“We did it, we won!” Samantha whisper-exclaimed in the hallway of the courthouse. Her now-ex-husband – me – had left the courtroom before her, but made a stop in the restroom on the way out, so she didn’t notice when I came into the corridor behind her. I kept my distance, not wanting to see her smug, acne-covered, horseface glaring at me, as she’d done at all of the court dates leading up to today.
The drive took several hours and I left early to be sure to get there by eight in the morning. Typically, I was the first through the door in the morning. I’d find a seat by the window in the third-floor lobby and spend thirty or forty minutes writing in a notebook. Brainstorm ideas. I typically go through a couple of composition-style books per month. Sometimes good stuff, sometimes garbage. It didn’t matter, it was how I wanted to spend my time – writing. A change of venue would be preferred, but if I had to sit there, I may as well be doing something productive.
Writing was something that always created conflict between us. Samantha wanted to be an author. She’d spend hours talking about writing a book or starting a business or going back to school, but never did any of it. I wrote my first book in about a month – mostly on breaks at work. It wasn’t a masterpiece. In fact, it was a poorly-constructed vocational guide. But I did it. And Samantha resented me for that.
She resented me for a lot of things.
When we first met, it was impressive that she had a lifetime of experience riding and training horses. Yeah, she was only in her mid-twenties, but she showed me photos of her on a horse as a toddler. She had a dozen horses right outside of her bedroom. I’d never spent any time around horses, despite feeling an inexplicable natural connection to them. As it turns out, time is not the only factor when it comes to experience.
Instead of the ‘do-it-my-way’ method that most people use when working with animals, I enjoy just being around them, part of the herd. When her horses got excited and ran over when they saw me, she resented me. When an entire herd of cattle followed me across her mom’s ranch and into a corral because I “asked nicely”, she resented me. When I jokingly called myself a “horse whisperer”, she resented me the most.
I didn’t like the way she treated animals, but it was somewhat better than the way her family and friends acted: punching, kicking, and even hitting animals with a truck to make them move. We’d have a lot of conflict over that during our relationship, too. I’d resent her, and her family, for exploiting animals for profit and not providing them with a decent life before turning them into burgers. It was one of the red flags I should have seen early on. There were a lot of them – and I certainly noticed – but for some dumbass reason, decided to ignore them. Or embrace them.
When I met Samantha, I was in a dark place. After a year of self-destructive behavior, I was ready for something ‘stable’. Whatever that means. Compos mentis, she was not. After a year of dating abusive, alcoholic crazies I’d met online, Samantha seemed even-keeled enough. Turns out she was the queen cuckoo-pants. Or ‘princess’ if she had it her way.
It wasn’t a few weeks into our relationship when she decided to move in. I had a whole four-bedroom house to myself, so she presumed I needed someone else there. Not that she moved into an empty bedroom. The whole moving-in thing wasn’t a big deal. I’ve had people move in sooner than that before. The problem was that she’d never give me any space to work on my own projects or hang out with friends. She’d have meltdowns over not getting invited to band practice or role-playing night, where she’d have nothing to do but sit and be ignored, anyway. Sometimes she’d even get jealous when I cuddled with the dogs. My all-time favorite was when she went back five-and-ten years on my Facebook posts and got jealous of likes and comments from other girls. I ended up deleting some of my best writing over that. Saving it would have been a better plan, but it was five in the morning and I was tired from being up all night over this particular ‘issue’. Samantha had gone through my PC and found photos of my ex-girlfriend (actually, they were of the old Studebaker, she happened to be in them), having a similar reaction to my ‘saving’ photos of her.
Samantha’s helicopter-girlfriending resulted in her picking on everything I did or said and telling me that I need to behave in a different way. It was comfortable, I guess – my mom was the same way. Still is, but I don’t talk to her anymore. Samantha expected me to act as an indentured servant to her, her mom, her aunt and her grandmother. Any time I balked at her orders, she’d threaten to, “find someone who will.” Hindsight being what it is, I should have called her out on it. I did a couple of times, later in our relationship, but it didn’t stop her threats, insults and, eventually, abuse. I was an “asshole”, “loser”, or “piece of shit” any time I didn’t anticipate her desires or agree with her opinions. Again, comfortable.
