A Chick in the Cockpit (22 page)

At the end of the first session, after I had laid out my laundry list of concerns and overview of our history, she tilted her head and raised her eyebrows, and asked the one question that changed the course of my life: “Do you actually
want
to make this marriage work? You appear to be disconnected from this relationship...”

I looked her in the eye and without a moment's hesitation, said “No. I am exhausted from trying to keep the peace. I'm not me anymore, and I haven't felt happy for years, except for being with my girls. My insides are bleeding and I've been walking on eggshells for so many years, I don't remember what the ground feels like. I am done trying to make this work. I can't do this anymore.”

The air was sucked out of the room, so I took shallow breaths to stay alive. We sat in silence as the terse announcement settled into Brad's psyche.
No.
Not often heard and rarely understood; for Brad, the word “no” hit harder than any fist. I had been emotionally detaching myself for years, and I was good at putting on a happy face to keep the peace. He probably thought I was at least content. For Brad, the announcement came as a reality check. Deep down, he must have known, but he never allowed the thought to burble to the surface. After years of controlling the puppet, I'm sure he was astonished to see Pinocchio come alive and stand on her own two feet.

Immediately, Bridgette told Brad it would be best if he could move out for a while. She knew the potential for violence and abuse, and her concern was legitimate. She said he needed to work on some issues before living under the same roof again, even if he/we knew that a divorce was pending. She asked us to come back and to approach the counseling session as a tool to handle the upcoming divorce, and to work out the new issues that were bound to come up.

We explained that, financially, we needed to share a dwelling for a while. Bridgette nodded and explained she'd seen many marriages languish in the depths of blackness for years because of financial constraints. That alone was an additional reason why we needed to continue talking to her.

We met with Bridgette two more times, and after that, Brad said he wouldn't spend another penny on her. “Why the hell would I give a
marriage
counselor money if she is just helping you plan a divorce?”

The elephant was acknowledged for the first time. I had admitted to Brad that I had no intention of staying married to him. As strange as it sounds, I needed the external confirmation from Bridgette that I wasn't the only crazy one here, and that the issues I had been dealing with all these years were intense. I really didn't have to live like that—even if I had two kids. Actually, Bridgette pointed out the disservice I was doing to the girls. How are they going to know what a healthy relationship looks like if this is their only example? “Do you want your girls to end up in a marriage like this?” Nuh uh. No way.

The elation I had hearing a psychologist tell me I was normal gave me the confidence to tell my two best friends, Marcie and Sandy, about what I had gone through all these years. We'd been friends during that horrible time, and I couldn't even tell them to their face because I knew I couldn't rationally talk about it. Instead, we met for dinner, and I told them through my wringing hands and threats of tears that they'd be receiving an email from me. By telling them the truth, I made my life real again. I was gaining my power. While it hurt like hell, I knew that the healing would soon follow.

The phone rang within ten minutes of my sending the letters. Both my friends were in tears realizing the secrets I'd been holding for seven years. I was ashamed that I'd kept it from them, and they were honestly sad that I felt like I couldn't tell them at some point along the way. My embarrassing admission to these two beautiful souls released years of self-loathing, and allowed me to gather up additional strength to press onward and upward.

Even though Brad and I knew we were getting a divorce, we didn't know where to begin. Without being told, Brad packed up his stuff and moved into the guest room, but it seemed to put even more stress on the situation. I was still finishing up school and Brad was busy with his race car, the economy, and our company. He'd recently bought himself a new mountain bike, so he was off on either four tires or two.

He was even less considerate than a roommate, and went out of his way to make life even more miserable. Anytime I spoke to him, he would act like I didn't exist. I could be at the breakfast table with the girls and ask him a question and he would just ignore me. The girls would watch us like a tennis match to see what would happen next. One morning, Lindsey turned to me and said, “Well, I can hear you, Mommy, even if Dad can't.”

