A Letter To My Divorce Judge...Eighteen Years Later

*NOTE: The judge who heard my case, in December 1999 has long since retired. She was a multiple divorcee who really, in honesty, never should have been eligible to sit on divorce proceedings. How could she? How could someone with so glaring and obvious relational issues with men, possibly be objective? Her reputation as a man-hater was legendary. And she typically lived up to it. For years now, I've wondered what I would say to her if I ever met up with her, especially now that I am no longer under her jurisdiction and my daughter is an adult. I know a lot of men wonder the same thing. So I wrote this and I'm posting it here for other men to read, and maybe...to vicariously send to their judge. Men who read this...this woman was awful. I had an uphill battle every step of the way, but I never let her run me off. You must be bigger than the judge and the system.  Bigger than the pain in your heart. In then end...you'll win.

Your Honor,

     I’ve debated writing this letter. I have alternately felt that it would be useless, and then that it would do much good for others. I have no delusions that you’ll ever read it. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write it. It would be therapeutic for me at the very least, and perhaps, for other men as well.

     Eighteen years ago, I walked out of your courtroom a divorced man. You certainly lived up to your reputation as a man-hater. Your despise for me –a man you’ve never met and who was the broken heart in this case- was evident. I neither cheated, nor abused. I worked hard. I was, and am, a great dad. It was my wife who decided to take a better offer, and it was my wife who walked out on me and our eighteen-month-old daughter. Yet, as you were always given to, during your thirty-five years on the bench…you awarded her primary custody. I got to see my little girl once a week and every other weekend, and for that privilege I got to pay $1000 a month.

     You graciously gave me two months in the summer where you reversed custody and gave me primary visitation. I’m sure your plan was that I would grow weary of being a full-time dad in those two months and come back, begging for you to reverse the order.

But I didn’t.

     I cherished those summers. I wept every night after I would take her back to her mom’s. I paced my empty home like a caged animal. I was lost. Aimless. People who saw me in those first years after my divorce said I looked like a dead man. On Monday’s, my friends could immediately tell if it had been a visitation weekend, because it took me most of the day to shake the gloom of my daughter not being there after a weekend of feeling normal.

     You doled out visitation as if she were your child, not mine. You commended my little girl to a horror she didn’t deserve and a brutal, violent life she never should have witnessed.

     My ex-wife remarried after about four years and the man she married was an animal. My daughter suffered so much emotional trauma under his hand that she has PTSD symptoms now. Together, they dragged me into your court every few months to put me through the ringer of additional child support. I was a straight commissioned employee and if I had one good year, you demanded that I pay an exorbitant amount whether the next year was as productive or not.

     When I would speak in my defense, you literally called me a liar without any facts to contradict me. When I explained that I was 100% commission, you said I was lying and you “simply could not believe I got no base salary,” even though I supported it with countless documentation. You refused to hear my petitions for additional visitation because of my concerns for my daughter’s safety.

     My daughter was forced to live with a man who drank, abused drugs, was physically violent and psychologically cruel. This man even went so far as to kill my daughter’s pet once. He damaged so many of her personal belongings that she started storing everything she owned in my shed. He would find birthday cards I sent her and deface them. He interfered with my visitation constantly and yet, when this was brought up in court, you gave her mother a verbal slap on the wrist and let it continue.

     She witnessed this man beating her mother numerous times. She lived with the fear that she’d be next, and sometimes she was. When every fiber in my being screamed out to just handle him myself, my common sense told me not to, because then my daughter would have no defender. So, I would rescue her from that hell, only to have to return her to it. Time and again you did nothing.

     It finally reached it’s zenith when she was 16, and we moved here to Virginia. She has been in counseling for a long time and will be for years to come. She still lives in fear. She still gets panicked whenever there is loud yelling, or she witnesses physical violence. Anything that reminds her of her mother’s home, causes her to almost shut down.

Her mother’s home.

The home you decided was the better alternative.

The hell you condemned her to.

     I want you to know what it’s like to be a dad who loves his daughter and see the damage done because of your rulings. To watch her literally shake in fear because she saw two people fighting like her mom and second husband used to fight.