Oblivious to the irony, anytime one of her redneck family members would act like a douchecanoe, she’d tell me, “that’s just how they are.” Addressing one of her many flaws was a futile endeavor. She’d say that I needed to accept her how she is. Regardless of how egregious the act, there was no guilt. Excuses often consisted of blaming others – especially me. After we separated, I’d learn about narcissism and things would make a lot more sense. Learning about my own autism in my mid-thirties had the same effect. It’s not that a diagnosis makes someone one way or the other, but studying patterns in behavior helped me learn to cut out the toxic people in my life.
Perplexingly, between calling me an asshole and threatening to break up for some imaginary dream-guy, Samantha put heavy pressure on me to get married. Even in those early weeks, she’d pressure me for a ring, despite still being married. Her first marriage only lasted one day, technically speaking. According to her, they never lived together or stayed under the same roof after the wedding night. She’d only been married two months when she moved into my house.
She told me that she never loved Ethan, her (supposedly) first husband. She’d only ever lived with her mom, aunt and grandmother. With the exception of Samantha, they were obese and slobbish. Not only did they have a big house that was covered in urine and feces of various animals and falling apart with half-finished remodeling projects, but a two-hundred acre beef cattle ranch. Samantha confessed that she only married Ethan because they wanted someone to work for free on their ranch. Apparently he got as far as repanelling the barn in preparation for their wedding before he caught on.
Of course, he was certainly made the same promise she would make to me as she begged for an engagement. With her family being old and in poor health, she was due to inherit the ranch and house. For anyone who dreams of living closer to nature, this is a compelling offer. She’d leave out the part where, due to a series of legal and financial blunders by Susan, Samantha’s mother, the ranch was actually owned by four passive-aggressive, definitely-not-feuding, siblings.
Neither her ex nor future husband were rich. They were, however, hard workers. Sometimes golddigging takes on other forms. Mud-digging, as it were. Between her personal volatility and that of her family, Samantha knew that nobody could tolerate her for more than a couple of years at most. Even her father and his family wanted nothing to do with her. He moved halfway across the country just for some space. Outsiders might have been appalled when Samantha had an hours-long emotional outburst about the way she expected to be coddled by her father. Her step-mom and half-siblings didn’t bat an eye. This was normal for her. She was thirty.
After several months of pestering for a proposal, she finally got one. For Samantha, that wasn’t good enough. It was less than twenty-four hours before she began a mantra on getting pregnant, “before it’s too late.” She’d never held down a regular job, lived on her own, or even learned basic adulting skills, like how to clean up after herself. Her now-fiance didn’t think she should have kids until establishing herself as a relatively-independent individual. I suggested we should buy a house before having any kids. After all, at this point we were living in an RV on the ranch so I could be working on the property whenever I wasn’t at work proper. Samantha argued that the hundred-fifty square-foot trailer was plenty of room for a family. We already had six dogs.
Crisis temporarily averted. Or so I thought. I wasn’t big on weddings, but figured if we were going to do it, it should be fun. I wanted to have a Halloween carnival the following April. She wanted to spend the least amount of money to maximize gifts received. In the end, when we couldn’t agree, we ended up getting married on a random Monday in August, only months after getting engaged.
Samantha suggested on Saturday that we go to the courthouse on that upcoming Monday. Convinced that I wasn’t going to budge on the house-kids thing, and knowing that she could never get a house on her own, marriage would be the quickest way to get one. I was tired of working to exhaustion eight days a week between my regular job and the endless list of tasks I was assigned to do at the ranch because, “family”.
I was fine with the courthouse marriage until Samantha invited her mom and grandma. This sort of thing didn’t require an audience, as far as I was concerned. My mother had a meltdown of her own when she found out my brother had a courthouse wedding without her – two-thousand miles away, where he lived. If Samantha’s mom went to the courthouse, I’d never hear the end of it.
This is how a simple courthouse marriage turned into the last-minute, backyard debacle that I’d specifically tried to avoid in the first place. My mom insisted that I invite my brothers and sisters and grandparents. My brother, the pastor, wanted to perform the ceremony. No big deal – just two requests, no religious stuff and keep it short. I specifically asked for the ‘Spaceballs’ vows.
That Monday, when we got to my brother’s house, we were forced to stand up in front of a couple dozen of our closest-related strangers and recite fifteen-minutes each of some Corinthians. At least I was able to take everyone to a local restaurant for the so-called reception. If it had been left to my mother, they’d have rolled sandwiches, lil smokies, and an array of 1970’s apps.
