An Early Christmas Gift

I received a copy of a letter from the ex-husband, Jay today. It reads as follows:

Dear Sir/Madam,
I am the respondent in the above case and represented myself at the initial hearing before District Judge X on 7th October 2009.

The appointment for the financial dispute resolution is due for 19th January 2010 at 2pm. I am writing to request a postponement of this meeting because I have a hospital appointment (which I have been waiting 5 years for) on 18th January 2010 that requires me to undergo an anaesthetic. The documentation from the hospital directs me to not work or sign any legal documents on the day following the treatment.

As regards the valuation of our marital home, I notice that an identical property in an inferior position in the same street is currently on sale for £40 000. I therefore must insist upon an up to date independent valuation of my jointly owned property. When we have a correct valuation of the property we can proceed on other matters.

I have to date received nothing from the applicant's solicitors in terms of orders or offers.

Yours faithfully
Jay Aspergers
Dr Jay Aspergers

copy
Mrs Aspergers
Mrs Aspergers' solicitor

If I wasn't at loggerheads with the man then I would laugh at the lies and misinformation in the letter.

Six years before he left home, Jay's father died of liver cancer. I put it down to his drinking, he always started the day's drinking straight after breakfast and by nightfall he was grinning inanely. Within weeks of his death, it was decided that he had probably died from colon cancer. Jay decided that he could develop the same thing and arranged for testing. So began the Great Endoscopy.

I suppose there are a few perverted people in this world who look forward to and positively relish an endoscopy, but generally it is something no-one appreciates as an experience. Jay took this dislike to new heights. Months before the intended appointment, long before he had a date, he would start getting angry. This anger would grow and grow, until it had reached the most incredible proportions. Then the letter would arrive, with tablet to be taken the day before. His whole mind would shut down at this point, apart from that part which thought about the endoscopy. The family's activities and plans had to revolve around Daddy's bowels. Food was discussed in terms of its effect on the bowels, the shopping list had to be rewritten so that it met his bowels' needs, I had to stay at home, for the day before hand, so that he could discuss his bowels, nothing else, just his bowels.

The entire family (apart from Jay) was shouted at to the point of trauma.

After the endoscopy he was actually quite pleasant, in the same way as his father used to be a relatively happy drunk. I put it down to the valium. Unfortunately, the hospital staff never thought to give me enough valium to keep him in that state until the next appointment five years on.

These endoscopies happened twice, and it was the last one which proved to be the final straw which precipitated the separation. This time, Jay received the letter and the tablets after a particularly difficult six months. He had been exceptionally abusive to the rest of us and we learned to be quiet and mouse like when in his company. Nina, our rather spirited teenaged daughter, fed up with listening to him abusing me and shouting at the children for no reason, used to beg me to kick him out. I would try to reason with her that he was under a lot of stress of work and couldn't help the shouting and anger. Was he under stress at work? I don't know but it was an excuse I always used when his temper got to much.

He received the appointment details before Christmas, so he degenerated into an awful caricature of a bad-tempered, rude and offensive teenager. On Christmas Eve he suddenly demanded that I leave the children and go off to Midnight Mass with him. During our lunch on Christmas Day, he entertained the children with complaints about how boring I was because I wouldn't go to pubs, betting shops and racecourses with him, which wasn't strictly true, said that the only good Christmas was one spent sleeping off a hangover, then promptly passed out for the rest of the day, waking up at nightfall to tell me that the wine had gone off and made him ill. Since he had only had three glasses and was clearly drunk before the bottle was opened, it was unlikely.

The next few days revolved around his bowels, until his prearranged appointment. He had left the letter and tablets on the dressing table for a month and by the day before the appointment it had disappeared. It was clearly my fault and I had stolen it to hurt him. In the meantime, I already had an appointment to attend a pottery workshop with the children, which I had saved up to pay for, so I told him to take his bowels and get to the hospital by another means. He got someone else to take him but I picked him up. This time he was grumpy because I had waited for the hospital staff to phone me and tell me to pick him up. The valium didn't make him into the cheerful drunk I had hoped for.

