Beyond Acquara

… Canada Day! Wedding Day! 475 Millionth Day More Evidence is Found that Men Are Idiots!

Ah, yes. Today was to be my wedding day. Sob, sob. I should be downtown right now in a beautiful suite by the river overlooking a harbor and city bridges. Flowers, Prime Rib, a Wedding Cake, Family, Pretty party favors and moonstruck chocolate. An ivory wedding dress, nighttime sparklers in honor of Canada Day and Independence Day, Maybe some private sparks after all the guests go home. Relief after a celebration of the joining of families from three nations, two languages, four cultures. The joining of families and bonding of friendships. The start of a future life together and a celebration of a new life we made together.

Instead, I sit here alone in a t-shirt and sweats, yet to bother to take a shower, slightly nauseous and feeling fat with a cantaloupe pressing on my bladder. The kids are still in their underwear, eating popcorn. Afterwords they’ll get a bath and we will do some laundry and prep for our camping trip that starts tomorrow. D is at the pain management clinic, Big N is working today in T.O. My family is still in Kansas, and get this…N’s brother is here. All the way from Sweden. Apparently, he already had tickets when N canceled the wedding and he and his wife decided to come anyway and roam around the west coast and play golf. I invited them to come meet me, and so far I have not heard from them. I think they might have traveled down to Santa Cruz. Would you want to meet some pregnant stranger your brother dumped? Yeah, probably me neither.

I actually wasn’t feeling too bad about all this until last night. N and I have talked several times and had several good conversations. He has been loving, apologetic, accommodating, regretful, sweet and kind. That is…until last night. When we started talking about child support. And he lost his mind.

I always considered myself to have a fairly good understanding of feminist issues growing up. I had a working executive mother who was strong and didn’t take any crap of anybody. She was very second wave feminist, dressing by John Malloy’s Dress for Success bible that basically told women to act exactly like men in order to be taken seriously. Which is what they really had to do at the time. But looking back, I realize that she also did 99% of the child rearing, while my dad did pride himself as being one of the good guys because he did his own laundry and helped with the housework. It was good for its day, but it wasn’t equal. Far from it.

I never really, really understood all of the issues women face in the patriarchy until I had children. Until I went through pregnancy and had to contemplate issues like abortion. Until I gave birth and became aware of all the trumped up mom wars that really don’t exist. Until I saw how moms were both made into Madonna inspired angel figures and villified for not being sexy anymore and wearing “mom jeans.” Until I figured out that everything I do as a mother will be picked apart by someone, but if my children’s fathers lift a damned finger to change a diaper or hold a kid on their lap they are instant heroes. Until I found that I was banned from the workplace due to lack of paid maternity leave and affordable childcare. Until I saw that many fathers “babysit” their children, while mothers actually guide their children into adulthood. Until I saw that fathers see parenting as optional and mothers, by default, are mandated by society to sacrifice themselves for their children.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I know that there are good fathers out there who pull their weight. I have found them to be the exception and not the rule. Also, I know that many mothers love their role as primary caretaker, I am one of them. Doesn’t mean I like that society mandates it. People shrug when a father leaves a family. If a mother leaves her family…she is villified as being evil.)

So, child support. With Big N, there are two branches of this topic. One is the support he needs to work out for his two other children. And the other is the support for this child. The first topic is a sore subject, that since it doesn’t involve me, I try to stay out of…

…except that it does involve me a bit. One of the issues with immigration is that I can’t immigrate until he is out of arrears with regards to child support for his two children, K and R. He could, I expect, settle it very quickly by just paying what he owes. But he is fighting it, and that means that it may take who knows how long for it to be settled. Child support payments differ in each state and providence, but in most all situations there is a formula that is followed. It roughly goes like this:

1. The incomes of the two biological parents are combined.
2. A determination of how much money would be contributed to the raising of a child is based on that combined income.
3. Other things are factored in, such as how much of a contribution each parent can be expected to make based on how much physical time each spends with the child  (providing meals, child care, etc.), health insurance, other non-joint children and other personal circumstances. These expenses are subtracted from the original incomes of each parent.
4. Based on that adjusted income, a payment is based on the ratio of income each can contribute to the care of the child.