Even before getting home from our half-assed wedding, Samantha was shopping for houses on her phone. I’d saved quite a bit of money over the previous year. It’s not too difficult when only working and then going home to perform servant’s duties on a ranch. The original deal was we were going to each put $1,000 into a savings account every month for a down-payment. Samantha had just received some cash from a family member and was feeling ambitious. After the first month, she didn’t make any deposits. A year later, they were married and the savings was ‘ours’ anyway, as far as she was concerned.
The other thing that started immediately after the wedding was the physical-abuse-in-earnest. She’d always hit me when she got upset. I didn’t care too much – I grew up being hit and had been in more than a couple abusive relationships since. Now that she had me relatively trapped, Samantha felt safe to progress to punching for trivial disagreements and throwing objects, like mugs of hot coffee, at me. Still, this was more tolerable than the gaslighting.
A few months before we got married, I had a seizure while working on the ranch on a particularly hot day and shortly thereafter, began having issues with my short-term memory. This was a golden opportunity for Samantha to practice her amateur manipulation techniques. The thing is, I’d spent an autistic lifetime developing routines and patterns of speech, even before I knew what neurodivergence was. So when she tried to tell me I’d said something that I hadn’t said, I knew she was gaslighting me. Pointing out my rehearsed patterns of speech and behavior didn’t deter her. She’d gaslight the gaslighting, saying she never said what I said she said about what I said.
Surely, she’d learned this from her mother. When Samantha and I first started dating, Susan gave me a beat-up, water-damaged BMW that had been sitting out in the field for several years. I spent a few months fixing it up but, not wanting to put any more money into it, sold it, just to recoup the cost of the new battery, oil and filter, and sunroof motor. Samantha took the money and told me it was wrong to sell something someone gave you, so that money should be her mom’s. Of course, she never gave the money to Susan.
When we moved out to the ranch, I again took on a fixer-upper project. Beyond the ranch itself, that is. Susan had an old Yamaha dirtbike sitting in the garage, not having been run for several years. I fixed it up and used it to monitor the horses and cattle at the ranch. Normally, I preferred to walk, but with gentle acclimation, the animals learned the sound of my approach and began following the motorbike around the ranch. It wasn’t long before Susan reclaimed the bike and sold it, now that it was in top-working condition. Minus the spoke Samantha had broken in a fit of rage.
Those were just things, and I never had much care for things. The fun for me was in learning how to work on different machines. The one that really got to me was Roy.
Roy was a big-ass paint horse that was largely ignored on the ranch, as he’d never been trained and, thereby, was useless to them. Despite being the largest in the herd, Roy was shy and independent. We had an instant connection. Soon, Susan and Samantha dubbed Roy “my” horse and promised to provide tack and saddle from their mouse-infested tack shed. It didn’t matter, I enjoyed hanging out with the horses and didn’t need to ride or train them.
Roy was eager to please and basically trained himself – as most animals will, when spoken to the right way. No saddle was ever provided, but Roy was happy to let his friend sit atop as we wandered the ranch. Unfortunately for us, Roy was now considered profitable and could be ‘flipped’ for more than the $500 that Susan had paid for him, as she’d done with so many other creatures before. When I dared to express the slightest regret at this decision, Samantha simply responded by brushing it off saying that I “never rode him,” as if that was the only value he had. The irony again being lost amongst the twelve other horses that went largely ignored by all but myself throughout the year. And then there were her breeder-purchased herding dogs that had never been trained and ran amok, nipping the heels of horses and cattle indiscriminately. This is simply normal dog behavior, but stands to show the hypocrisy of the people who think that animals should be ‘worked’ to have value, yet neglect the training and care of those animals. The amount of animals that had died due to neglect or ‘accident’ while under Samantha and Susan’s care made me sick.
The particular combinations of insults, gaslighting and physical abuse unlocked something in me that may have remained buried indefinitely. Having spent my twenties and into my thirties drunk and on drugs, I’d effectively blocked out years of childhood trauma. They say you marry your mother and, at forty, thought I was past that, but not so much. Samantha’s behavior was so like my mother that it brought all of those memories flooding back. Fortunately, I’d grown some over the years and no longer looked to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism. This time, I was going to process everything, using it as creative fodder for my writing and music. I even started seeing a psychologist, despite my negative past experiences with inept therapists.
