Public Thoughts. Public Threats

 I received an email this morning.  I believe it to be from my X wife. It  read something like this:

"I am aware that you have put your blog back up as well as reposted the pic of Jake in tears as your gmail profile picture. While I am not certain these things are in violation of the order I am saddened that you have chosen to make your thoughts public as well as use such a sad photo of our son to represent you. Your thoughts are all over the place, from suicide, to love to not knowing if you have the ability to miss people or feel true emotions. Some of these posts are disturbing and even detrimental to my career as you use my business name and my name in the posts. If you are truly working towards seeing your kids this blog does not help show emotional stability. In fact it does the exact opposite. If you decide to leave it up I feel the need to take the next steps in the process to having you remove it from the web. I also have found pictures of me in various states of clothing that you have photo shopped and.posted. Please remove them from your deviant art site and anywhere else they may reside. I do not want to have to take this further and cause any more possible legal ramifications. I am legally able to send you this as I cannot violate my own order. Please do not respond as you would be in violation. I appreciate your considering how this all has affected me and in turn affected our children."

"I am aware that you have put your blog back up" .. it was never up .. it was never down.  it simply is something I was typing for myself that I did not know was public.  I did not intentionally make this public. I do not know if anyone apart from you and your cronies read this.  I am not sure that I know how to change the settings.

"as well as reposted the pic of Jake in tears as your gmail profile picture" This is something different than the blog.  It is a picture of how much my child misses me and the look on his face when his parent refused to abide by a legal government order to allow him to see me for thanksgiving.

"Your thoughts are all over the place ..." indeed.  I am a little sad and I have been a little confused.  It is not often I am betrayed by so many people in my life and forced to make so many significant changes.

"Some of these posts are disturbing and even detrimental to my career as you use my business name and my name in the posts." I am not sure how my posts would affect your career,  But I am glad you got to your point of your email halfway into your paragraph.   To be honest I do not really know what is in my blog.  I have written it all ... but I do not go back and reread them all. I am sure that some of it is not positive as that many of them serve as journals that I write as I wake up.  Some of them, many of them are passing thoughts and even dreams.  I am not sure how any of this would affect Armada.

"If you are truly working towards seeing your kids this blog does not help show emotional stability. In fact it does the exact opposite. If you decide to leave it up I feel the need to take the next steps in the process to having you remove it from the web." Strange how this course I take on Parenting says not to threaten the other parent with custody issues when you have a problem with them.  The truth of the matter is that I have been denied custody because my X wife and I have a personal conflict.  I am not abusive to my kids.  I have not hurt my kids.  I am a good parent.  My X is with holding my visitation rights because she has an emotional problem with me.  She is not upset that I am a bad parent. She is not upset that I am a threat to solemnity.  She is simply upset because I am public with my opinions and thoughts.

" I also have found pictures of me in various states of clothing that you have photo shopped and.posted."  if you go back to your evidence and check the dates at which those picture were posted they were long before the divorce.  You name is no where near those pictures.  They were not put up in an effort to discredit you or someone else.  The offending pictures have been removed.   In my opinion; the fact that I posted a picture of your likeness months prior to our divorce and the rest of this issue are separate.  I have treated it as such and have complied.

As far as the issue of your threats ... I do not do well with threats.  I am not really in a place in life that I can any longer be threatened from you.

1)  I give 60% of my income towards the children.  -  There is no legal way to take more of what I make.  I have gotten very very good and living on a tight tight budget.  I am able to live on 900 a month.  All my other money go to paying off your appliances in your home and to paying off your Volvo.

2) Friends -  I have none.  You can not take them away, you can no longer influence them.  You can no longer tell them stories and get them to side with you.  All my friends I ever had I have left or have stopped being friends with.  You can not influence any of my friends if I do not have them.

3)  Family - My family knows exactly what I think or believe about them.  They know how far I think I can trust them and they know exactly how far they can trust me.  I am completely honest with them.  It is not important if they are honest with me or what their opinion of me is .. because t hey do not greatly impact my life.   If you do or do not influence them it will not affect me.

Now the areas you can affect me.

1) Our Children- you have the knowledge to probably keep this restraining order up until the kids are 18.  And to be honest with you I have already paid 700 dollars in fines not counting how many missed days at work to get my visitation with my kids back.  I am sure there lots of really good stories you tell them on why there Dad is gone.   And I am sure to you that even sometimes some of those stories seem just a little bit real.  But the truth is no matter how much you hurt me or hurt out children I am sure they will find out the truth.  And you know from my personal experience that learning the truth a dozen years after the offense does not serve well to the perpetrator.  I do not really do a whole lot of complaining about my X wives parenting skills or styles.  I think we all have gifts and we all have areas to work on.  If I was a friend to my X wife and wanted to give her some advice I would ask her to re consider what she tells the children when she is upset.  Once you start to make little lies you will find yourself making big ones.  And with Jake's condition we both know what happens when he finds out someone is lying to him.  After Nana lies to him about the rainbow; he has always questioned everything she has told him.  The truth is my X wife was upset with me for texting her fiancee a mean and inappropriate text.  It was 100% of my fault and I should have never done so.  Looking back I wish I never did.  Not because it was untrue or because it was hurtful but rather because it will have long lasting ramifications in a direction I did not wish to travel.