Then it happened. For the first time in my life, my body failed me. I was dealing with what I thought was an upset stomach, but while getting ready for bed, the ache turned into severe pain. I couldn't catch my breath and I had to do shallow pants to manage the agonizing pain from inside my core. It was constant and wouldn't let up. I thought I was having a heart attack. It scared Brad, too. He called my friend Aimee, who lived at the end of the road, to come down to stay with the girls while Brad drove me to the hospital.

After checking to make sure my heart wasn't failing me, they performed subsequent tests. Gallstones. Hundreds of them. Personally, I think the culmination of years of constant stress manifested into the poetic diagnosis: all that hurtful bile I couldn't get rid of finally required intervention from an outside source.

I stayed one night after surgery and went home the next morning with instructions to not lift anything for a few days.

Brad had fed the horses while I was in surgery, but the stalls hadn't been cleaned, and it was just getting worse. I woke up the next morning at home and willed myself to go out there, but I just couldn't do it. I asked Brad if he could please feed the horses. I needed this income to buy groceries and pay our bills. He rolled his eyes and headed out the door. I crawled back into bed and tried to force my body to instantly heal. I took some deep breaths—and then grabbed a Percocet.

While walking back from the bathroom, I stopped to watch the horses as they waited for Brad to get them their grain. Just like small children, they poked and bit each other to bridge the boredom of waiting for their food. Naomi, my favorite mare, was obsessed with food. Her restricted diet made her feel like she was on the edge of starvation, even though she was about 200 pounds overweight. Brad laid the bowls of grain out and Naomi took a few bites, but she thought it might be best to steal from the horse next to her, too, just to make sure she got more than anyone else.

I held my incision because I was laughing so hard. Watching her sneak over and push her nose into her neighbor's food dish, take a bite, and then move on to the next horse's dish temporarily made me forget my pain. Silly innocent fun.

However, Brad didn't see it that way. He saw what Naomi was doing and walked up to her and punched her in the nose. She was so startled that she ran into the next paddock, trying to understand what just happened. She probably knew she was being naughty, but the punishment didn't quite fit the crime. But it didn't stop there. Brad followed her as she ran away. As Naomi stopped to turn around and reassess the situation, Brad ran up to her and grabbed a tuft of mane and leapt onto her back sideways. He drove his knee into her side over and over again all the while he was yelling, “You dumb fucking horse. Eat your own fucking food!”

Naomi just stood there, with a grown man on her back, driving his knee into her side. She had always trusted humans and in return, treated those around her with calm and care. She was trying to process this bizarre and hurtful turn of events. We both were.

The scene from my bedroom window had instantly gone from serene to insanity. I struggled with the warped window until it finally lurched open, and I yelled, despite the pain in my abdomen, “What the hell are you doing?” He gave her one last jab and jumped off.

Despite having been in surgery a few hours earlier, I completed the rest of the barn chores. I went slowly and used my arm strength to get it all done. It felt good to move around anyways after laying in a hospital bed, pushing my happy button which released paid medication at my whim. It also helped remind me that my body was still strong and that a little gallbladder removal wasn't going to slow me down. Sometimes, even though it's part of you, a diseased organ needs to be removed. After watching Brad punish the horse for a minor infraction, I knew he was like a mindless cancer latching his own pain and anger on anyone else. I'd watched him do it to me.

When Brad got into the house, I asked him why he did that to Naomi. He looked at me and shrugged, “Do what?”

I am ashamed of myself when I try to explain why it took so goddamn long to get divorced. I can't believe I wasted all of those years putting on a happy face, while inside my pain turned me numb as Novocain. My only solace is that after talking to many divorced women, I found that it's actually very (too) common for women to languish in marriage hell for years due to finances and young children. We're always waiting for the right time or moment to file for divorce, but let's face it, there is never a good time. My excuse was that I wanted to finish my BA degree at DU. I worked with passion and focus, and the 3.9 grade point average proved it.

As my last quarter of school began, I told Brad I was ready to schedule our first mediation session. Yes, I still believed that we could have an amicable divorce for the children's sake. Brad was astonished that I was ready to begin the process and kept saying that he thought I wanted to wait until I was done with my classes.