I told Samantha that I needed to go no-contact with my family for a bit, while I processed and organized everything. She wouldn’t agree to that, saying that she always wanted a big family and, thereby, co-opting mine. Despite my pleas to the contrary, she guilted, shouted or hit me into going to holiday and birthday gatherings, which reinvigorated memories of dysfunctional holidays from my childhood. Before the year was out, she’d booked a cruise with my family. A week of being guilted, shamed and made fun of from every direction. My brothers had both married reproductions of our mother as well, so I’d be surrounded by materialistic, manipulative women. This is the furthest thing from a ‘vacation’ I could imagine doing with my vacation time.
Before we’d left port, Samantha was having another meltdown. She was mad that I was texting with my partner from work, Jasmine, when I was supposed to be spending time with “family”. More jealousy issues. Because my partner was a woman, I shouldn’t be friends with or text her. It’s not like I was allowed to have real-life friends. Samantha was especially jealous over our shared interest in serial-killer culture, but when I tried to share this with her, she only responded with disgust. Less at the killers and more at me for what I considered innocuous, morbid curiosity into human behavior.
She began spreading rumors of me cheating with Jasmine to our families, causing my non-pastor brother to attempt to intervene and play peacemaker. My brother’s wife, however, chose to join Team Samantha and helped her send hateful Facebook messages to my one remaining friend. I couldn’t handle the triangulation and disappeared to the piano lounge to get drunk.
I’ve never been a violent or mean drunk. Quite the opposite. Alcohol was often the only way to get me to turn into a social butterfly. Sometime after I went to sleep, though, Samantha decided to get her ultimate revenge. While I dozed uneasily in a single bed on the other side of the room, she did something to break one of her teeth. Pulled it or hit herself, I suppose. I’d never find out. Part of another devious plan to break my brain and paint me as the bad guy. She’d surely chosen to break her tooth because she could point a finger at me doing it as revenge for her chipping my tooth when she threw a metal bit-and-bridle at me. That tooth was already chipped on one side, so it wasn’t a big deal. Now it matched.
Although we bought a house, I was still holding out on having kids. She pressured me daily, but I told her I wanted to save up some money first. At least enough for the first year’s expenses. Since she didn’t work, I suspect she didn’t want to wait any longer and this was her chance to ‘cash out’. By depicting me as abusive, instead of the victim, she could leave without guilt and get her ‘half’ of the assets.
It’s funny how little I cared at this point. I’d lived for at least twenty years with crippling depression and anxiety. Point of advice: don’t share all of your mental health and past with someone in an attempt at transparency. They will use it against you. Time and again. She told me that I had to ‘get over it’ and forgive my family within the next three weeks or she’d leave me. I told her that it takes however long it takes. Turns out, that’s about a year for me, once I’m left alone to actually do it.
Samantha would regularly push me when depressed – yelling at me for being ‘lazy’ on days I needed to rest. It’s funny that she would call me lazy when I spent sixteen or more hours working every day and then wanted rest days, while she spent each day sleeping, browsing social media, and sipping coffee. She also called me entitled for expecting to be treated with a modicum of respect while working for her family for free. Meanwhile, she expected me, her mom, her dad, and anyone else she came in contact with, to shower her with praise and material goods.
For once, she actually held good to her promise. After a month of not reconciling with my family, she moved out. Back in with her mom, of course. Not that much changed. For the next six months, she’d keep calling and texting me daily and would show up at my house unannounced, despite living over an hour away.
My brain problems were getting worse. According to one of the many doctors I saw, I was having mini-seizures where my memory, vision and balance would stop functioning properly. Sometimes these episodes would last for days. Samantha made it clear when she said, “I’m not going to be your caretaker,” that her marriage vows were one-sided. Much like all of our relationship had been. She told me that I needed to hire someone or get a roommate to get me groceries. I was still capable of taking care of myself, with the exception of driving the hour each-way up and down the mountain to get weekly supplies.
