LifeRecovery

I am about 10 years out from the extreme hurt of my relationship that got me here.

Just in the last 12-18 months am I able to share about light, funny stories from that relationship. For example my in-laws, before I was in the picture got a dog and named her my first and middle name. They had a great story to go along with it, that was only added to when I came into the family.

I used this as an excuse to keep my maiden name when I got married. We did not need two beings in the same family (and one a dog) with the same name.

That story cracks me up, but I could not share it for years.

As I have healed and moved through the multiple emotions that relationship left me with it has gotten easier. I had to feel the hurt, and anger and frustration though....which is very much what I hear you are doing.

Sasha1972

Here is today’s update which is also a reminder that maintaining boundaries is hard but necessary.

The valuable heirloom that ex absconded with before his death (see below) has still not been found. His former boss, and his boss’s boss, and his boss’s boss’s boss all the way up the stack of turtles are now freaking out because apparently the owner of the heirloom is threatening legal action as well as a lot of public embarrassment and possibly the loss of big financial donations.

So today I get a call from the lead counsel for my workplace, who reports directly to the president. They believe ex’s addict girlfriend has the heirloom. She does not respond to any attempt to contact her or to Angry Lawyer Letters (as a side note, telling an addict “we think you have something in your possession that’s really valuable to us” strikes me as a not a good strategy). They are trying to get access to the apartment where she still lives in order to search for it. The landlord quite reasonably is not going to let them into the apartment just because somebody says there might be something in there that belongs to somebody else.

What to do? Well, normally if you think something has been stolen, you would involve the police. But that is messy and public and they’re trying to redeem the situation as quietly as possible. Someone had the bright idea - “let’s try Sasha again! As the administrator of ex’s estate on behalf of her daughter, she’s the only person with the legal standing to seek a court order turning over the contents of ex’s apartment to her, and she can search for our missing heirloom! And of course she’ll do it because she’s such a helpful person!”.

So lead counsel calls me and asks me to do this. I say no (as I have said no before, but somehow my no was not heard for what it was). I say that the heirloom did not belong to ex, so it doesn’t form part of his estate. My responsibility to act in Kid’s best interest with respect to the estate. Other random antisocial crap that ex did, like walking off with valuable things, is not part of the scope of my duty.

If I run across the heirloom somehow I will of course get in touch, but I have no intention of battling with the girlfriend to go through ex’s literal dirty laundry in case the heirloom might be there somewhere. His personal effects - socks and toothbrush and pots and pans - are not worth the financial and psychological cost of getting enmired in this mess. I also do not want anything to do with the girlfriend if I can avoid it, and this is avoidable.

Counsel says that if I get a court injunction granting me access to his ex’s personal effects, he will pay part of my legal fees. I wonder which part of “no” is not making sense here, and I repeat that my responsibility is to Kid through disposal of the estate, and the missing heirloom is not part of that responsibility.

Counsel asks if I would sort through ex’s effects if I knew there was something valuable for me at the end of it. I say that I am not negotiating, No is no. I think to myself that this is sounding really close to bribery.

I see this as a big “cover your a$$” operation, and I do not have an interest in covering anyone’s a$$. I did many years of that while married to an alcoholic.

PuzzledHeart

You know what I find funny??

PART of your legal fees? Not all of them? Sheesh.

Sasha1972

It dawned on me why this is so irksome. It’s because the dynamic is familiar from living with alcoholism. It is:

“If you would just not be so difficult and do [thing that is inappropriate and burdensome], I could [avoid or minimize the consequences of my own actions]”.

With active alcoholic ex, it was “If you would just stop being so difficult and stop insisting that I follow the SoberLink protocols, I could spend more time with Kid and have a normal parental relationship”.

With big-shot lawyer, it’s “If you would just stop being difficult and agree to get ex’s personal effects from his girlfriend and go through them to find this missing item, we could avoid the financial and reputational damage of having lost an item belonging to some VIP”.

In both cases, I am not the source of the problem. If ex had abstained from alcohol when he had Kid, he would have had much more time with her. If my employers hadn’t decided to give a valuable item to a mentally ill addict, they wouldn’t have big-money donors breathing down their necks.

