...nevermind our kids.

INTRODUCTION

I don't know how to approach letting you all know what's bugging me, so I am just going to give you an overall picture.

Let it be know that I am anti-feminist, and anti-sexist. I am positive that men's rights have been severely impeded to the degree that my entire family is harmed. If you disagree with what I am saying, then please don't bother responding because we will NEVER see eye to eye and/or we will end up debating the issue until the thread gets locked.

On a side note, I think I may have hit a gold mine (if there is such a thing in this life which I am SERIOUSLY doubting at this point) in that there are alot of US/UK posters on here. I am from the US and my wife is from the UK.

We have lived back and forth in both places, and no doubt makes for an even more complicated psychology.

I am around 33 years old and my wife is 26. She lost her mother at 21 and her dad at 25. They were only 46 and 50 years old. I lost my best (and only) friend of 15 years somewhat recently, he was only 28.

We have 3 children:

girl (7 months old)
boy (4 years old)
boy (8 years old) non-custodial parent

Like my family, every biological member of her family alienates her to one degree or another especially since we moved stateside (again).

My wife is my second marriage, but my first happy one. My ex-wife decided that it was time to divorce me, and it has been a good riddance. Since that time (mid 2001), every single biological member of my family alienates me. They have all fallen completely silent since that date. My own parents heavily favor my ex to myself under the premise of being able to see the child that my ex and I had together. This is indeed a false premise, because my "parents" refused to partake in any time sharing with that child when I offered it to them.

My "parents" have deliberately said things about my ex over the years to get under my skin. Whenever I counter with the truth, they fall silent and/or we get into a big argument based on smart comments they will make.

At many points in time, I decided to stop talking to them. After months or years, my wife or I felt "weak" and decided to start talking to them again.

As of recently, we have decided to be "cohesive" in speaking with them but still have the same sentiments about them. In my opinion, these "parents" know private things about me which could probably cause even more damage, so we have kept them sort of close. These are things which they learned about us when we started to believe we could entertain their trust. They have a nasty habit of reporting personal details to this ex which cause undue harm on my family. Another reason that we kept them close is that my wife never had grand parents because they all died young to, and with her mom and dad dead, she figured that it would be nice for our kids to have grandparents.

I feel that I have horrible parents. My mother and father aborted my 7 brothers and sisters, and adopted out my older brother (who also alienates myself and my family). For some reason, I lived but feel that my parents are trying to kill me in their own little ways.

I hope that gives you a little insight into my upbringing.

As for the other obstacles we face, they are as follows:

1) No support system whatsoever. We decided to move to Virginia as a middle point between Florida and the UK. We also wanted a somewhat private life. Well we got more than we bargained for. No friends, and no family. We are terrified of letting someone watch our children when required because of the luck we have. I would flip if someone abused my children. Which leads us to.....

2) Chronic illnesses. We have all been getting sick recently. So far it has been with this flu that is going around. One of the biggest problems is that I don't get sick days as an independent contractor
And due to "obstacle 1", if my wife gets too sick to watch the kids I need to take the day off. My boss claims to be understanding, but I don't know if I can trust him. I have resorted to going to work no matter how sick I am.

3) Horrible medical insurance. All I can afford is high deductable insurance, and we have had HUGE medical bills this year. Shoot, I can't even go seek help (if there is such a thing which I REALLY doubt lol) because I will go broke going for 20 sessions that insurance won't cover! At the end of the sessions, I would have probably dealt with someone who couldn't possibly understand me or my simultaneous issues.

4) "Child" Support Harrasment -Federal Student Loan debts....Child Support has suspended my driver's license about 8 times over the past 2 years while I have been paying. They have sent me non-compliance letters, trashed my credit, taken my passport away, and threatened me with jail. It is me who has to spend hours and hours resolving this garbage on a perpetual basis. Guess where I get to resolve it? With phone calls at work. Forget letters, these guys fall silent. If I want to take them to court, guess who gets to pay? Who has the money to take them to court when you are paying "child" support at the same time? If you do, you must be rich. At the same time, I have a huge Federal Student Loan debt which keeps accruing interest at an astonishing rate. Forget about any help with that either. There are no programs for folks who fall outside of the criteria that the government establishes.

5) Horrible commute - I travel 3 hours each way to work. I don't have the luck that other people allegedly have where they can just look on monster and get another job. I can send 100 resumes a week for over a year and get my first interview. I have decided to stop blaming myself for that and wasting time editing my resume every 5 minutes.
I would rather just stay where I am because at least I can pay my bills. Think about it, if I can't pay "child" support, I might as well just go to my local police station and turn myself in. I don't believe that I can sell the house that I bought just 9 months ago because of the horrible housing slump. To complicate this, the DC area is a different animal for housing. I live 62 miles from work and I still live in the DC metro area. You pay mile for mile if you wish to move any closer to the degree that I probably wouldn't be able to move THAT much closer.

6) Other financial problems...Like dummies, we picked the first house we saw because we didn't have the time to look all over and our credit situation is rather dynamic. We have trees all over our yard and the branches are toucing our roofs and our neighbors roofs. We just received a quote of $6500 to remove them. Must be nice for some people. In addition, there are no HVAC ducts upstairs. The inspector somehow didn't *notice* this. Hint* never trust an inspector that your realtor hires. So now we have all these horrible bandaids upstairs for winters and summers until I can obtain an HVAC skillset or have thousands of dollars to have that done.

7) Vengeful ex....Ex has threatened to call the police at random if I excercised my lawful visitation. This was especially hard when I was broke. I mean, if judge dred (aka the police) knocked on my door and decided that I was "guilty" my family would be screwed. Sure, I could turn it around and tell it to the judge (and hire a lawyer at my own expense while simultaneously paying "child" support and making bail).

8) "Friends" dissapear on us. Happened to myself and to my wife all the time. This happened to me years before I met my wife. I'd have to wonder what you could say or do to someone that would offend them so badly that they would never ever talk to again at the drop of a hat. I wish that I had that sort of talent to turn people off like a light switch.

Everytime we get into trouble, we both just jump on the idea of moving to the UK where alot of these problems won't exist.

When we met, we lived in Florida for a while, then we moved to the UK because we couldn't make it. I missed my son too much and we ended back up in Florida. Couldn't make it yet again in Florida and moved to Virginia in 2005. Since then, good things have generally happened in our life financially. However, the support system stinks and we are all tired of being sick suddenly. We have this underlying fear that there is something in our house that is getting us sick. Based on my life's experience, someone will tell us exactly what it is in our house that gets us sick for the paltry price of $3k. It will be the wrong thing, and we will end up broke.

We are FED up, I assure you. Some of us says to move back to the UK. Indeed my 8 year old has a support system in place.

We would need to live with family there again. They are all smokers. We will all get sick. My wife worked so hard at becoming a non-smoker here and all to be subjected to a smoky environment there.
In the mean time, "child" support would either not get payed or would take 100% of our disposable income.

I feel like all I am doing is riding it out until I die, and staying alive in this situation is not normal. After all, you don't hear about many people like me out there. They are either in jail, have a good support system, or are dead.

Do you know what it is like not to be able to cry over any of this?

I sure as heck can't and don't know why.

I wish that I had a good upbringing where I would be told to watch out for. "Baptism under Fire" sure is expensive and God forbid you can't pay in America!