I do not tend to hang around online groups where women discuss divorce and custody. Firstly, I do not understand what a NEX, a NARC, a STBX or an OP is because I am old. Secondly, everytime I read a pitiful tale about an unemployed Stay-At-Home-Mom bickering with her ex-husband about alimony and child support and assets, I guffaw loudly and scream I WISH I HAD YOUR PROBLEMS BITCH and then my dog gets scared and hides under the bed.
I enjoy scouring the internet to find evidence that life has shortchanged me. The evidence that life has shortchanged me is actually not on the internet, but in my bank account and 90302 zipcode. Nonetheless, it is more fun to go on instagram then to log onto Chase or gaze out of the window at the concrete skyline. Because I go to USC, and because Sinners is out, I have become broodingly obsessed with Ryan Coogler lately. No one bought me Final Draft. When I was pregnant and locked in the bedroom with my chihuahua while my demented husband prowled around singing Happy Birthday to himself, Ryan Coogler was being lauded for Fruitvale Station. When I was in my third or fourth trial at Santa Monica Courthouse, Coogler was paying off his student loans with Creed. And when I was filing bankruptcy to get rid of my divorce debt, Coogler was marrying his childhood sweetheart. Now listen, I know that rationally everyone’s lives are not as perfect as they may appear (to be honest it’s kind of creepy that he married a girl he met when he was thirteen) but Ryan Coogler’s life has unfurled seamlessly. Mine has burped and belched along, stalled, and resulted in an emergency gastric bypass. Did Ryan Coogler have to get his tits out to get a publishing deal? No, he did not.
I took N and his friend to see Sinners last night. I had no idea why Stack and Smoke were driving around for half an hour trying to find people nor why it was so important to establish this world with an extremely boring back story, but I got into it when the vampires appeared. I don’t look at movies and books anymore and think ‘what a work of genius!’ I think ‘wow, that person had a lot of money and a lot of support and some great collaborators who made a kind of shaky story into something cool’. Afterwards N said something to me along the lines of, ‘It’s a pity no one realizes what a good writer you are, Mom, because you would make some great films. Maybe it’s best if you become a nurse’ and I had a little weep as I drove him and his expensive friend back home after their $56 of movie tickets, $20.04 of candy and $37 of pizza.
Afterwards I called my friend Ariel, who is a mother I’ve been following for over a year. She is the subject of / participant in / specimen for / victim of a documentary project I first started in Filmmaker
’s incredible doc class at USC. Tracy is amazing. More about Tracy later.Ariel and I are attending an upcoming conference where I’ll show a roughcut of our extremely unfinished documentary (it’s unfinished if because I ran out of hard drive space and couldn’t afford a 12TB drive yes I accept zelle). Ariel is also amazing. Ariel is also terrifying. She is one of the most organized and direct people I have ever met.
I thought I was blunt. Let me share with you some of Ariel’s choicest phrases:
“Who did your hair?”
“X salon in Santa Monica.”
A long beat as she looks at me.
“Oh.”
I have a tendency to either not respond to emails, or email a response the minute I get it, something like:
ye sure great to meet you can’t wait to get sstrted
I did this once with Ariel. She called me immediately. “Don’t send emails like that to people as you come across unhinged.”
Ariel is someone who articulates my inner monologue before it has even taken an inhale. I am sure this sounds horrendous to most people, as we all know my inner monologue is loud, abusive and quite cunty. But when you have been navigating an entirely fictional reality where everything you have ever done is dragged into court as evidence that you are an insane, hysterical bitch, when you no longer know if right is wrong, if wrong is right, if black is black or an entirely different color, you desperately need the unshakable honesty and pragmatic truth that comes from someone like Ariel. She is grounding in quite a horrible way. I really like her.
I did something terrible, Ariel. I did something really, really stupid.
Yeah, that was pretty bad.
I have 3247 unread emails in my inbox. My ten years and 72 visits to court are littered across several dead computers, two google drives, three email accounts, an adobe cloud, icloud and whatever-the-fuck cloud. This is not because I have ADHD, but because trauma gives you the symptoms of ADHD (I usually tell people it’s ADHD as trauma sounds very Facebook circa 2013).
One of the most important concepts in coding is decomposition: the process of taking a complicated and terrifying and unwieldy problem, and breaking it down into smaller, bitesize pieces. One of the worst things about trauma is it makes it nearly impossible to decompose anything because you’re futzing around trying not to have a panic attack wondering where you put the Lorazepam and getting fired from a job for being weird.