So, to make this simple…say a father makes $70,000 and a mother makes $30,000. So combined they make $100,000. The contribution to the child’s care would be, say $30,000. After deductions for things like health insurance and other circumstances which is all very complicated, but say the mother has primary custody but the father pays $200 a month in health insurance premiums for the kid. So, his income would go down to $67,600. Then the $30,000 a year in child care costs would be divided proportionally by income. So, since dad makes approximately 2/3 of the total contribution, he would pay 2/3 of the $30,000 a year child contribution.  He is to contribute $20,000 a year and she would contribute $10,000. So his payment to the child would be approximately $1467. (20,000 / 12 months – 200 for health insurance premiums.)

Now, this is all an approximation and there are a lot of factors and rules involved that I won’t go into. But what seems to be bothering Big N (and a lot of guys) is that the contribution isn’t equal. First, they don’t account for the fact that they would be contributing this much if they lived together. Second, they don’t account for the fact that physically having to care for the children is a huge detriment to earning income. Third, they don’t account for the fact that this is just the financial contribution that they would be making anyway if married. It does not account for the unpaid additional labor the mother is doing by taking care of the children without a partner. This is only financial contribution, the work of physical custody that the mother does on her own is completely uncompensated for in any way, except by visitations and such. Visitations have little to do with financial support unless the noncustodial parent is taking on a huge share of the financial burden by feeding, clothing, and otherwise caring for the kid for a huge chunk of the child’s life. (Every other weekend and one night a week is factored in, but it doesn’t reduce the support amount by that much. We are talking like a fifty/fifty deal with all shared expenses or something.)

Finally, and most importantly, N and other men seem to think that these issues are between the mother and the father. They are not. They are about the kids. The money is not for the mother. The money belongs to the children. So, and here is another big issue some people seem to have, if the custodial parent gets remarried and the new spouse provides a significant added income to the household that the kids and mother benefit from, it usually isn’t factored in. This seems to piss some men off to no end and I believe it more to be about power and property than really best interest of the kids.

(Disclaimer #2 is that I know that all of these factors can easily be reversed if the father has primary custody and the mother is paying support. This is not a mother bias, just a reflection upon the realities of the fact that it usually is mothers who make less, have the kids, and recieve child support.)

Okay, so N owes K and N $20,000 in back pay and approximately $800 a month. I would like him to just pay them and get going already. He wants to fight it. Why? Because his ex-wife made a verbal deal with him three years ago that she never legally followed through on, which meant that there never was a deal. He doesn’t want to come to Jesus on this. Also, because financially, K and R are fine. His ex remarried, and her and her new husband are securely middle class and live in a very low cost of living area…so the kids don’t NEED the money. Finally, he sees this as being some kind of thing between him and his ex. It isn’t really about that. There is a formula which you plug in numbers and an amount he owes HIS CHILDREN comes out. It is that simple. It is their money. Even if they don’t need it, it could benefit them in a million ways. They could go to a better college, they could travel, they could visit him, they could go to camps and internships, whatever. It is their money. Not the exes, not his. Whatever the new spouse contributes to make it financially easier on the family he should look at as a blessing. The new spouse took on the kids, he contributes to them financially, perhaps relieved stress for their mother and enabled her to be a better parent, this is a gift for them, not an opportunity for him to take advantage of. The whole thing, his attitude, drives me nuts.

I’m not naive enough to think that this can be taken care of tomorrow. There is still a lot of legal mumbo jumbo to get through. I know these things take time. But if he went into it with the attitude of doing right by the kids rather than fighting his ex, it could be solved a lot faster. The longer it goes on with her, the more complicated it makes things for figuring stuff out for our baby.

So there’s that. You still with me? I know it is tedius, but I need to just write out my thoughts.

Okay, moving on to me and this baby. First, I have to thank Alanna for helping to get me started on this by sending me some valuable information and links, and also for giving me a wonderful surprise when I needed it the most. She gave me a $50 gift certificate to a restaurant, and I enjoyed very much using half of it on my birthday to eat greek. So Yeah! Blog readers rock this world.

So, right now, N has been giving me $320 a month since the start of this pregnancy. This happened before he broke up with me when I asked him to help me hire a helper since I have been so sick during this pregnancy and he agreed. So he has been paying for my wonderful, wonderful helper, Kim, who takes the boys for about 4 hours twice a week and also often helps me with housework and laundry. She has literally helped me to stay afloat with the workload and also has given the boys much needed breaks from me when I’ve been sick and down. She has taken the boys places I can’t take them (like u-pick farms that I can’t drive  to) and has given them a chance to make friends with her kids which they love. I am extremely appreciative of both Kim, and N for enabling me to do this.

