Divorce Part 3

Today I feel as if I'm soaking wet, being completely twisted and rung out by my ex wife. Maybe this is a normal feeling for a man with a separation agreement, perhaps I fucked up when it came to agreeing to the terms of mine. See, Amber is a self employed stylist, a leap of faith we took during our marriage. At the time, we agreed that working for one's self is a much better way to go than working for someone else. This is true, but as I've discovered over the last year, you have to have a lot of steady clientele to afford the cost of products and weekly booth rental. So from the beginning of this venture, I paid all of the rent for our house and the majority of the bills while Amber concentrated on paying Fox's daycare and acquiring new clients. Let me clarify, she is very good at hair and exceptional at making people feel special and pampered. But, the money wasn't close to what I make, an amount which we had hoped to far surpass. We knew it would take a while to build, but unfortunately we didn't factor in the separation. So yeah, I'm writing this in an attempt to reason with myself that when I agreed to pay for all the rent and half the bills after we separated, that I wasn't a complete idiot. This is the part where you all laugh. Let me just tell you my thinking behind this first though.

I knew that Amber wouldn't be able to afford the house rent at the moment we split, so I had no problem endorsing these terms in our official agreement. Hell, at that point I was already used to paying everything and on the other hand, I was living with my mom so I really didn't have any bills. Also, the one caveat to the deal was that Amber would do the best she could to make enough and find her own place so that I could move back into the house and out of my mom's. It was kind of an "I'll help you until you get on your feet" type of deal, so I thought. Mostly though, I didn't want Fox to be uprooted from his home, the one he came home from the hospital to, the one where he learned to crawl and to eventually walk, and the one where his bedroom lived. I wanted him to know nothing of what was going on with the big people. I'm sure you can understand that but you know where this is going don't you?

If you read my previous blog about divorce then you know that Amber and I also included into our agreement the clause about dating other people. You also know that I met her new man already and that I liked him. What you don't know, and neither did I when I agreed to all of this, is that he would end up basically living with Amber in the house I pay rent for, and on top of that have his own damn clothes drawer. Yes, that completely means that she never found a place of her own. Who would when you live where rent is free right? So am I an idiot? I say YES and NO. Yes, I am an idiot because I didn't see this coming, and no, because Fox has a place to live that is not a cardboard box or much worse at Amber's boyfriend's house. The latter part of that makes me feel better for sure.

In closing, I would love to have more money and I would especially love to have a place of my own, but those things will come in time (6 months to be exact). Right now I know that one day I can look Fox in the eye and tell him that his father did the best he could for his family, even when it was torn apart. I hope he will look back at me and thank me for showing him how to be a real man. Yeah, I like the sound of that.