I want you to know how my heart is ripped in two when I ask her if she’s heard from her mom and she says “No” with resignation because it’s been over a month. I want you to know how my heart aches when I look at my precious daughter, my only child, and see so much potential and so much talent, and such a loving, tender, heart and know how damaged she is already, at nineteen.

     I wish I could transfer all my grief and sorrow and pain onto you. I wish that, somehow, you could feel my hurt instead of me. I don’t deserve this…you do. You blithely rendered thousands of rulings like mine over your career and glibly destroyed thousands of dad’s lives and the lives of their children, because of your arrogance and your hatred for men. NO multiple-divorcee should ever sit on the bench in a divorce court. Not ever.

     You are long since retired. You’ve walked away from the battlefield you created and settled into the family business, and you’re living the life of ease and comfort while men like me are left to clean up the disaster zone you left behind.

     I hope someday your conscience awakens from it’s slumber and you begin to feel the effects of the career you had on the bench. I hope that someday you start losing sleep as I did for so many years. I hope your soul is vexed and your spirit broken until you repent somehow for what you’ve wrought on good men who merely wanted to be dads.

     A lesser man would hate you. I don’t hate you…I don’t think enough of you to hate you. But I don’t pity you either, although I should. I should pity a woman whose life was so consumed by her personal grudges against men that she used her position of power to extract her personal vengeance from every man she came across. You can’t possibly be happy. You can’t possibly be satisfied. You can’t possibly look back and think of any good that you did.

     My Faith got me through the long, grueling years under your jurisdiction. It’s my faith that commends me to civility in this letter. I refuse to give in to bitterness, because that would only extend every ruling you made in my life while you could.

     My daughter wound up with me. She survived your jurisdiction, as I did. You didn’t break me or run me off to abandon my daughter out of shear frustration. I won. I endured and resisted the urge to leave and escape the pain your rulings caused me. I stayed. I was there when my daughter needed me and in the end…she chose the better parent. You lost. You didn’t break me. I remained and became living proof that your sad, pathetic view of men is twisted and skewed.

     I met lots of dads in the years I lived in N____ who had been victims of your court. They all told the same story. Many of them were consumed with hatred toward you. They wished you evil and harm and talked openly of what they might do if they only could. I know they were only talking…only speaking from pain. I never became that man. I never vented my spleen with bile about your jurisdiction. I refused. I knew that I would only make my own pain worse, meanwhile you would carry on with life as merrily as before, unaware and unconcerned about the harm you’d been doing.

     So, I waited until this morning. I’ve thought about what I would say to you if I had a conversation and you had no power or authority to extract revenge after I spoke. I thought about what I wanted to say and what I needed to say and what I should say.

Then I realized that it wouldn’t make any difference. Your heart is too hard and your soul entirely without compassion to even flinch if I were to have said all this to your face.

It never bothered you then, what you were doing to families, so why would it bother you now?

     So, I wrote this article for me…not for you. For me, and for all the men like me who’s dream of fatherhood was broken and reshaped into something twisted and clownish. Men whose hearts never quite recovered during those long years of unequal visitation and prejudicial treatment. Those dads who had less, because so much of their money was going toward child support while so little of time was granted for their fatherhood. Men like me…condemned to weep every other Sunday night after the long ride home from our ex-wife’s house, looking over at an empty car-seat. Men like me who pulled up in the driveway of our own houses and sat in our cars for long stretches, not wanting to go inside and hear the deafening silence of a house without the sound of our child’s voice. A sound that had been filled those halls only hours before. This is for them. This is for me.

This is as vivid a description as I could give, to the life you condemned me to when you made that ruling in December, 1999.

     I survived you. My daughter survived you. In my mind…I won. You spent your entire professional career dissolving families. You profited –you and the despicable attorneys who picked at the carcasses of families for every possible penny- from marriages ending.

I don’t know how much my legal fees contributed to your lifestyle, but I hope you enjoy it. I hope you got my money’s worth.

     My daughter is 19, she lives with me, she’s getting better, and I survived you. I won.

     This case is finally closed.

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