When my husband was told by the attorneys that I had told them that I could not
provide any financial information for the courts as I was not allowed access to it, he
was upset that I had shared this information.
I had actually been hesitant to share this at first.
I was simply going to be the “I don’t know” wife.
I didn’t want to admit out loud that my reality was the “I wasn’t allowed” wife.
It was embarrassing.
But I made a decision that if I was going to have to walk this new journey called
divorce and have any chance at coming out healthy on the other side-I would walk it
with honesty.
Raw, open honesty.
At least once I stopped hiding from life.
I had to look at everything in my life if I had any hope of healing and being a better
person on the other side of all of this.
And this meant I had to hold myself accountable most of all.
My husband told the court that he had never told me I could not access our bank
account.
More lies.
He told the court that if I had wanted to access our bank information I could have
simply driven myself to the bank and asked to see it.
When I read his words I was filled with so many emotions.
I was angry.
I was sad.
I was just plain exhausted with emotions at this point.
Why wasn’t he feeling any guilt about the lies he was telling?
As I stared at his words, I couldn’t help but wonder how it seemed lost on him that in
his own response to the court he was actually confirming that I had no online access.
I simply had to “drive to the bank” to look at our bank information.
Did this seem normal to him?
How could he have even written the words and not realized what it sounded like.
When I saw his response, I realized that he had no problem being dishonest even under
penalty of the court.
This made me tremble a little inside.
Going through a divorce was terrible enough, but knowing I was going through it with
somebody that had no problem with lying made me fearful.
A type of fear I have never felt before.
I would have loved to have read a statement from him to the court telling them that
yes, he had not allowed me online access to our finances, but he now realized that it
had been the wrong thing to do.
Even if it was embarrassing to admit this information to the court, a good man with
integrity would have done so.
But I was learning that this was not what I was facing in my divorce.
Each new part of the process brought deeper pain for me.
I knew there had to be other people in the world that go through this in their
divorce-you hear about things like this all the time.
But it didn’t make me feel any better while I was living through it myself.
And my shame kept me from talking to people about what was happening to me.
When I was growing up, I had always viewed the word discovery as a positive thing.
An exciting thing.
New discoveries.
New adventures.
I learned to loathe the term “discovery phase” during my divorce.
It became a time of great anxiety and fear for me.
It made me want to hide away from the world forever as the “discovery phase” was
leaving me with discoveries that made me feel more and more foolish…