Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Dirty tricks

Divorce Dirty Tricks 101, as practiced by an expert:

Send the children out for their every-other weekend visitation without their daily prescription medication, so the father will have to utilize his lawyer at $300/hour to schedule a hearing two months later to resolve the issue of the mother not providing him with adequate, or any, prescribed pills for the children, making sure to write a letter on the last visitation Friday before the hearing which describes how she has (just) provided him with said medication (after a month and a half of not doing so) so that he can cancel the hearing which has cost him thousands already.

When under a duty to let the father know where the children are at all times, by either communication in person or by phone or in necessary circumstances, by written communication, mail a letter while leaving town after school on Friday, describing where the children will be during a three-day holiday weekend, using a nearby pre-scouted mailbox that the Post Office picks up from at 11a.m. on M-F but not on weekends or holidays, so that the children can see how cooperative she is but which written communication will get to him the following Wednesday at the earliest, days after the children are already back in town.

When the father calls on his cell phone (never answer his calls of course) and leaves a voice-mail asking if the mother would bring to him the spare key she has to the jointly owned pickup he uses (while she is exclusively using the far-more comfortable family van) because he has accidentally locked his key in the vehicle while miles from home, put the children in the car so they can see how cooperative and kind she is and leave the key in his mailbox but don't tell him it is there, so he can find it days later after considerable expenditure in time and money to get a second key already.

When the mother's lawyer tells the father's lawyer how she doesn't have enough money at hand to provide for the children for the following week, and he gratuitously brings over two $500 money orders and leaves them inside a padded envelope taped to her top porch stair so she is sure to see it when she returns home (as well as leaving her a VM), and as he sees the envelope flapping in the wind, he puts a skipping stone inside the envelope to weigh it down so it won't blow away, spend the next year of litigation writing in practically every motion how the father has menacingly sent her rocks in the mail.

Send the children out in their stockinged feet and shirtsleeves for their court-ordered visitation when their father arrives on a cold winter Friday afternoon to announce by a well-practiced refrain that "Mom sent us out ready to go with you but we don't want to, so we're not coming," whereupon they scamper, like skipping, jolly little elves, back into her house and shut the door.

Don't tell the father about a gasoline and matches episode in a park involving one of the children while under her care, and, I suppose, the police, and when the father lights a couple of hand-held sparklers in the driveway with said child on the Fourth of July, have her unscrupulous-at-best divorce lawyer William Reichhardt of Fairfax bring this sparkler "incident" to the attention of the court at a subsequent hearing as an example of how unfit as a parent the father is in light of the prior incendiary issue in the park (unknown to him till that moment in the courtroom).

Send the children to several undisclosed psychologists (which is contrary to the prevailing custody order), at least one of whom was subsequently disciplined or maybe disbarred for general incompetence, until one finally had to report to the GAL that one of the children, in my opinion the child most vulnerable and put-upon for these suggestive get-dirt-on-dad attempts, had expressed violent ideation against himself, his father, or both if he had to go on visitation pursuant to the plain-vanilla court-ordered schedule.  This abuse of this susceptible tender child breaks my heart even now.

Withdraw a child who is a special ed student from his public high school during the summer and send him to an out-of-state boarding school that fall which the father only learns about when he arrives in September at the public school for a long-scheduled IEP meeting which, unbeknownst to him till that moment, has long been cancelled by the school as no longer being necessary.

Shall I go on?  Even a decade and a half later, my heart practically seizes up at these rending memories, and there are several even worse examples of despicable, unconscionable adult behavior in my opinion that went into brainwashing these now-adult children who haven't spoken to their father or any member of his bloodline in over a decade. 

But congratulations on achieving full retirement age, Sharon!  (BTW, how are our kids?  And their kids?)

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