24 Sep 2006
The Week From Hel

I missed more days posting to this blog last week than I have the entire rest of this year (so far). And blogging was literally the least of my worries.

I don't post much personal stuff here, except for Mom and her deteriorating condition, but I'm going to make an exception here. Simply because the events of the past week defy belief without documentation.

My youngest daughter is in the process of getting a divorce. She recently relocated from Minnesota to Indiana with her [soon-to-be-ex] husband's tacit approval. Well, at least he approved until they bought a house. Then he changed his mind and filed for an emergency change of custody for my grandchildren. The hearing was last Tuesday morning - the kids have been in school here for almost a month, and nobody here thought Peter stood an ice cubes chance in Hel of forcing her to move back. We have numerous documents showing his assent to the move, and were convinced it was going to be cut and dried.

Not, apparently, in the People's Republic of Minnesota.

When Hilary arrived she was greeted with over 100 pages of affidavits, filed by Peter, his family, his mothers church lady friends, anybody they could round up. If they could have found the homeless lady that Hilary refused to supply with change last winter I'm sure they would've paid her for an affidavit, too. They filed these five minutes before the hearing started, and when Hilary's attorney objected, as there had been a deadline of last Thursday (9/14) to file additional documents, the judge's comment was only "Well, I always allow late evidence."

These affidavits accused my daughter of being a prostitute, a drug addict, a terrible mother, a rotten housekeeper and a general waste. One deplored her use of "capital punishment" to discipline the children - no shit. They weren't even proofread for obvious errors like that. And for the record, Hilary doesn't even use corporal punishment at all...

Nor does she drink beer, which one accused her of consuming in excess. She drinks, to be sure, but certainly not to excess of anything, and she hates the taste of beer. She's a wine kinda girl.

To give you some idea of what the relationship was like between Hilary and her in-laws before this, let me quote here from an email I received in June of 2005:

Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 09:41:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: J Willams [redacted]
Subject: hello
To: Dave Haxton 

Dave,
I just wanted to let you know how proud Ken and I of
your daughter. She is working so hard, carrying two
jobs. When she is not working she is with the kids.
She has never taken for granted the help Ken and I are
able to give. If she needs/wants some free time she
asks if we are available. We only have the kids
overnight Fri - Sun now, when Hilary is working at her
night job. Now I'm sure you are thinking of course she
does that - but sadly our son doesn't quite get it
yet. So we notice Hilary's accomplishments. He is
getting better about coming here and spending time
with the kids and he is usually here on the weekends
to put them to bed. Damien has started T-ball and
Peter has agreed to be responsible for gettting him
there. Progress not perfection - right. It baffles me
how a son of Ken's can be so irresponsible. Maybe he
should come live with you and you can whip him into
shape?? Just kidding. I hope you and Kris are doing
well, I will send some pictures of Damien and Ana
again soon.
Jacki

Yet I made it into this woman's sworn statements as an ogre who forced my daughter to live in her car and then to move to Minnesota. And Hilary became little more than a party slut who just dropped the kids on their doorstep and left. For the record, she's lived here, with the kids, several times as her husband went through his travails. And what travails he's had!

He got a General Discharge from the Marine Corps in 2005 having spent nearly a year in the brig for snorting cocaine and going AWOL. Yet the affidavits presented him as a "decorated, disabled combat veteran"! And apparently, he's getting nearly $1500/month as a VA disability payment for "post traumatic stress disorder".

There's much, much more, all of it equally ridiculous. My little girl's attorney was given until Thursday to file a response.

And they took the kids away from her at the hearing, and handed them over to Peter's party! This was not a final decision, either - the judge took all the evidence presented thus far, and as mentioned earlier, gave Hilary a little bit of time to respond, and promised a decision by fax (!) this coming Monday or Tuesday. Until then, the kids were to swapped back and forth every 24 hours! And Hilary cannot leave the State until such time as the decision is rendered.

Hilary played by the rules, always tried to do the Right Thing™ and ended up getting screwed. This is bankrupting her, it's draining her emotionally, and the kids - well, I'll describe the effect on them later.

How can a dad not respond when he gets a call from his crying, hysterical daughter saying "Daddy, I need you!"

So I made the decision Tuesday to take a trip. And I made another tough call: I got a hold of my ex-wife, Hilary's mom, Lorraine, and invited her to go with. Hilary needed all the support she could get.

It was an interesting drive up, to say the least. Lots of 25 year old issues were opened and discussed, and, I'd like to think, a new understanding was reached. We were friends before we married, and enemies after our divorce, and I'm pleased to report that I believe we're back to our original state - our daughter needed us, and we responded.

There was a moment of levity - how does one check into a hotel with one's ex-wife for perfectly platonic reasons? Especially since the register demanded the names and addresses of both parties? So we traveled as brother and sister.

Which was fine until we arrived in Minnesota. We met Hilary at the lawyers office, finished our responses to the ridiculous allegations, and checked into a new hotel before Hilary and her boyfriend. We used the same ruse we'd been using. We told Hilary what room we were in, of course.

When Hilary knocked on the door about an hour later, she told how the clerk had just stared at her when she signed in. She'd mentioned she wanted a room near #120, because her mom and dad were staying in that room! I nearly peed myself I was laughing so hard - Lorraine and I became "Uncle Dad and Aunt Mom" for the remainder of our stay... which, as it turned out, was not to be lengthy.

No sooner had we all gotten settled in than I received a call from Kris - my mom had had another heart attack, and was in the emergency room of the Indiana Heart Center again.

I couldn't drive Wednesday night: we had just gotten there that morning, and I was exhausted. I was terrified that my mother would die before her 83rd birthday, and I wouldn't be there with her. But I had to sleep, so sleep I did. And I returned to Indiana on Thursday, arriving Friday morning about 1 am EST.

By that time, mom had undergone an emergency heart catheterization. They had found new blockages, and also found them inoperable. So they put mom on stronger meds, and discharged her, telling her that if it happens again to take nitro and aspirin and hope it stops.

Kris had been unable to pack eggs for our Friday delivery to Sunflower, so I did that Friday morning, and then spent most of the rest of the day with mom, and we've been tending her closely ever since.

I left Lorraine in Minnesota - she'll get home with the kids somehow. Damien (my six year old grandson) has developed a severe case of shingles - imagine that, with all the stress he's under. Anastasia broke down in Legoland in the Mall of America yesterday, crying aloud that she wants to go to her "Indiana house", and her own room and her own bed.

It's nothing short of horrifying.

So here I sit on a Sunday morning - burnt out and feeling utterly out of control of events. I really didn't have the money to make that trip - Lorraine helped, but she ain't exactly rich either. So now we're short of cash to buy hay for the winter - which may seem like a trivial worry, but unless the animals eat this January, I won't eat this January either. There's a hard discipline to the land, that's for sure.

Hopefully this explains my absence - to those commenters to whom I've not responded as is my wont in the past few days, please forgive: I'll get around to it as soon as I'm able. But now, well, off to see how mom's doing.

Because day after day, the show must go on.

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