I didn’t cause either of these problems. But I am being importuned to help solve them, at significant cost to me (the worry and anxiety of letting Kid go off with a drinking alcoholic, the emotional stress and potential danger of dealing with the meth girlfriend [legal fees or no legal fees]). In both situations, I have said “no - this is your problem, not mine” repeatedly.

I do not like efforts to make me responsible for any of the chaos that surrounds an active alcoholic,

hearthealth

Sasha, I keep thinking if you were still married to him the counselors would be coming after you.

Bekindalways

Sasha, I don't understand what type of legal fees you have right now. Do you need legal help for dealing with the estate?

Ugh . . . in someways it would be nice if everyone got a course on how to deal appropriately with addicts/alcoholics. Perhaps it should be part of health class. Sigh. Although I'm sure there are plenty of people who never have to deal with addicts.

Ariesagain

I am beginning to get rather impressively po’d at the whole bunch of them.

You are his EX wife. You are under zero obligation to make good on this institution’s lack of judgment. They are going to have to just suck it up and deal with the meth girlfriend or confess all to the wealthy person who wants their objet back and have their insurance company compensate him/her.

“No” is a complete sentence!

Sasha1972

Indeed it is, and I am grateful to Al Anon for enabling me to really learn this. If I hadn't put in my time in the rooms, I would probably have reacted to this situation by trying to be super-helpful and over-function and "fix" things. Instead, I'm thinking along the lines of "you break it, you bought it" - in other words, I don't own this problem, you [bosses and lawyers] do.

Sasha1972

I have legal costs associated with having myself appointed the administrator of ex's estate on behalf of Kid, his only heir. But I'm not so hard up for money that I need to make deals that go against my psychological well-being in order to pay the bills (and compared to my legal costs when ex was alive and busy taking me to court every three weeks, estate costs seem like pretty small potatoes.

I'm continually surprised by the naivety of people who don't have the up-close-and-personal experience with alcoholics that we on this forum have. I keep thinking "what part of 'mentally ill addict in advanced stage of alcoholism' wasn't making sense to you?".

Bekindalways

Yep pretty much . . . except we all know, from this forum, that lots of people just don't know and it isn't intuitive.

DiggingForFire

hopeful4

Unbelievable. So they let a mentally ill man be entrusted with a valuable item then want you to deal with the fallout?? Maybe they are mentall ill as well!

Milano58

I think there's a lot of... Not looking... Not looking...... At peculiar behavior from addicts. People either don't WANT to see it, to protect themselves or can't compute what they're seeing.

I feel like the kid from 6th sense... I see alcoholics EVERYWHERE!!!!

Sasha1972

Me too ... a few times at work when conversation turns to someone who's behaving strangely, I will venture, "do they have an issue with drinking?". And the answer is almost always "yes" (sometimes it's a delayed "yes" because it takes time for dysfunction to show up ... butI don't think I've ever been wrong).

Sasha1972

I think a big piece of this messed-up picture is privilege. Ex was an upper-middle-class white man with letters after his name and a high-status occupation. He dressed expensively and drove a luxury car (actually, several - while $25K in arrears in child support). Until pretty close to the end, he could still clean up and look (and talk) the part of Mr Entitlement, at least for short periods of time when he wasn't visibly drunk. He got a lot of passes from people who don't look below the surface. If he had been (visibly) poor or worked at WalMart or spoke accented English, I don't think he would have gotten away with nearly as much as he did. Lots of old-boys'-network stuff which is now coming back to bite the old boys, for whom I have really no sympathy.

Milano58

Funny that. If EXAH wasn't white I reckon they would never have given him a chance to recover or given him overnights. There's an expectation that non whites will fail, relapse etc which is so effin racist over here. I despise it. The first thing nearly all support groups (cept SR) asked was... Is he white? and then looked surprised when I said yes.

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velma929

I was talking with a widower about a woman he met on a cruise. He liked her, but something was off. She seemed immature for someone in her fifties. Does she drink a lot? I asked. Uh, yeah, maybe she did. Did she start drinking in her teens, maybe? Yes. I offered the possibility of social development to stall when alcohol addiction took over. Yes, he thought that sounded about right.

If girlfriend knew or guessed it's value, it may have been gone from the apartment a few weeks after it entered. *Even if she didn't know* it's value, she may have pawned it for drugs. Your ex, in his state, may not have known. If he did he certainly would not have told anyone. Who knows who may they may have had in their apartment, and if it was in the same state as his office, would either of them have noticed if it went missing?

