The stories we tell ourselves during divorce are the same. Are the papers that the lawyer draws a gunshot wound delivered on the battlefield – your ticket out of the war and into a peaceful world of your own choosing? Or are these papers served to you like a thief come to empty your cash register – the end of the blissful life you have known and the beginning of loneliness and poverty?
I have represented people in both of these positions, sometimes within the same marriage. There are the couples who are both tired of living on a battlefield and see divorce as their exit strategy. They tend to have short, clean, amicable splits. And there are those couples who both see the divorce as a terrible and necessary evil caused by the other spouse. Those couples tend to have protracted litigation as the end of their marriages.
Most divorcing couples are a combination of the two. There is the one who feels that the marriage has been a battle and is willing to brave pain, paperwork, and an extended recovery time, just to get out. Ironically, married to the person who thought everything was fine until now. For that person, the daunting tasks of paperwork and beginning again feel like an injustice piled on top of an insult.
The truth, of course, is that neither story is an imperative truth. Divorce is not a physical injury. It is a largely paperwork process designed by the legal system to protect the rights of individuals and their children. The perception of whether it is painful or helpful, of whether it is a curse or a gift, lies strictly in the mind of the beholder. It is the choice of each member of every divorcing couple to decide whether this is a moment of liberation or a moment of tragedy.
What we Love: When we direct our own movies, we are more likely to enjoy the ending.
The first time I ever saw “Lana” she was already on the witness stand as I walked into the court room. I was a new attorney, still in my 20s. I had never seen a divorce before. I didn’t even really know anyone who had been divorced.
Most of the work I had done until then was for other lawyers, drafting the contracts they had negotiated, briefing cases they needed for court, interviewing their witnesses. I didn’t know what type of law I would eventually practice. I had a brand new shiny degree and I was still figuring it out.
I was one of three attorneys from our firm in the courthouse that day. Two of us were on a civil matter and one was handling a family case. When there was a break in one, I’d go sit in on the other to see which attorney might need my help.
I walked into the family law courtroom and slipped into an empty seat in the back row. My associate was interviewing a woman on the witness stand. The witness sat in front of the courtroom full of people and with perfect calm, grace, and poise answered every question put to her, while tears silently rolled down her cheeks.
She was only a couple years older than I was and in that moment she was becoming a self-supporting single mom. By choice. The husband was her high school sweetheart, and she loved him, but he couldn’t settle down and raise a family with her and she could no longer support him, herself, and their two year old son. She was cutting him loose, and it was breaking her heart.
I didn’t know most of this at the time. What I knew was this, the judge asked her why she had agreed to accept decreased child support, and she looked across the room to where her husband sat staring down at his hands. “My husband is a landscaper,” she told the judge. “His work is seasonal and when he doesn’t have work he doesn’t have money. I can’t ask him to give me what he doesn’t have. I know that when he makes money he’ll take care of me and Luke.”
The judge reminded both parties that if he did not “take care of her” she could always come back to court and ask for more child support. Then he pronounced them single and unmarried. She thanked the judge, stood up from the witness stand and walked straight past her lawyer and over to her ex-husband, where he stood waiting for her. They did not say a word to each other. They just stood there, facing each other, each holding both of the other’s two hands with their foreheads touching and tears falling on the floor at their feet.
I have never seen another divorce like it. I am proud to say that I became friends with Lana and more than twenty years later still count her as one of my dearest friends. In that moment she was, in every way, one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. I have learned so much from her strength and generosity of spirit in all of these years, but never more than I learned from her the very first time I ever saw her.
And . . . she never had to go back and ask for more child support.
What We Love: Sometimes giving people the benefit of the doubt works to your own benefit.
When I first met “Rayna” she was scared to ask her husband for a divorce. He pays all the bills, he knows how to fix everything in the house. He doesn’t like surprises.