Before I got divorced, I used to calculate my deductions, save every receipt, cook bolognese from scratch, make green juice and kombucha, knit, do yoga every day and get hair extensions every ten weeks, all the while juggling 3-5 development projects. The reason I do not do these things now is not because I have a kid. My kid is the easiest thing in my entire life. I could put him on a sofa, hook him up with a colostomy bag, an iphone, a feeding tube and come back three months later. As long as the wifi did not falter, he would be thriving. No, the reason I don’t do this wholesome sunshine shit anymore is because I went from being a screenwriter who earned a lot of money and lived in a two bedroom flat in Venice Beach and traveled overseas for work regularly, to being someone who did not have a job, was surviving on benefits, was fighting for my kid in an ongoing court battle, visiting the police station three times a day for custody exchanges, and doing all of this alone with very few friends (I did eventually find a group of British moms who I love to this very day who fought for me during this time. I love you V!!) I did not have a support system. I became a victim at the very same time as I became a mother. Probably before I became a mom. This makes it incredibly hard for me to relate to ‘normal’ moms as I am usually plotting how to dispose of them, and take over their hot-tub-in-the-yard-maid-comes-twice-a-week lives, Talented Mr R style. Not really, but I like to throw a bone to the moms out there who refuse to let me into their stable marital kitchens every time I drop my kid off for a playdate and look longingly at their coffee pot and plead for friendship (rejected)/
One of the other online spaces I consequently avoid are the Momastery types. Glennon Doyle and her sistsers extolling on their difficult lives and the immense challenges of marriage, motherhood and two incomes, incite my rage. I am aware that life is not a competition (it is a competition). GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING PROBLEMS, GLENNON AND I WILL RAISE YOU.
ANYWAY. The point is trauma makes it very hard to summon the kind of strategic thinking that is required to navigate the burden of dealing with a vengeful ex husband. And trauma doesn’t turn you into a very nice person. It’s hard to be friends with a traumatized person. We are quite explosive, unpredictable and quite sad. I would not want to be friends with me.
If you are reading this and are considering leaving a man, especially a man with whom you have a child, please be very careful before you proceed. Men do not take break ups well. Fortunately, if you remove yourself from their immediate eyeline, they tend to forget you exist especially when they can find someone else to either inseminate, ejaculate into, or nod at them with an encouraging smile.
If you have not yet figured out if your partner is an abusive lunatic, the litmus test is leaving that fucker. You have probably had some suspicions in the last few years, but they have convinced the world that you, instead, are problem. You are lucky they tolerate you. You are difficult, unworthy, unstable and host a litany of mental health issues. You start to believe this yourself. You cling to this broken relationship, afraid there is nothing better out there, that you deserve nothing better.
Eventually - and I love that women’s ‘eventuallys’ can be so extreme. “Eventually his sadomasochistic tendences and desire for me to call him sir got a little too much”. “Eventually the seventeen thousand dollars of crypto he spend on the dark web seemed overly concerning”. “Eventually after his third day of sleeping, it occurred to me that maybe that’s where all the Xanax went”
Eventually, you have no choice but to end the relationship.
When you leave someone who has spent a lot of time telling the world that you are the problem, they freak the fuck out. They start throwing everything at you like a cluster bomb: harassment, intimidation, withholding finances, undermining your ability to parent, demanding custody of the kid they have spent no time with, threatening court, spreading rumors about your sanity… they lob all of this at once. When you, wide eyed with adrenalin, deal with one bomb, another goes off, another, another, another. Their intent is to disrupt, destabilize and destroy. It’s quite easy to do this and not break the law because the law is not set up to protect women. It’s set up to create conflict and feed the parasites who rely on the criminal justice system for a paycheck like Judges and BINGO! DIVORCE LAWYERS. OOPS I left my caps lock on by mistake. Ignore that.
Planning to leave someone does not involve worrying about it for months, talking to a therapist and confiding in a few friends. This is what I did, and this is the number one stupidest fucking thing you can ever, ever do. Planning to leave someone means p-l-a-n-n-i-n-g. Asking hard questions like:
How can I survive on one income? (pretty easily as long as I have access to a job. But what happens if I don’t have access to my job? What then?)
Where will I live? (in the house that you pay for, but given the neighbors are his friends, could this be a bad idea? The answer is YES, naive little Rio of ten years ago)
How can I get the support I need? (Ideally you will have a supportive family, and great friends. Otherwise you are fucked because there is no support in the real world. None)
Ariel and I have very similar story. Both of us had seemingly normal husbands who began to lose it shortly before we gave birth. I would even go so far as to say that during our marriage, my husband was dramatically worse than Ariel’s. Afterwards, maybe not. But during, I had a million and one missed chances to get a restraining order and protect myself. I did not do this. The difference between Ariel and I is that Ariel went: fuck this man. He is crazy. I cannot reason with him. I am going all in to rid him from my life.
I went: fuck this man. I cannot reason with him. I will end our relationship and then reason with him, and wonder why he is still unreasonable. Then I will go to court and try and reassure unreasonable man that I am a good person and want to work with him and wonder again why he is being such an unreasonable jerk and super mean and extra abusive. And then when it’s way too late, when it is no longer possible for me to legally rid this creep from my life because once the court makes a decision, it’s done - I am trapped.
But anyway, Sinners. Fun for all the family. Thumbs up. Hit. Shout out to Ryan and his 200k of film school debt. We investing in our artists over here at USC.