I would stand fast on not getting involved. I'm not even sure I see a legal path to *you* taking this on. It's not *your* object.

Sometimes things just get lost. They honestly do. When AH died, there were one or two things his brother picked up from me the day of his memorial service. He later called about a table saw that had belonged to their father: he wanted it for sentimental reasons. FIL had built an addition to the childhood home with it. I had no knowledge of that table saw but I'd look. I did look. I never saw it then, I haven't seen it since his death, almost ten years ago. I'd be *thrilled* to give him the table saw and make room in the shop. AH was a hoarder of sorts. It's likely it was sold for beer money, or traded or bartered away for something different. It was gone years before he died.

Sasha1972

Today’s update: so, two dreams about ex in the last couple of nights. This is a first, but maybe not surprising as I’ve hit the six-month mark since his death.

Dream #1: Ex is alive, his death was a “misunderstanding”. And he wants to get back together! Eck, yech! Even dream-me thinks this was a bad idea. In the dream, I am really worried that ex is going to get upset because he’s going to see all the emails or texts that I’ve written since his “death” which contain descriptions of him that are less than flattering. He’s going to be really sad and angry when he finds out what I’ve said about him when I thought he was dead. Then I wake up (a little bit) and I think: well, I do have his death certificate so it would be reasonable for me to think that someone for whom a death certificate issued is in fact dead. So okay, maybe I was a bit harsh in what I said about him, but it’s not unreasonable for me to think he was dead (note that even in my dream, I’m really concerned about whether I am being “reasonable” and “considerate” of ex’s feeling). Then I wake up the rest of the way and I remember: I have his ashes in a box in my office at work. He really is totally dead. He is not going to come back and sit there feeling sorry for himself and making it my fault. That’s all over.

Dream #2: I am in some sort of crafts workshop with ex and his second ex-wife. We’re making ceramic bowls. He and x2 are still married. He starts criticizing the bowl I’m making, pointing out how I’m doing everything wrong and it’s going to look terrible once it’s fired. X2 tells him to stop giving me a hard time. I say that I like my bowl the way it is. I put it in the kiln and tell ex and x2 that I’m going home. Ex says “you don’t know how to get home”. I say “Yes, I do know the way”. X2 says “leave her alone, she can get home just fine”. As I leave, ex is calling over a waiter (apparently there are waiters in this craft shop ...) and ordering a beer.

trailmix

Funny when I read that second description I was thinking, one would need a drink - because how miserable is it to be so miserable.

Sasha1972

Today's update: my furnace died and I need to have it replaced. It's being replaced today, and costing me about $6 500. The furnace was coming to the end of its functional lifetime and machines don't last forever, so this is not something abnormal. I have good credit, so I can get the new furnace without having to hit payday loans or skipping a mortgage payment. But it's still a heck of a lot of money I have to come up with all of a sudden.

Moving the money around in my accounts triggers memories of doing the same thing to figure out how to pay multi-thousand-dollar bills when ex was alive and taking me to court constantly. Today, the money that I'm spending is actually buying more something - a new furnace - rather than just disappearing down a drain of alcoholic craziness. But I'm still carrying a lot of resentment because I know that if I still had the money that I had to spend because ex kept fighting court orders, I'd have no worries about getting the thing replaced. Even setting aside what ex cost me in legal fees, the amount of unpaid child support he owed when he died would buy me three new furnaces, with money left over.

He burned through an unbelievable amount of money in the two or three years before he died - his own inheritance from his parents, $50 000 borrowed from his brother, all the equity in his house, all of Kid's university savings that he could get his hands on, tens of thousands in credit card bills and who knows what else. And there is nothing to show for any of it, besides a few sleazy lawyers who've been enriched and some expensive toys.

I am grateful that I have a secure job which pays enough to meet my needs and Kid's needs, and that I have a good credit history so that when things like this come along, I can deal with them. Compared to a lot of people who've been bled dry by alcoholics, I was fortunate in that I separated my finances before his really fell apart. It's just moments like these, when I find myself juggling money here and there and I'm reminded why it is that I have to do this, that a tide of resentment starts to rise.