Paper Trails

Even I have a breaking point. Yesterday, after the umpteenth request from my attorneys to produce yet another year’s worth of pointless documents because my husband’s genius attorney keeps demanding them, I may have gone a bit ballistic.

I figure each email exchange about this nonsense costs a few hundred bucks, and I can only imagine what it will cost me once I produce stacks of statements so that both sets of attorneys can pretend to flip through them and conclude there’s nothing in there that could possibly have an impact on our divorce settlement.  The only thing having an impact on our settlement, after over two years of masterful fee generating, is the continuing emptying of the marital pot by the people we hired to protect our interests. Ironic, no?

Over time, I have discovered that if you are a person who generally appears to be calm and agreeable and you suddenly have a hissy fit, people react. And so it was, yesterday, when I sent a scathing email to my attorneys laying out what the only relevant issues are, how irrelevant everything else is, and how I refuse to allow them to rack up more fees over sheer and utter bullshit. To top it off, I emailed my husband – who, at least in theory, agrees with me about all this – and told him about the nasty email I sent to the thieving bulldogs of the bar, asking him if maybe he’d like to send a similar one to his. Which would have been fine, except I accidentally sent the email intended for my husband to my attorneys. Oopsy.

My husband was amused, and assured me – correctly, no doubt – that there are two groups unaffected by personal insults and rudeness: timeshare salespeople and divorce lawyers. I’d add telemarketers, by I certainly get his point. My attorney did, in fact, seem unaffected. “Breathe, and call me later when you’re calm,” she wrote. Since I didn’t expect to feel calm any time soon (although I did fully intend to keep breathing – I am determined to not let this kill me) I made a conscious decision not to call at all that day, even though I had earlier promised I would.

Back to the good news. Lo and behold, the next communications I had from my attorneys had absolutely nothing to do with requests for useless documents (good for my psyche, good for the trees) and everything to do with setting up a meeting to discuss the issues that are actually relevant. Dang. Even my husband jumped on the bandwagon and is slowly trying to explain to his dimwitted attorney that she needs to stop wasting time and money on pointless court pleadings and maybe focus on the stuff that matters. It will no doubt take her a while to process all this, and she’ll feel a bit naked when the shopping bag full of papers she totes into court (I am not making this up) is not as full as she likes it to be, but maybe she’ll get there.

We had hoped (and by we I mean the ones not getting paid royally for our participation in the matrimonial court circus) that this would all be over and done before another wedding anniversary was upon us. Not bloody likely, with only six days left until number twenty-six. At the outset of this whole ordeal, my attorney told me that the longer I stay married, the better it is for me. Theoretically I suppose that’s true, since my entitlements increase with every year I have under my belt. Whoop dee doo. My piece of the pie may be growing, but that doesn’t really help me when somebody else is eating the whole friggin’ pie. It’s like sitting in a bathtub with the drain open. Everything gets sucked out before I even have time to soap up. And (might as well beat the metaphor to death) I come out feeling icky.

All I can do is breathe. And throw an occasional hissy fit. Guess I’d better go shopping for an anniversary gift. Naturally, I’ll send the credit card statement to my attorneys.