Despite what I thought was a good counseling session, we did not connect or talk more in-depth afterward. The fights about things began again primarily with my frustration being that she didn’t want to talk about anything and she continued to overspend. If having no spending conscience was an endorsable skill on LinkedIn, she’d be at an expert level. My job was to make the money and keep score while she found creative ways to spend it. If I had a nickel for every time she said “I got this on sale”, she’d have taken the accumulated nickels and found another sale to spend it on.
During this time period, we had multiple arguments, and yelling was often part of them. Unfortunately, this is how my kids remember our relationship although it was not always that way. In one instance, I opened the doors aggressively in our master bathroom (she was behind me) and the doorknobs went into the wall. She was in her closet one time and said something snarky to me and I hit our bedroom door flat-handed which was about 15 feet from where she was which left a small crack in the door. She would tell me that she was physically afraid of me despite me never being anywhere close to physically abusive to her. It helped her narrative though as she described me and I would later find pictures she had taken of the wall and door damage as proof of my “violent” tendencies. Insight – Although my frustration was justified, the yelling and other stuff weren’t. As a man, in particular, you’re subject to a high standard on dealing with crazy stuff and keeping control. Leading up to and even going through the divorce process, you have to maintain control as any loss of control will be amplified.
Somewhere in this time frame, my company (a large eyeglass manufacturer) had a sunglasses sale. I’d hit a few of them up in the past and brought home some amazingly good deals. I would typically set aside all the girls’ glasses for her to keep or give away and I’d keep the guys’ glasses which is what I did this time. I came home from work one day and found most of the glasses gone. Additionally, I found sunglasses from my personal stash in my closet gone. I called Hahna and she told me she had taken them and given them to people at the gym and that she had told me that. There was no discussion about her taking the glasses but this was one of many lies that were told to me during this period of time. Later, I’d see pictures of her and her personal trainer as he wore my sunglasses.
Hahna had stopped wearing her wedding rings in the fall and kept them in her closet. She would claim she had a rash on her fingers. I would look occasionally to see if she had begun wearing them. It was an odd habit but with the way things were going, I felt compelled to check. One day, I found the rings were gone as well as one of our lockboxes. When I asked Hahna about it, she told me that her jewelry must have been stolen. Hahna said she had painters in the house to quote painting the entire house (which I should have called BS on as that had never been discussed) and cleaners in the house (she was a stay at home mom, which kept her busy, but we’d had house cleaners most of our marriage). I told Hahna we needed to file an insurance claim but she would drag her feet on filing and I eventually would file it for her. She wasn’t overly concerned about it all which should have been another warning sign. We’re talking $15K in jewelry gone and she’s acting like it was no big deal.
At this point, my frustration had been growing and Hahna continued to not talk. If she wasn’t going to talk through things or try to get finances under control, I was going to do something about it. We’d often talked about going to a cash system and I decided to set something up as close as possible to it. I sat Hahna down and went through the budget and how I was going to set our accounts up differently. One account would have money for our fixed expenses (mortgage, insurance, etc.) and one would be for groceries, shopping etc. She was on board with it but unbeknownst to her, I set the new accounts up in my name only and switched my paychecks to hit those accounts. I knew if I gave her access to the money, she would just dip into those accounts. To make this process work, it meant we would stop using our credit cards and rely on debit cards only. I told her I was going to put a block on our credit cards so we didn’t use them which she agreed to. My plan was to deposit paychecks in the accounts in my name and then transfer the money over to our joint account to use towards discretionary spending. Insight – Once divorce papers are served, no changes are supposed to be made to any accounts. For the person that is going to file, they have time to make changes and do what they think serves them best financially. It was by the grace of God that I set my paychecks up to go into an account in my name. Had I not, Hahna would have drained our accounts.
Some time in that next week, Hahna ended up going to get a procedure done for our son and couldn’t pay the bill with her ATM (she had a problem with her debit card and the zip code is what we’d later find out) and couldn’t use the credit card because it was blocked as we had discussed. That led to a huge fight even though I unblocked it in a few minutes.
Things were falling apart all around me and despite the signs, I was clueless and still felt we were going to get things worked out. I was told repeatedly divorce was never an option and I never imagined it would happen to me. Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20. My Presentsight was about 20/1000.