After several weeks of coordinating everyone's schedules, the mediation was scheduled. It was a full on war. Brad would go out of his way to not help with anything, even the girls. Even if I asked an innocuous question like, “Do you know where Lindsey's backpack is...?” His reply would be silence, like I didn't even speak or exist. The girls couldn't quite grasp what they were seeing, but they knew something was horribly wrong.

I had worked so hard at covering up this bad relationship, and I always wondered how much they actually knew. I'd smile and say everything was fine in a sing-song voice, but I doubt my eyes hid the pain. Kids are so much better at picking up the atmosphere of a room than we give them credit for. It was clarified one night while reading a bedtime story to Lindsey. I closed the book and, out of the blue, Lindsey turned to me with her head tilted and asked, “Mom, I think I am a lot like you, don't you think? If I'm like you, and dad is so mean to you, does that mean that dad will be mean to me and not like me either?”

Out of the mouths of babes.

21
Post-flight Inspection and Reflection

1.
Check for damage from your journey

2.
Use this as a chance to stretch your legs after a long flight

3.
You can now officially log these hours in the logbook

The post-flight inspection is the least utilized checklist. After flying all day, you're exhausted and you just want to go home, so the last thing you want to do is walk around the airplane again. You justify your lack of self–discipline by promising to check the aircraft with more enthusiasm on your next pre-flight inspection. But this is your only opportunity to look at any damage that may have been done along your journey. Once you walk away, if further damage is done, you'll never know if it was done during your flight or after you got on the ground. This is a peace-of-mind checklist. Maybe that little sound you heard on your descent was something important.

When I was a copilot on a Citation II, we were flying at night above a solid layer of clouds, when we felt and heard a subtle and quick twang in the airframe during our descent. Airplanes normally creak and groan as they transition through pressure and temperature changes, so we didn't give it too much thought. The captain and I looked at each when we heard it, but the flight controls were smooth and there were no other unusual sounds or vibration, so we soon forgot about the little noise.

We landed, taxied to the FBO, and got our passengers on their way. Since I was the copilot, it was my responsibility to do a quick post-flight inspection. Honestly, most flight crews don't perform this check, but I was still young and ambitious. It was nighttime, so I was just giving it a cursory inspection to make sure all the major parts were still attached. As I walked around the inboard leading edge of the left wing, I could see something was wrong. There was a dent, only about three inches wide but almost two inches deep. Grey and black Canadian goose feathers were imbedded in the impact mark, and blood and feathers had exploded onto the air intake of the engine and side of the fuselage.

Murphy's Law rules on Sunday nights, so maintenance was closed at the FBO, and there were no other mechanics on the field who could inspect the aircraft. We had to wait until morning to figure out how bad it was and if the aircraft was flyable. Needless to say, we had to charter another jet to get our passengers to their destination while we stayed behind to figure out what to do. We ended up getting a Special Flight Permit from the FAA to get the aircraft home, which meant that we had to stay out of the clouds and all precipitation because our wing's leading edge de-ice equipment was inoperative. It was hard to do since we were flying from South Carolina to Minnesota, but as luck would have it we had blue skies all the way home. The plane was in the shop for three weeks.

On the flight home, all I could think about were the odds that we'd hit a goose at seven thousand feet, at night, above a solid cloud deck. Were the birds stuck above the clouds and couldn't navigate through them? If so, wouldn't it be exhausting and stressful to have to fly and fly with all your might to find a safe landing spot? Clouds are nothing but water droplets. There are no physical barriers to stopping someone or something from going through them, but if you can't see to the other side, or the ground, you don't have anything to reference your position, which is disorientating. It's incredible that something that weighs nothing and has no touch can be the biggest barrier of all.

The majority of our paperwork for the divorce process was the endless financial and physical property statements. This was the first time in years that I had sat down and dug through our financials. Not just our personal bank statements, but the business's as well. This was an epic post-flight financial checklist.

