My apologies.
There is way too much of this sort of griping, this sort of regurgitation of marital misery. No-one outside of the couple’s own circle is really interested in any event. Even the friends of each tire of it quickly: “get on with your life!” each admonishes. Don’t bother with the griping!
Well I did, mostly, and life is lots better for doing so. Marie-Helene’s life is too, as you will see here.
So I apologize for not keeping mum. But the divorce proceeding itself lasted nine years after our separation in 2010. And it’s been five years since the courts finally refused her constant demands for more.
Yet she’s still venting about me to family and friends, and her evident hostility damaged the atmosphere of my sons’ recent weddings.
Note for my sons: the basic rule for divorcing parents is not to share their differences with their children. Or, at least, they should share them as little as possible. That’s why Marie-Helene should not have showed hostility to me at the weddings. In that light, you might want to leave this post alone. Or you might be interested: your call.
What finally moved me to have my say is that silence can look like consent. In other words, my public silence risks confirming her accusations, whatever they may be.
I can’t address her justifications for the resentment that has lasted so long, 14 years already since our separation, because I don’t know them.
But I can recap the key equities of our marriage and divorce. From my point of view, of course.
Theft
First, Marie-Helene and her uncle Alain Berhaut each stole from me early on in our relationship.
In 2000, I had a small legacy from great-aunt Alice wired to Marie-Helene (about 46,000 francs, or $7.5K) so that she could deposit it in her French account. I no longer had an account in France.
When I asked after it a couple of years later, she happily announced that it had already been spent.
I hadn’t seen it. She had just spent it, without bothering to tell me how it was spent (“on vacation,” was her line, although we already were spending plenty of my California earnings on vacations), or even ask me if I was okay with her silent expenditures.
Actually, no, I wasn’t. We were supposed be a community of sorts, working together.
Her uncle Alain Berhaut was reputed to be devout, a good Catholic. He was also wealthy, literally hoarding gold in his local branch of the Banque de France!
The volume of our furniture exceeded what could be fitted into the undersized container that our moving company provided to move it to the US in 1997, resulting in a van load of French appliances and other items (10 cubic meters) being sent to Uncle Alain’s place, because he had free available storage. That was his offer.
Five years later, we visited Uncle Alain during one of our French holidays. Most of the items had disappeared, vanished into thin air, and that was it.
Marie-Helene made light of it, as if nothing had happened. I don’t remember all of what we had shipped there, but it included a Mièle dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, as well as a GE American-style fridge freezer. Only the GE fridge freezer was visible, standing alone in Uncle Alain’s barn, with a big dent in it!
Uncle Alain told Marie-Helene that our crooked moving company, which she had selected, had demanded payment of 5,000 francs from him for the shipment, which may have happened, even though we had paid them that money before that load left our home. They were crooked movers, after all. But Uncle Alain presumed that we were the crooked ones, and had “reimbursed” himself accordingly.
Why did Marie-Helene not tell me any of this? Why did she go along with it? Why did I find my stuff – my mother and I had paid for almost all of it, of course – “missing” years later? That too was theft.
US Immigration
By virtue of our marriage, Marie-Helene obtained a green card and then US citizenship. So did Daphne and Alban, her children from the prior bed (le lit antérieur), as the French say so endearingly.
She did okay there, don’t you think? How much is US citizenship worth for a French mother and her two French children with no means other than yours truly for obtaining it?
Our Inheritances
Timing also played a role in how well Marie-Helene came out of the marriage.
In July 1996, not two years after we moved in together, before we’d even talked about marriage, my mum died. Between my share of her life insurance, family home and various other assets, I inherited about $250K. I spent all of it, except for the 20% deposit on our Santa Cruz home, on Marie-Hélène’s and my blended family.
I moved us all to California in 1997, although at the last minute French courts held Nick and Tom back until July 1999, by which time the inheritance had all gone. We set up home there, which involved the unusual added cost of covering for all of our furniture and personal effects because her crooked moving company took over three years to deliver. I covered the excess of our costs over my part-time income until I found full-time work. To this day, I don’t know where all that inheritance went.
I did ask Marie-Helene to chip in some of her separate property, to balance things out as it were, and she refused, professing great distress that I even made the request. She did loan our blended family some furniture, but insisted on keeping it all when we split assets during the divorce.
That was her contribution to the marriage from her separate property, rent-free furniture!
In late 2008 or 2009, before we separated, her family sold her father’s former darkroom in Paris. She said in court that she received 56,000 Euros from this sale at the time, and would receive 56,000 more when her father died.
Of course, I saw none of it. Neither did Nick and Arlo, my sons from “le lit antérieur.” She was not obligated to contribute these funds to our community, just as I was not obligated to contribute mum’s estate to our community.
I gave it all.
We’d been separated for years before her dad died, and the children were all grown, meaning that the separate property that she inherited then remained entirely hers. In addition to the darkroom, she and her brother split 50/50 two apartments in the 17th arrondissement in Paris, a cottage and other real property in Brittany, and I don’t know what else. I estimate her share of what I know about to exceed $750K, after payment of all debts.
Marie-Helene has a tight fist, hanging on like grim death to every penny.
Add to that difference the timing of our inheritances, and Daphne and Alban benefited from mine, along with their mother, of course, while neither Nick, Arlo nor I received one cent of hers.
Thankfully, Charlie and Alex lost nothing out of this transfer of wealth from the Stock family to their mother’s.
Intimacy
Not the strong point of the marriage.
Except with her own children, Marie-Helene is almost never physically affectionate. Snuggles and cuddles are not her cup of tea. More strangely, she brooked almost no real kissing. That’s an odd rule, compounded by her reticence to talk about the real deep secrets that we all have somewhere.