Child support in my state can not be enforced until there is an actual live child, so right now, N is doing this out of the kindness of his heart so to speak. But also, of course there are expenses that come up with the baby even though it is not born yet. I need clothing and diapers and doctor co-pays, and child care for the boys when I am at the doctor and baby gear and what-not. So, I don’t feel all that guilty about his financial help.

But I have told N from the beginning that once the baby is born we would need to get a legal parenting/support plan filed. Using Alanna’s information, I have found that the way I have to do this is to file in my state (which bases everything on the formula mentioned above) and then file a reciprocity agreement with the province of Ontario, which will then agree to enforce the plan on their end. My state is the ruling jurisdiction here because that is where the baby lives. Ontario will then follow whatever my state says.

So, I mentioned last night that I plugged in our financial information to the state’s support calculators just to get a ballpark estimation of what child support would be, cuz you know, I need to plan and stuff. I said that, of course this amount ($500CD/ $400US) is an approximation based on the info I had and my best guess as far as what info to plug in. Of course, we would get with a lawyer and do it all legally and right and with actual W2’s and pay stubbs and all that handy.

And he went all defensive victim ballistic powerplay bullshit on me. It was ridiculous. I guess this is not what his Ontario calculations came to. Well, Ontario doesn’t count health insurance premiums because they don’t have any there. And he also didn’t factor in my kids, which cancel out his kids. (The support each parents give to other non-joint children is factored. Since we both have two non-joint children each, they cancel each other out and are not really a factor in support.) He seemed not to be able to comprehend why MY state’s rules override his province’s rules. “oh, of course it goes by the mother,” he says. No, It goes by where the freakin’ child actually lives. The fact is, I DO have to pay health insurance premiums for this kid so it IS a factor. Because the kid lives HERE.

Then he started being all, “oh, it always is all about money.” Um, excuse me? I never in a million years planned to raise a third child on my own with the father 2000 miles away in a different country. Oh, yea! I get $400 a month to do it! I’m rich! I said I’m only asking for what the law says this child should get. Do you WANT your child to have health care? Do you want your child to have clean diapers and clothing? Do you want your child to have a mom who can take breaks on occassion? This is the simple, simple stuff that this money will help me do. Meanwhile, I will be spending the next year in baby jail taking care of this kid essentially on my own while he sits in a sailboat next summer and talks on his new iPhone.

Yes, he got the new iPhone. This is the guy who a month ago complained that he was having trouble getting  from month to month.  I swear, between him and D and their toys, Apple is the bain of my existence.

It’s like, their expendable income goes for apple shit and battlestar galactica shit (D is the proud owner of maps of Kobol and the unknown soldier clipped cornered pic and Quorum member ID tags and BSG phone props and stuff. The unknown soldier photo prop alone was over $400.) and going out to eat and what not. Fine. My expendable income? Goes for stuff for the kids. Camping trips for the kids. Books and curriculum for the kids. Classes for the kids. Child care for the kids. Preschool for the kids. Tickets to fun stuff like amusement parks and children’s museums and zoos for the kids. I DON’T EVEN HAVE A CELL PHONE. jeebus fuckin’ christ.

It’s just a complete unawareness and lack of a realization of how much time, energy, money and responsibility goes into raising kids. They kill me because they act like such victims. I think N wanted to just keep paying $320 or whatever we decided and was like, OFFENDED or something that I wanted to abide by the law in this matter. Like that $80 extra he will have to pay might just kill him or make him have to go out to eat two times less a month or something. Gah!. I’m going to set up a separate  section of quicken just for this baby and account for every single expense I spend on it or in relation to it. And I have a feeling he should be very, very happy that I won’t be asking for half of THAT amount. And then if I were really mean I would divide my clock hours of care for this kid in half and give myself a salary for THAT.

They have NO FUCKING IDEA what little entitled shits they act like sometimes. I have done everything in my power for both of them to make them feel included and to be accommodating and get along and make it a peaceful place for the family. The least they could do is not act like dumbfucks about it.

N did sort of back off and say something about not seeing the forest through the trees and old habits with ex wife and what not. So, okay. I’m still bending over backwards willing to work with everyone.

But I still filed my “modest means” application for a family lawyer TODAY. If anything at all, that conversation where he tried to convince me that I didn’t need to follow the law and get a court-ordered support document with the aid of a lawyer made me think that I need to go RUNNING to a lawyer, pronto.

So, that is what I spent this day, my un-wedding day, my not to be new country’s birthday, doing. I love this. I tell ya. Love this to pieces.