The first mediation session is all about “discovery” and formalities and what to bring to the next meeting. Since Brad had changed all the passwords and had taken my name off of all our joint accounts, I was flying blind when it came to our finances. I had been locked out of my own accounts for almost a year and didn't have any money except for what I took in from horse boarding. This “discovery” meeting required Brad to hand over financial statements. I took the copies home with me and “discovered” two very important problems. First, Brad had a secret bank account, and second, he'd been stealing from our company. He had created a ghost employee who was drawing paychecks, but the apparition was actually Brad.

I also happened to see a bank statement from our company that had several transfers of a few thousand dollars to an account I didn't recognize. This turned out to be a secret account that he'd set up the same week he had taken the girls and me off his insurance policy, and put his mom on, instead. He'd also cancelled my health and car insurance—something that came as a huge shock.

Brad requested at our first mediation session that I continue paying my life insurance premium. He insisted that I maintain a life insurance policy—his passion for this demand was bone chilling because it was one of his top demands. My backbone tingled at the sentiment behind his actions.

I should have known that the moment I told Brad “no” that he would retaliate. In the months preparing for the divorce, I had been working on getting the girls and me emotionally ready for the impending changes. Brad, in the meantime, had been locking me out of my own accounts, taking me off all of our insurance, and stealing what was left of our lives together. He removed my name from our accounts as the listed beneficiary and put his mom's name on. I suspected his mother was copiloting the situation.

During Brad's brother's divorce five years earlier, I'd overhead a discussion Brad's mom was having about custody. She proposed to Brad's brother that he kidnap their child and take her out of state. She thought so little of the bonds of motherhood and her daughter-in-law that she insisted it was his right to take their daughter because she believed he'd be the better parent. When she realized I had heard her conversation, she rolled her eyes and simply said that some people didn't deserve to be a mother. I agreed. It's how I knew she was offering Brad the same advice about me and the kids, and the thought was horrifying. I trembled at what Brad was capable of, and to have his mother backing him had me seeing a red echo on my radar screen. I still didn't have an attorney at this point, but I honestly felt I could deal with it like a checklist, one thing at a time.

I presented the financial theft discovery at the second mediation session, which also made it the last mediation session. Brad said there was nothing
illegal
with what he did, so fuck off. He also told the mediator he could tell he wasn't going to get what he wanted in mediation, so he walked out of the session. Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to court we go.

Our mediation sessions ended right before the holiday season. It had been planned months before that we would be hosting Christmas at our house. Airline tickets had been purchased by out of town relatives, and I had a tradition of inviting friends without family in town to join us, so we already knew we had a houseful of people coming. I wanted this for my kids since I didn't know what their next Christmas would look like.

Given that our plans were already set, I asked Brad if we could have one final, peaceful Christmas in the house and after the holidays were over, we'd go down to the courthouse together to file jointly for divorce. Since I was locked out of my accounts, I didn't think I could even buy Christmas presents, let alone find an attorney who would take me on my word. Agreeing to file for divorce without attorneys sounded like a great idea, since I couldn't afford one anyway.

Right before the snow started flying, I had walked down to the barn to put away some hoses and summer gear. Attached to the barn was a workshop where Brad kept his race car. It was such a part of the barn that when I walked in, I immediately saw the empty space where it was usually parked. Brad was always afraid someone would steal this car, and seeing the empty spot, I feared that it had actually happened. The barn was never locked, and it would have been easy to grab it. I dropped what I was doing to run up to the house and tell Brad the bad news.

I walked into the kitchen and said, “Brad, oh my gosh, your car is gone. The barn door was closed and everything looked okay, but the car is gone!”

Brad just kept stirring the soup in the pot on the stove. He didn't even look up. I realized I misinterpreted the situation, so I asked, “Brad, where's your car?”

“Gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? Where is the car?”

“It's gone. I hid it. It's
my
car, and I can do whatever the hell I want with it.” (he chose to forget that it was “our” money that sunk thousands of dollars into it). He set down the spoon and snapped his head towards me. “And think about this,” he said, with his shark eyes flashing, “if I can make an entire
car
disappear, just think how easy it would be to make
you
disappear...”