They had discussed divorce from time to time over the years, and he had made it clear that he was worried for her and the children. He had explained that he would be so “heartbroken” if they ever got a divorce that he would have to stop working. His anxiety at being single would outweigh his ability to make a living. Then he would not be able to pay for her car, there would be no money for food, phones, or college tuition. She and the kids would be homeless and penniless. No, he had advised her, divorce was definitely not a smart option. Better to stay married and just live by his rules.
But as the years went by, the marriage became more difficult for Rayna. She and the kids would try to do everything exactly as her husband demanded, but they were human and would make mistakes. If the house wasn’t cleaned right, or grades were not high enough, or clothing was in any way viewed as inappropriate the repercussions were too severe.
Fighting, yelling, hitting, broken promises, and constant threats became more and more prevalent. Rayna and the kids had to go stay with her sister to get away from the worst of the tirades.
We decided that Rayna needed to start making a little space for herself. She started working increased hours at her part time job, and saving more of her money. She opened her own bank account without telling her husband. She took out a credit card in her own name. She surrounded herself with people she trusted at work and in her life. So that when the time eventually came that she could take no more, she was ready.
She called and asked me to file divorce papers. I knew that the mud was about to hit the fan, and asked if she was ready.
“Today I am a much stronger person than I was a year ago.” That’s what she told me. It was music to my ears.
After we filed for divorce, her husband pulled all of the nasty tricks he had threatened. Rayna stopped for gas on her way home from work one day and used the same gas card she had always used. It had been cut off. She paid with cash from her wallet. When she asked her husband what happened, he got angry with her; so she stopped asking.
A week later, she took her son to a large box store to buy back to school items with the usual credit card. Now, this card was cut off. Again, Rayna reached into her own wallet, pulled out her own credit card and completed the transaction without her husband’s support.
When the husband’s attempts to make her stop the divorce failed, he started getting angrier. One night he got so bad that she tried to call the police, but he broke every phone in the house. She calmed him down by saying there would be no divorce.
“We just have to live through this night, and in the morning things will be different,” she told her frightened teenage daughter. The next morning they each packed a bag and went to stay with friends. They lived on couches for two weeks until she found an apartment that she could afford to rent on her own. She found the place through a friend at work; the landlord was able to give her a break on the rent; and she does not have to live with her husband any more.
One day at work, she received a call from the dealership where they had leased their vehicles. The lease on her car was in the husband’s name and he had canceled the lease, the registration and the insurance. They were on the way over to pick up the car from her place of work. She was sure she would have to walk home. But, again, a friend gave her a ride, a less expensive lease was available, and she was able to get to work the next morning uninterrupted.
This divorce is not complete, and he will be found in contempt for the rules he broke by cutting her off like that. The money she has had to pay from her own pocket will likely be reimbursed to her when they sell the marital residence; and the whole thing should eventually balance out through the court system. But, Rayna does not have to wait for the wheels of justice to turn slowly in her favor. She made them turn by her own strength.
She got good advice a year before she filed for divorce; she followed that advice, and bided her time. So that when she was ready to leave; she was really ready to leave. Now, thankfully for Rayna and for her kids, there is no looking back and there is no control that her husband can exert over her.
What we Love: “Today I am a much stronger person than I was a year ago.” And a year from now she’ll be able to say it again.
Q: My friend has a timeshare with her husband 14 days every 2 years. They are filing for a divorce. They’ve separated and he lives with his new girl in a different state now. My friend made reservations for 6 days at their timeshare and asked me & my man if we would like to go with her. Between the 3 of us we agreed that since she has the timeshare that we will pay for the rental car, food, & round trip airline tickets. It’s all set and we’ve taken off work for the vacation and everything. When her husband heard we were going to use the timeshare with his wife he flipped. Now he is harassing his wife almost every day by email. He says he will cancel our reservations unless we pay the going rate to rent this timeshare for 6 days. But his wife is the one that invited us as guests. My concern is can he do this? What are her legal rights as 1/2 Owner of Timeshare? Can she go to jail for doing this? I’m sorry but I didn’t see any wrong doing here. We thought we were doing the right thing by purchasing everything else to help out and this way we all can have a nice vacation. Well not if her husband has any say in this. Help PLEASE!
