I’ve read The Burning Bed. The Hughes home was known to the cops as a hotbed of domestic violence. They would only go there with backup. But they told Francine they could not arrest her husband because they did not see him hit her.
Judges at the time would often tell the wives of first time battering offenders to “gie the guy another chance.” Then if he was arrested again, she would be told “Well, if you stay with a batterer, it must be because you enjoy it!”
Quincy, Massachusetts is creditedwith creating the first sensible program for dealing with batterers. If the police came and saw any evidence of battering, the man was taken out of the house and the woman was given a restraining order. If the guy contacted her in any way, he was arrested and jailed.
Mediation will usually *only *work if both of you are both onboard with the realistic range of expected outcomes. It’s going to be big waste of time and money if you are poles apart on asset division, support levels, and visitation.
You can gauge expected realistic outcome ranges by visiting the state websites that let you calculate child support based on income, number of kids etc. The only issues at that point are dividing household assets and any support you expect beyond child support. These days alimony (if granted at all) is mostly quite short term to allow the non-working spouse to get a job.
Some less scrupulous attorneys try to generate extra billing hours in divorce settlements by promising bigger than rational payouts and churning over details. Assuming typical middle class incomes and assets when the rubber meets the road in court the Judge will follow the state formulas, and all these pie in the sky expectations disappear and you are left (in most cases) with approximately what the state website told you you could expect, but you now have a $20,000 legal bill instead of a $5,000 legal bill.
With a little work you can pretty much nail where your CS income is going to be. In a middle class divorce there should not be a lot of drama over assets. The formulas are cut and dried.
My advice is to be very very careful about basing important life decisions on the advice of people on internet message boards.
The people advising you have for the most part no expertise at what they’re talking about, and also no real in-depth knowledge of your situation.
It’s very easy for people to toss off advice to people on the net. Then, they go on to the next thread. You’re the one who has to live with the situation and with the decisions that you make.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no purpose of such threads. People can tell you things that ring true or that make sense on careful consideration. But sometimes you can just get influenced by the weight of “everyone thinks X”, and in this regard I would caution that when “everyone” is just a bunch of random drive-by strangers, this consensus is not worth much, if anything.
Uh, the main danger people are referring to here involves a sudden stop. Uh, if you coast to a stop in a controlled manner, uh that gives you time to get to the shoulder. Uh, he specified he was talking about non-heavy-traffic situations. Uh. Uhhhhh. Uh.
Yeah, but no job isn’t fun even if everyone is living in the same house (that they can no longer afford), so I’m not sure that’s an important consideration here.
That must be in Oregon or something. The kind we have in South Carolina, behave predictably or close down the highway for a day so they can hose it off.
I thought turning the car off was part of some driving technique I read about on a message board somewhere…
That said, I’m just going to go with the whole “don’t make life decisions based on internet advice from strangers thing.” I don’t want to go into it too much, but I’m a husband and father. Don’t think I’ve ever abused anyone, but I’ve made mistakes like everyone- and had isolated mistakes held against me for life. I’ve also been a victim of abuse, including at the hands of my wife. I know what it’s like to be abused regularly, but also what it’s like to be hurt by a person in a very isolated incident. If I took my kids away from my wife over what happened, I doubt I would get all the “You go girl (boy?)” type of encouragement to break-up the family. it would probably even make ME look like the aggressor and some type of “controlling” guy.
You ruined what was already a poor point with unnecessary sarcasm. Slowing rapidly (which cars tend to do when turned off, relative to highway speeds) with no brake lights on is not something I’d consider safe.
Well, hopefully Palo Verde’s decisions were made because of her own assessment of her own life, not because of people on here, though that may have been part of the decision-making process. I doubt many people start divorce proceedings because a few, not all or even the majority, of people on a messageboard suggested it.
That’s what I was thinking, too - I’m assuming that Palo Verde is not stupid, and she’s making this decision based on everything in her life, not just the little bit we’re commenting on here.