I had misread the situation completely, so the threat was a double whammy. I blanched at the realization that my life had just been threatened. I turned on my heel and silently walked back to the barn to collect what was left of my security in the world, which wasn't much.

That night, I sent an email to my friends telling them that if I disappeared or died in some strange way, to look no further than Brad. I implored them to dig deeper, because he did it, even if he made it look like an accident.

I also kept tabs on where my girls were at every second of the day. I had my friends keep an eye on them at school, and made sure they were put on the bus. I made sure to be there as they stepped off the bus. I spent my days looking over my shoulder, waiting for the knife to plunge into my back while I was looking forward. I knew that if I ran with the kids, I'd lose them permanently. The state frowns on parental kidnapping, and Brad would make the most of it, so I knew I had to just secure what I could and brace for impact.

Behind my back, on December 4
^th
, Brad had snuck down to the Golden courthouse and secretly filed for divorce—even though he had agreed to go with me after Christmas and file jointly. He wanted to be the one to say
he
filed for divorce. He wanted to control even this. He arranged to have me served divorce papers on Christmas Eve, in front of the children and twenty four other friends and family. To this day, those divorce papers remain the best present I've ever received.

Every year for Christmas, my dad sent Brad airline tickets so we could all join him at his timeshare condominium in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. When Brad found out he wasn't invited this year, he raised his chin in the air and told me that if he couldn't go, neither could the girls. I rarely got see my dad, and we were excited to get away. But two days after Christmas, Brad told me that if I took the girls on vacation, he'd wait until I got to the airport, then he'd call the police and immigration and tell them I was kidnapping my children to Mexico. He said he would never give permission for me to take this annual trip with my dad.

This announcement turned into an argument. I rarely engaged in an argument when the girls were in the house (it was winter break), but I told him what I thought of him, and he was flabbergasted that I was actually talking back to him and standing up for the rights of my two girls to go see their grandfather. Not to be outdone in showing he still had control over me, he stood at the top of the stairs, narrowed his eyes as he sneered at me, “You're out of control. I'm taking the girls, and I don't know when, or if, you'll ever see them again.” He turned and yelled down to the girls in front of me, “Girls, pack your bags. We're leaving. Right now. Say good-bye to your mother...”

The blood drained from my face, and I instantly flashed back on my mother-in-law telling Brad's brother to take his daughter and run, and I believed there was a very real threat that if he took the girls, I'd never see them again.

“You are not taking the girls anywhere,” I said, shaking. “I'll call the police if you try.” I was willing to die, get arrested again, or take a beating, but Brad was not taking the girls.

His face twisted as he laughed, “Yeah, right. Ha. You know as well as I do what will happen. You will be arrested again, just like last time. I'll make sure of it. I know damn well you're not calling the police. God, you're so lame. Just shut the fuck up. I'm taking the girls...”

I walked to the phone and dialed 911.

The police arrived as Brad was still downstairs trying to get the girls packed. I told the officer what was happening. Brad came up and tried doing what he'd done seven years earlier. This time, these officers were from a different generation, a different town with a different agenda. This time, I was the one who called and, for better or worse, the one who calls gets the initial benefit of the doubt.

“Oh hi, officers. I'm so glad you're here. This woman is a whack job and totally out of control. She's done this kind of thing before. She has been arrested for assault and domestic violence. You can go look it up. She is probably just in need of a tune up. Got room in the back of the squad car today?” Hahaha.

The officers said that no, actually, what
he
was doing was wrong.

Brad just stood there, miffed that these two uniformed officers didn't back him up. His ploy wasn't working and he was a bit confused. He tried talking man to man.

“No, you don't get it. She's done this kind of thing before. I just filed for divorce against her, so she's all pissed off and out of control.”

The officer looked at me and said, “Well, actually, she looks like she's pretty much in control, and she has a legitimate reason to be upset. Brad, do you have someplace you can go for the next few days?”

“What?! No, way, I'm not going anywhere,” was his indignant response.