Signed,
Ready to hit the Beach!
Dear Ready,
Until the court officially divides the property of the parties, it is still owned jointly by both of them. The problem is that your friend acted without the permission of the co-owner of the timeshare (who happens to be her husband) and without a court order. If anyone owes you the time or money back, unfortunately it is probably your friend and not her husband.
That said, the husband could be nice about it, or could be a jerk about it. I am sorry for you and for your friend that he is not choosing to be nice about the timeshare. I suspect it will be one of many petty disputes between the two of them. My best suggestion to you personally is to stay as far out of it as possible.
If you all have time and money set aside for a vacation, take it anyway – just don’t go to the disputed timeshare! There are websites where people let you rent out their timeshares for below cost. Do a little more research and you will all still get to have a fun vacation together, leaving the angry ex behind!
What We Love: As bad as this woman’s situation might be, she is lucky enough to have friends who want to go on vacation with her. Divorce can be hard; a relaxing trip with good friends is always a great idea!
“When you meet my husband, you won’t believe the things I have told you about him.” At my law firm, we hear this so frequently from women in emotionally abusive relationships. They tell us that their husbands belittle, demean, threaten, and frighten them, and yet, to the outside world, the men are charming, funny, considerate and sweet.
With apologies to the men I have not yet met, I must add a disclaimer here. I have never met a man who meets the description I attribute to the wives in this piece.
The women feel as if their friends and family will take the husband’s side in any factual dispute, since they see their husbands making the other wives laugh and blush. They see their husbands glad-handing and back-slapping with the other men. They see the man they fell in love with, when they are out in public. And they think that everyone else is just as duped by the external façade as they were.
Truthfully, a lot of us are duped by their husbands’ façades. We do not know what goes on behind the closed doors of someone else’s marriage. If a couple seems happy together, we presume that they are happy.
The wife in these situations must feel especially confused and betrayed. When she is out with her husband in a group, she sees the man she loves. Frequently, that man can last for weeks, months or years. The wife might even begin to doubt her own senses, and think that maybe he is not as bad as she feared. But, then, something happens, a trigger is secretly thrown and the controlling, anger, vicious comments, or subtle put-downs begin again. And, she is alone again. How can she expect anyone to understand or believe her when they were out for dinner just last week, and she was laughing and dancing and hugging her husband?
So, eventually, she makes her way to my office. She is frequently a woman whose confidence is substantially lower than her station, accomplishments or looks would warrant. She clearly feels badly about herself and does not quite understand why that would be, or how she got that way. She is a woman who doubts her own judgment and is afraid of what her husband will say or do when he finds out that she wants a divorce.
And then she will tell us how she lives within her marriage, the abuses, the angry words, and the accusations she has sustained. Often, she will not have any friends of her own, because the husband disapproved of them, one by one. She might not be wearing clothes she would have chosen for herself, but instead dress the way her husband prefers. Frequently, she will not know the family’s true financial picture because the husband has either been the only one who worked, or the only one who controlled the bills and income.
And then she will say, “When you meet my husband, you won’t believe the things I have told you about him.”
But, sadly, we do. Here is what I have come to understand. Nice, normal guys don’t have to pretend to be charming. They are not in it to trick anyone. So, they can be a little gruff, a little rough around the edges. The controlling, creepy, abusive ones, however, can never afford to just be themselves in public. They would quickly find themselves exceedingly alone, with no one to order around. What’s the fun of being a controlling borderline personality all by yourself? In order to lure people into their world these are sometimes the very people who have the most highly developed sense of social ability – because they are the ones with the most to lose.
So, I tell my women clients to rest easy. Not only will their family and their true friends believe them; but the attorneys and – more importantly – the Judges have all seen this before. And they will know who to believe, despite any false impressions.
WHAT WE LOVE: Once a wife decides to see her husband for who he truly is, she empowers herself. The rest of the world will very shortly see him for who he is as well.