Within days, the atmosphere at home was horrific, with Jay walking around bad-tempered and abusive, the children scared that he was going to attack me again and me scared but determined not to allow him to frighten me. I took to sitting him down in the evenings and asking him why he was so nasty to me. He would sit there for hours, imitating a dead man, then shout that he had always hated me, I had forced him into marriage and my only redeeming feature was that I was a good mother. It wasn't true and he was the one who had pushed the marriage, but he often tried to hurt me and he knew this would serve the purpose.

Days later he left but I took care to tell him he could come back if he returned to the therapy sessions he had originally been prescribed by the psychologist. I even arranged for marriage guidance sessions but he wasn't interested.

He has since got married. Or rather, he started seeing a colleague, a rather plain, fat spinster many years his junior. He phoned me up four months later, demanding a divorce because he had to get married as he was sleeping with someone else.

Last week I received the appointment for the endoscopy and to be honest, I laughed and hastily redirected it to his new address. He would have to attend the hospital and the new wife would see a whole new side of him, particularly his bowels.

So the endoscopy appointment of which he wrote 'I have been waiting five years for' is a routine endoscopy which he only has every five years. He couldn't make an appointment any earlier and it was so important that he never bothered about telling them about the change in address.

As for the neighbour's house being up for sale, he first told me about it over a year ago, so it is hardly news. Yet he agreed to a value on our home at the court hearing.

This is part of his plan to stall the financial settlement. At the moment he pays maintenance for the children but refuses to pay any maintenance for me because I should be going to work (the disabled child just being an excuse I invented with the help of a bent consultant psychiatrist). He has also decided that I am living with someone, so any additional expenses which relate to the children should be paid for by my live in lover. The fact that no-one else's name appears on the electoral roll just goes to prove my dishonesty. The fact that the children have never seen or heard the man who shares my bed just goes to prove that I have poisoned them against their father.

Years ago we attended mediation, in an attempt to get a financial settlement. I knew we were on to a loser there because he couldn't discuss things during the marriage, other than the odd, evil insult carefully chosen and lobbed at me to frighten me our of any ideas of talking. The mediation required both of us to provide details of our finances but he wouldn't. Instead, he launched into a careful, controlled tirade of insults about me poisoning the children against him. The mediators suggested that a court hearing to establish contact was a possibility. He took that to mean that they, or I, could take me to court and force me to arrange access. I tried gently, to tell him that the children didn't like him, one of them threatened to leave home if he ever came back and the police had told me they would contest any attempt at establishing visiting rights for him. He dismissed it as lies. In the meantime, I was paying £150 per hour for him to wriggle out of any hope of a financial settlement. The mediation suddenly fell down when I, devastated by Nina's recent diagnosis of an auto-immune disease, was repeatedly accused of having Munchausen's by proxy.

Mediation could never work because of his Asperger's Syndrome.

There then followed two years of my solicitor, Mr Harker requesting financial details, offering my financial details, making an offer, having the offer turned down because 'Mrs Asperger has earning capacity and refuses to work.'

There then followed a strange flurry of letters between Jay and Mr Harker, as Mr Harker tried to establish if Jay had remarried. Yes, he had but he didn't live with his wife, so no correspondence must be sent to her house. Mr Harker said that a court wouldn't expect a newly married couple to live apart, I told him that Jay wouldn't live with me when we first got married because he already had a home with his mother and she wouldn't let me live in her home. Mr Harker's eyebrows have a way of rising up his forehead whenever I tell him about some of Jay's eccentricities. Poor Mr Harker, I sometimes worry that he will be forced to take early retirement after this.

Finally, in desperation, my solicitor warned me that Jay had no intention of making a financial settlement and we were left with no choice but to take him to court. Even now, he's playing for time. He requested a postponement of the first hearing on the grounds of his ill health, too much work and a holiday. I suppose he could have thrown in that his car didn't work, his breakfast wasn't made or his suit wasn't pressed. Now he has made up this little knot of lies.

So, I have an ex-husband who has a poorly understood concept of the truth, can't understand my lack of enthusiasm over his bowels and has thought up another reason for delaying the financial settlement.