2) Barb - it all goes back to Barb.  Barb asked me to stop posting on facebook.  I did.  I even closed my Facebook down.  I love her very dearly.  The reason I went to jail was because of a reaction I had to being told that Barb likes Robert more than she ever liked me.  It was not right or correct that I get upset with my Ex.  I should have never set foot into our house again.  When the conversation changed to My X wives feeling and perceptions I should have politely excused myself and took the high road and refuse to argue.  It is my X wides habit to go to church on Sunday and then to go to her mother's
 and gossip about the past week.  I have heard if for over a dozen years.   Sometimes its about people they know.  Sometimes its about people at church.  I am sure that alot of the gossip lately has been about me.  I can see her asking for the kids to go upstairs and play so she can sit down and eat while her Mom cooks so she can tell her Mom all the hurt feelings and lies she has to tell. But I have been hurt as much as I can by not having Barb in my life.  While it is very true I miss her.  And my life will forever dimmed by not having her in my life.  I can not be hurt anymore for her not being in my life.  I don't communicate with Barb and more.  Out of respect for my X Wife.  Barb's opinon of me whether good or bad has no influence any longer on me.  If my X Wife continues spreading gossip and lies to her about me it will not affect me in any way.

3) and Money.  My X wife knows she can always hurt me monetarily.  I am poor.  I make very little.  I work at a dead end job that has no possibility of progression.  In fact I will make 20% less this year than I made in previous years because of this furlough.  But my X could always do the most damage to me by forcing me to take off days of work to go to court cases and force me to pay fines and legal fees.

I guess it always came down to money.  One thing I regret in my life and in my marriage was never having enough motivation to finish College.  One of the big impacts in my divorce was the fact I never made enough money for my X wife.  She always felt that she had to make more money to some how make up for my faults.  I guess we all have different goals and different standards of living that we wish to reside at.  Her's has always been higher than my meager salary could afford.


My X wife makes her thoughts public by mass communication.  She has a thought.  She repeats that thought through verbal and text communication with a friend.  Then she continues to go through all her lists of friends until she has spread that thought.

The difference between us is that I simply write a blog. 

I am not sure what the legal difference between someone going around from person to person telling them gossip and lies from someone who post thoughts on a public forum.

My blogs harms no one.  A total of 20 people have visited this blog in a year.  I assumed it was simply me trying to log on from a different computer or different gmail account.  No one besides my X has ever said they have seen this blog.  I do not make it public to anyone I know.  The only people that know I write this are my counselor (who told me too) and those that my X wife has told (i.e. My Mother)

My Mother asked me to take it down. She said that Melinda saves a copy of everything I post for evidence.

So I need to weigh the benefits into keeping a blog.  does it serve a helpful and beneficial medical use to getting me thru these tough times?  Or is it the means at which my X can demonstrate my past emotional state in an effort to further keep the children from me.

I will need to spend some time on this one.  Harassing me and threatening me will not actually assist in me coming to a conclusion sooner. Either way .. I will take her opinion into advisement.  I will take my mothers opinion too.  I will look to see if there is a way to turn this to private so that I can appease all parties.

But lets not confuse things.  If a person does unethical things; or if a person makes certain choices in their personal life and those impact there workplace.  It is not the person who told the story who is to blame.  It is the person who did the unethical act.  I do not talk negatively about the place of employment where my X works.  To be honest I have no issue with where she works or anyplace she has worked.  Now that I am divorced I honestly see no reason why I would ever see a need to communicate with her company or say something about that company.

This harassing email she has sent me is about two things.  She does not wish to see negative pictures of her or her family.   She does not want private things in her life to become public.

In the past my X has had some pictures spread about the web.   But what she does not know is that prior to the divorce I deleted all my pictures of her (revealing or not) off my computers and email account so that I would never feel tempted at sharing those pics.  I never told her this and to be honest it is not really important that she knows it.  If my Ex a t time in our relationship felt the desire to give me a gift of her beauty in a photo it was meant for that time and those emotions.  It is not meant to be used several years later when I am angry.  So all I have of her are my memories now.  And that is enough.  I never intended on hurting anyone with my pictures on my art site or on my Gmail.

I look at Jake's crying face daily and use that as motivation to improve and to work as hard as I can so I may see my children.

As far as my thoughts and my public display of them.  Please trust me from experience it will stop mattering to you.  When I was married I asked for years for my personal life not be shared in public.  But it was not in my X wife's nature not to Vent (Gossip.)  After a while it stops bugging you and you stop caring.  By the time the relationship was over I no longer cared. I just assumed that anything I said was instantly told to Robert, Jamie, Sarah, and Barb.

Since the divorce I have been living with everything I do or think publicized.  In the future when I am long dead and gone and my children think back on my life.  They will see a man who made a terrible mistake when he was in his early 20s.  They will see a man who tried to make up for it but never got over it.  They will see that I was wronged by Robert and his decision.  They will know that My Wife at the time was feeding information to him which lead to his decision.  They will see a many who was so obsessed with Jiujitsu and Marital Arts that he chose to spend more time at the gym than with his family.  Then they will see him give up his obsession and how it hurt him dearly.

I don't know what the future hold for me.  And to be honest I don''t see any "bright light" over  the horizon.  All I know is that I am a simple person who wishes to see his children.  I may have made mistakes in the past,  I prob will make mistakes in the future; but neither of those issues has anything to do with my ability to parent.

If this blog somehow disappears .. its not because I am wrong, or even that I should not be feeling the way I do; but rather it will be gone because I realize that my children are the most important thing in my life and that I need to take the high road when my X threatens me.