Does this happen to you, too? People talk to me about their divorces all the time. I don’t just mean my clients. I mean the lady next to me waiting for our dry cleaning, my eye doctor, a mom whose son plays baseball with my son, the cop directing traffic at the corner, the woman getting her hair cut in the next chair over from me. I mean all the time.
Sometimes I think it is because of what I do for a living. You know, the fact that I’m a lawyer. But the lady at the dry cleaner does not know that. I do not wear a divorce lawyer name tag or uniform. (Although that does remind me of this joke: what’s black and brown and looks good on a lady lawyer? A doberman.)
I think the level of detail might increase once they find out I am an attorney. Maybe it is because they assume I will be more interested. Or maybe I just start asking more questions because I am, in fact, interested in people and their relationships, and – let’s face it – their divorces. I am always looking for the good divorce story; for the people who can teach me something about how they handled a difficult or challenging situation and made it better; so I can pass the wisdom along to my clients.
I am recently starting to see a pattern develop in the realm of who says what about their own divorce. I think that part of the reason why divorce gets such a bad reputation is because the people with the most to say about it are the people who narrowly survived a hideous episode and are still traumatized by it. The people with calm, healthy divorces have very little that they need to say. I think it makes sense, in a way.
Here are two recent contrasting examples. A lady at a little league game and I are watching our sons play ball. She asks, “did you see Tuesday’s game?” I answer, “No. I was working. I heard we won. Did you see it?”
She says, “No. I wanted to come and promised my son I would be here. But his father decided that he was coming instead, and I am not showing up here and running into him ever again. Last time he brought his new wife. I don’t even understand why she wants to come, this is not her son. This is my son. So, now, I have to go back to court for contempt because I wouldn’t let him go home with them at the end of that game, and then he said fine, I just won’t pay you until I can see the kids and I said, you have to pay me, so I called my lawyer, and my lawyer said that he has to pay me no matter what. Now he has to pay me back alimony and if the judge says it is contempt then he has to pay for my lawyer’s fees, too. So how am I supposed to risk going to one of his games and then she might show up and then all of us are in contempt again and paying each others’ lawyers. So I told him he can’t come to two games in the same week, no matter what. He came Tuesday and I’m here today and so help me, he better not have the nerve to show up. Do you know what the score was?”
I could have mentioned what I do for work; but I decided to let it go. It seems to me she already has way more attorney involvement in her life than anyone should, why add my name to her mix?
Then, there are the people like my my eye doctor. He has met my kids, and says something that indicates he has kids, too. We chat about that for a few minutes, and I ask where they live, or something. “With their mom,” he says, and goes back to his business. That is clearly all he plans to say on the topic. And, if I were a normal person with no divorce fixation I might have left it at that. But, of course, here I am in my Doberman coat, asking for the gory details. “How long ago were you divorced? How old were the kids? How often do you see them?” Etc.
And, just as you may have surmised, his was a clean and amicable divorce. They are still friendly with each other, 8 years post dissolution. In fact, he and his ex had dinner together with the kids two weeks ago when the dad brought the kids back from a summer vacation. Nothing was angry or nasty then, or since. So, in his mind, there wasn’t much to say about it. A short and unfortunate incident that happened almost a decade ago. Nothing more, nothing less.
But, not to me. To me, that is the crux of it – the people who were not crippled by their divorces stand happily and quietly off to the side as the parade of mangled zombies proclaim the hideous aftermath of their terrible divorces. I am not suggesting that the people whose lives were irreparably damaged by unhealthy marriages and diseased divorces need to be quiet about it. Not at all. I know they need to process what has happened to them and they have every right to do so. My qualm, if I have one at all, is with the secretive success stories.
There are men and women who live in our midst – use our hairdresser and dry cleaners and ball parks with us – who know that they got out of their marriages in calm and humane ways and have lived to tell the tale. I say, let them tell those tales. The stories of divorce which end with “happily ever after” need to take their places in the parade, as well.
WHAT WE LOVE: Guilty secret: I actually love lawyer jokes and challenge any one to tell me one I have not already heard.
Love Your Divorce 