Sunday, February 9, 2014

94,000 Miles, stuck at the airport

So here we are, well into 2014, five months after the ER visit that set this round of legal action into motion: nothing has changed, and it looks like nothing will change for several more months.  The GAL has not issued his report yet, in spite of assurances that he would complete his work by the end of January.  He has six more days to deliver, but he could ask for an extension if he feels like it. 

I had been hopeful that he would get his report in, I would get my final court hearing this coming week (before my kids' school vacation), and we'd load up the car and go.  I was actually doing pretty well at getting up in the morning, motivating myself to face the day, and being a productive member of society.  Then, with no fanfare, a notice arrived in the mail last week stating that there was a "mediation hearing" scheduled for late March and a "pre-trial/status conference" scheduled another week after that.

That one piece of information knocked me right off course.  The judge had ordered back in December that there would be a mediation hearing within 75 days of the appointment of the GAL; that date would come in mid-February.  At the time, my attorney assured me that we would be able to bypass mediation and get a final hearing scheduled for that same day.  It seemed simple: the GAL will present his report, testify about it, and the judge will make a decision.  But now I'm getting a completely different story.  Apparently the court can just ignore its own order to delay this for no good reason.

I asked my attorney to estimate, based on the new scheduling, when I could expect to actually have a final hearing at which custody could be switched, and she wouldn't say, but she didn't dispute my assertion that it wouldn't happen until May.  Worse, she denied telling me that the whole thing should have been done this month, and when I challenged her on it, she slipped into lawyer-speak: "well, I'm sorry if you got that impression.  I don't recall ever saying anything like that."  She is a good lawyer, but she still has a vested interest in stringing this thing out: after all, each hearing is another $1,000 for her.  She says she will try to schedule a private mediation with my ex's attorney, but even that will only save a couple of weeks.

So now, in a best case scenario, it will be sometime in April before any decisions are made.  In the meantime, another school year has been lost, and my kids are one year deeper into the abyss that is their mother's world.  The isolation, paranoia, narcissism, over-attachment, and tolerance of bad behavior that she displays has had one more year to seep into their souls, making it that much harder to undo the damage.  The separation has gone on for another year, leaving me only tied to them by a phone call each night for weeks on end during the long, dark winter.  I grudgingly made my arrangements for another long weekend over the President's Day holiday that will be spent holed up in a hotel room in Maine. I had convinced myself that there would never be another weekend like that, and signing up for at least one more is a stab to my heart.

I had a reminder yesterday of just how long things have gone on like this.  I was watching the 2014 Winter Olympics, and remembered the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, when I was hunkered down in a sparsely furnished apartment in Maine without TV service.  As a result, I missed the now-legendary U.S.-Canada gold medal hockey game.  Now that the 2014 Olympics are underway, it's been a full four-year cycle spent living like this.  When it started my son was in Kindergarten and my daughter was just barely two years old.  Now he is about to turn 10, and she is well into first grade.  So much time has passed, they have grown so much, and I have experienced so little of it.  Even if they eventually do come to live with me, I will always feel a deep sense of loss for the years of their childhoods that I did not get to share with them.

There is a certain feeling that has been coursing through my body each day since the court scheduling notice arrived last week.  It is a feeling that I have come to know too well, but can't really explain it.  It's a sensation of emptiness and coldness, tightness in the chest, detachment, and confusion.  It is not something that I ever felt before moving away from my children, so it's not just depression.  I have come to realize that is something far deeper, something that can only come from losing something you love.

I love my children more than I ever thought I could love anything.  I know it is still quite likely that they will be living with me soon, but, until that day comes, I am just left with one day after another to feel the cumulative effects of being separated from them for so long.  For now, I don't even know what the GAL will say, when my real day in court will come, or what will be decided.  Until all of those things happen I am just going to continue to feel like I do right now. 

It is a terrible way to be living--stumbling through life in a fog and wishing days away just to get out of this darkness.  I am 40 years old now and have wished away enough days--days that I won't be getting back.  This period of my life has been reduced to simple survival.  I don't know how many days or weeks it will take until anything changes, but I am fully aware that I am going to continue to walk around feeling terrible every day until then.

I don't even want to think about what I will feel if the court does not agree with me and my kids are allowed to stay put.  I am not OK with that and probably never would be.  I know that it's not a likely outcome at this point, and I am trying not to think about it, but the possibility definitely exists.  I have had so few things go my way over the course of my adult life, so I should be used to disappointment.  But if ever the time was right for the karma to even out, this is it.  I have suffered enough.  My kids have been poisoned enough.  The world may not be fair, but I'm not asking for fairness.  Life has already been so unfair to me--I'm just asking for a little less unfairness.

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