“A Nice Nest”

I crash landed back in “the real world,” as we have sadly created it. There, after dragging the illusion of abundance (money, time) longer than I should, I had to face my 

Reckoning. With. Money. 

“I gave you a nice nest” repeated ex, truly believing, bless his patriarchal heart, that he had set me up for a good life in the Bay Area. 

He’s “the good guy,” one then-girlfriend who knew nothing of the legal intricacies of divorce insisted. He’s been “so generous to you.” 

When you decide to get married, it’s romantic and all, and you also enter into contract with a third entity who becomes part of your marriage. The State.

And when you divorce, the State of California says: everything acquired during the marriage is community property, and will be divided equally. 

The State also says, if you have children then their quality of life must be maintained regardless of you separating, and here are State Guidelines to calculate child support. 

The very night we decided to separate, soon-to-be-ex reached for a piece of paper on his nightstand and read to me what he had already worked out:

“You take the land, I take the gold. We sell the house and split the proceeds; we split whatever’s left on the bank account. I’ll keep the wine cellar…you don’t care for that, right?”

I acquiesced to everything. I trusted him. I was the mother of his children! Steadfast companion of a decade, supporter of his career! He had my best interest at heart. 

Three years and countless lawyer hours later, I finally admit that no, he did not have my best interest at heart. And arguably, our boys’ best interest either.

Turns out, ex was not ‘generous.’ He hammered out the mediation ‘agreement’ that would set alimony at the bare minimum and allow him to avoid state guidelines for child support for over two years. 

He did not ‘give’ me the piece of land I was blindly attached to. It was part of the legal division of community property. But he did ‘guesstimate’ its value around that of the gold he’d been stashing away. No appraisal was done (ah, trust!), and it was only after everything was finalized, that I learned the plummeting value of a rough piece of land in a fire-prone area versus the sky-rocketing value of physical gold in a tanking economy. 

Good lessons, huh?