Early on in the relationship, at our wedding in May 1997 (we got together in around August of 1994), she gave me a telling foretaste of how the marriage would evolve. She and I did not make love at all during the week around the wedding. From when her clever friend Josseline Tonnelier, her maid of honor, arrived to stay with us, until after she left, the marital bed was quiet and dull.
Years later in 2012, after her mother and I had separated, Daphne shared news of her own several affairs with women. A light went on: I began to wonder whether her mother might have been loyal to Josseline at the wedding by not sleeping with me. Maybe in the past she and Josseline had been involved.
Only two years out of the marriage and still utterly miserable, my reflections went further. Excess misery can evoke all sorts of paranoia. Maybe I shouldn’t have let it lead me to this sort of conjecture: was Marie-Helene a lesbian, bisexual, asexual? Did she choose Santa Cruz to settle in when we moved to California because of the town’s then vibrant lesbian subculture.
Maybe I was a beard.
Maybe I need a drink!
Whatever she was, Marie-Helene would never tell me anything or dialog with me about her past, or how she ended up not kissing or cuddling and so unenthusiastic about making love.
Things deteriorated over time, and before moving out in April 2010 I spent almost two years banned from the marital bed, first on a couch downstairs and then in Alban’s former room when he moved into our self-contained in-law cottage.
And she claims that I left her!
Divorce terms
Last but not least, let’s summarize the financial terms of our divorce. Claims from one spouse that s/he was treated unfairly in the divorce, especially in its financial aspects, are common.
The whole procedure was suspect, which may be why it ended after the Sixth District Court of Appeal reversed the trial court, Judge Jeff Almquist, and threw out his final order that I pay yet more spousal support.
Appellate reversal of a divorce court is very unusual in California, especially when the only issue is how much support should be paid. It’s also very embarrassing for the trial judge.
The underlying reasons for this appellate reversal were elaborated by Judge Kim Baskett, who took over the case after the Sixth District had reversed Judge Almquist. She pointed out conspicuous lies, manipulation and deceit from Marie-Helene. About her own job-hunting and earnings, about her rental income from our family home, about her French assets, you name it.
Marie-Helene had hedged and lied her way through five years of divorce proceedings, which is in part why she got so much out of them.
There were other reasons for the outcome, notably my cunning lesbian (we all make mistakes!) lawyer, Vicki Parry, who appeared at times to be working more for Marie-Helene than for me.
By the time the Sixth District had reversed Judge Almquist, I was broke and had lost my retirement savings, which remained in the family home.
While it was gratifying to finally see Marie-Helene treated appropriately by the court for once, that barely altered the financial outcome.
According to her own calculations filed with the court, during the five years from September 2010 through September 2015, I paid Marie-Helene almost $435,000 in spousal and child support, an average of over $7000 per month.
Overall Balance Sheet
The end results of the divorce, our different approaches to our inheritances and their timing are these:
I now own and live in a 1000 square foot cottage in Brittany, a very cheap real estate market, with a small mortgage;
Marie-Helene now owns our family home in Santa Cruz, a little under 3,000 square foot in one of the US’s most expensive real estate markets. Zillow currently estimates the home at over $1.8 million, and last I heard it had a mortgage of under $300K. She lives there while in the US, and rents out rooms year round in the six bedroom property.
She also owns one half of two Paris apartments aggregating at least 130 square meters and one half of two Breton properties (and whatever else I don’t know about – she never did divulge all of her separate assets). Her bother Denis owns the other half.
In short, my current real property portfolio is worth about $200K net, and hers is worth way over $2 million net. She can’t be complaining about the financial terms or consequences of our divorce.
My real remaining gripe, which it’s very hard to let go of, is her sole ownership of the home that we lived in together from 1997 through 2010. She still lives there, which drives me crazy however hard I try to forget it.
She did not contribute one red cent to that house, not one. It was purchased with my inheritance and my earnings. She never earned at all until after we separated, and then very little. My spousal and child support made her mortgage payments and property taxes through 2016!
After the court valued my solo legal practice at an absurd amount – what is the value of a solo legal practice? It has no value! – I didn’t even get back my 20% deposit. She kept all the rest. And after we separated, my spousal and child support enabled her to make significant improvements to the real estate.
So what is her problem?!
Marie-Helene is focused on appearances, and for that reason would prefer that the divorce be attributed much more to me than to her. She looks better that way.
I’m not perfect, of course. I do have a bad temper (although much less since we separated). I yelled way too much at the refs in our boys’ soccer games. I don’t filter as much as she would have liked: witness this blog post! I don’t filter much, period!
I do hurt people emotionally, sometimes a lot, just as they hurt me. That’s life.
She dislikes me so much that at times I have no idea why she ever got involved with me. Maybe on the rebound from Pierre, Daphne and Alban’s dad, because she was tired of living in increasing financial distress with him. That too is life.
But the equities in our marriage and divorce all favor Marie-Helene. She went from being a poor tenant in Paris with an unwanted full-time job, supported in large part by her parents, to being a comfortable landlord in Paris and Santa Cruz, as unemployed as she wishes to be, thanks to me, my assets and 22 years of my earnings.
She gets to live in our home in Santa Cruz or in one of her Paris apartments; I can only visit either city.
And she, Daphne and Alban were given U.S citizenship.
Fourteen years after our separation, I’m so much better off in so many ways. I imagine she would say that she is too: she certainly should! And Alex and Charlie, our joint efforts, are both wonderful young men, for which I think that we can both share the credit.
So why am I still griping about the divorce? Move on, Ian, it’s time to move on!
You too, Marie-Helene!