The following month, when I did get someone to do this, she freaked out. Probably because it was another woman. Living in her house. Drinking from her coffeemaker, as she once said. I rented out a room for cheap and got necessities delivered, proving I didn’t need her to be my ‘caretaker’, I guess. Now officially the queen cuckoopants, Samantha began hanging around the neighbor’s house so she could spy on the goings-on. Getting regular text updates from them as well, no doubt.
I was happy to sign the divorce papers. They dissolved our marriage ‘as-is’. I kept the house and the furniture and crap I’d bought. She had nowhere to put all that stuff and couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage, anyway. Wiping my hands of the last few years felt like the best resolution I could ask for, considering the abuse and gaslighting. I got to start fresh. Move on. Forget about it, if I smoked enough weed, maybe. Actually, it was additional material to process for my writing. Samantha once told me that I “got so much” from her. I was never sure what she meant. She used me as an indentured servant, ignored my ideas, my needs. I mean, she bought a cheap refrigerator and left it behind when she moved out. I figured all of the tools, shoes, arcade games and other stuff she kept of mine, despite countless requests to get them back, more-than made up for it. I should have billed her for the hundreds of hours I spent trying to help her with one failed ‘business’ idea after another. Podcasts, websites, event planning. I shudder to imagine what I could have done with that time. But I’m not one to focus on sunk costs.
Life went on.
Over a year passed. I processed a bunch of shit. Wrote some books. Made some music. Met someone new. It was a good year.
That is, until one Friday afternoon when I got home from spending a couple of days at my girlfriend’s house to find papers taped to my gate telling me I had three days to move out of the house and “surrender” it – and my dog – to Samantha. Manipulative bitch. She knows I care more about the dogs than anything. And she wanted the house. She would argue that she found the dog, making it hers. The former is true, but she was going to give the dog to a friend of hers. I insisted on keeping the poor, emaciated girl and teaching her to trust again. She became a loyal and trusted partner over the succeeding years. Samantha also knew how much I hated the courts and would do whatever I could to avoid participating in that corrupt, sham process.
Not this time.
An hour later, I got up the mental energy to call the court and file for an emergency injunction. Not only was it impractical to pack up and move an entire house in a few hours, but fucked up. I’d spend the next seventy-two hours preparing my case against her.
The following week, upon arriving at the courthouse, I learned that she had been dragging the divorce out for the entire eighteen months that I thought we’d been divorced. Or, in-process, knowing that California drags ass when it comes to doing, well, anything. Samantha had filed amendment after amendment, claiming she’d had me served with papers. Aside from the papers I’d signed, this was the first I’d heard of it. No calls, no emails. Having lived at my house, she surely knew that there was no way to physically hand me papers, being fenced and gated, several acres from the road. She could have had one of her neighbor-comrades give them to me, but then I would actually know what she was up to. By the time I got to the court, the judge was yelling at me for wasting his time.
This judge, “honorable” and benevolent, knew everything about marriage, the law, social media, the internet, and any other topic that was brought up. He was as irrelevant and misinformed as any other seventy-year-old politician. The one thing he didn’t seem to know about was the particular scam that Samantha and, presumably, her mother were running.
I have a hard time believing that. Before he lost the election to become a Madera County judge, he was a slimy divorce attorney. There’s no doubt that he ran this exact scam many times himself. In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind that he was in on it with Samantha. He listened to Samantha’s lies about me with concern for her and disgust for me, but wouldn’t even allow me to speak or present any evidence to the contrary. This is typical, and I expected it. In case you’re wondering how someone can lose an election so miserably and still end up a judge, he was appointed after another judge ‘retired’. I should mention that he was a cop before he was a scumbag divorce attorney, if that gives an idea.
I did file a complaint against him with the judicial board. I’ve never been a Karen, but have recently taken to writing to politicians and oversight bodies about particularly disgusting behavior by public figures. Everyone should do the same. Otherwise, we just keep the status quo. We keep the status quo anyway, but maybe if enough of us do it, there can be some change. Oh, idealism, how I missed you.
Despite all of the evidence being in my favor, I was never able to present it and ended up conceding to most of her demands, including selling the house and giving her a majority of the profit. Mostly to shut up Judge Fascism and get it over with. I still didn’t care. I got the dog and never have to go back to Madera County or see Samantha or her grotesque, dysfunctional family again. Or mine, for that matter.
That’s why, when I heard her tell her mom that they’d “won” as she was getting into the elevator, I just laughed.