More from the words of Jed Abraham
Your doctor will be reassuring. The blood tests were normal, and there was no blood in your stool. The pain, the alternating diarrhea and constipation could have many causes. Your doctor will want to rule out the worst. He will order full gastrointestinal workup, including a colonoscopy, a tube inserted up your rectum through which your doctor can detect abnormalities, in real time. As for the headaches, there are also several possible diagnoses. To rule out the worst, you will need an MRI scan of the brain. For this, they will stick your head into a magnetic tube. Head into tube, tube into rectum. Medicine, you will reflect, is just like the law. Worse than the pain will be the worry about the pain. You will worry about it so much that you will forget you are worrying about divorce. Your doctor will tell you that the tests were negative and there is nothing physically wrong with you. He will tell you to see a shrink.
Dr Young will be thorough. He will spend many hours with you and the kids. He will note how you get along together. He will talk to you and the kids, separately and together. He will spend many hours with your wife and the kids. He will note how they get along together. He will talk to your wife and to John. He will talk to your children’s teachers and coaches. He will put you through psychological tests: the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Rorschach. He will prepare a detailed written evaluation. His fee will be $5,000, up front.
You will not be able to take the day off work to attend the deposition of John. Your boss had a little chat with you. Your work has fallen off sharply. He knows about your marital problems and he sympathizes, but he has a business to run and a payroll to meet and everybody has to pull his own oar. You can be replaced by a trainee, for all the business you’ve generated lately. Your bonus is under review. And the bookkeeper tells him it’s an added pain each month to calculate and cut a separate check to pay your wife’s temporary child support which the court ordered withheld from your commissions. If you can’t limit your divorce to after hours, you’ll soon be going through another separation.
Your lawyer will report that John’s deposition was quite revealing. John is divorced, from out of state. He came here to find better-paying work because he couldn’t keep up with his child support payments back home. He says that your wife first hired him to do landscaping. Now, in exchange for doing odd jobs around the house and cleaning up after your wife and kids, he gets to sleep on the couch and to forage in the fridge. With a straight face, he admitted he even does windows. He also admitted to occasional intercourse with your wife in her bedroom. The truth is he’s moved in with her. But to prevent your wife from blowing a shot at alimony, because she may be having what the law calls “a resident, continuing conjugal relationship” with him, your wife’s lawyer has undoubtedly told him to talk about all the odd jobs he does so he can pose as a live-in employee. For all intents and purposes, the bed-and-board he gets for servicing your wife keeps him afloat. You should be proud that the hard-earned temporary child support payments you make to your wife are helping this diligent young man support his children.
More on When Your Wife Files for Divorce on next summary.
