Anvil Ranch

it's a beautiful venue

Today is the one-year anniversary of the date that the court, according to my attorney, “noticed” my status as a divorced person. There are a lot of important dates here: the date of separation, which should be March 18, 2019, the day that I asked my then-husband to meet me at a therapist’s office, where I told him I didn’t think he loved me anymore, if, in fact, he ever had. The therapist agreed, very validating. It should be March 18, but it’s technically May 1, because between March 18 and May 1 there was some extremely slim possibility that we would reconcile — a possibility that I didn’t see but that some older, wiser people encouraged me to consider. 

May 1 is the legal date of separation that I put onto the petition for separation that I would later file in July. We’d had some phone calls, and I’d asked him to have no contact for thirty days so I could stop feeling that horrible way I felt every time we talked. May 1 was the end of those thirty days. I was in Union Square when we talked, and I remember shouting on the phone that I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t just let me go. It seemed like he had a flowchart of answers, and after I said I didn’t want to reconcile I heard a clicking, like he was pressing an arrow on a keyboard to go to the next slide, and then he said something like, in that case you owe me X amount of dollars over Y years. It was clear he’d been given a script. I had just moved to New York and wanted to pursue a New York divorce, which I thought would be more favorable to me as the sole earner, but I would have had to have lived in New York for two years in order to establish jurisdiction. The very nice, very expensive lawyer with whom I consulted in New York told me there was absolutely no way I could get around the residency requirement and encouraged me to file in California. Figuring that out took about a month, as did signing everything and making sure everyone in California was filing in the right county. I got divorced in Alameda County, even though I got married in Sonoma County, and my lawyer was in San Francisco, which is in the County of San Francisco.  

Because of logistical nightmares I was only able to file for legal separation, not divorce. By the time I wanted to file, my then-husband had only been back in California for a few months and for some reason I needed to wait to file for divorce until he’d been there for six months. So I filed for legal separation as soon as I could, in July of 2019, and then planned to file an amended petition for dissolution of marriage three months later. I looked through some emails from July 2019, and I thought that it would take six weeks to three months to sort out a separation agreement and get divorced. It took a year and a half. 

When the judge noticed my divorce, on September 29, 2020, aka one year ago, he backdated it to March 30, 2020, which is when my attorney had filed for a default judgment. We’d filed for the default judgment on March 30 because we hadn’t been able to come to a settlement agreement, which we’d started trying to work out as soon as we filed for legal separation. The divorce filing, the amended petition for dissolution of marriage, actually happened on Monday, November 11 of 2019. I went to see Marriage Story at the Prospect Park Nitehawk , by myself, and came home to an email with a PDF of the amended petition for the default judgment of the dissolution of marriage that my attorney asked me to sign. I signed it. 

Between November 11th 2019 and March 30th 2020, there was a lot of back-and-forth about how much money I had and how much of it I would need to give to my ex-husband. I got Covid in late March of 2020 and then in one week every single consulting client let me go. This proved fortuitous because I could not even afford rent, much less the eighty thousand dollars a year for five years that he was asking for. I sold all my furniture and moved into my mom’s apartment. 

The value of my literary career was on the table; my then-husband thought that I was a secret millionaire. An agent I knew through a friend evaluated my career and said that it was over, that I would never earn out the advance on my first book, and that it would be very hard to sell a second. Even though the letter said what I hoped it would say, it was still very hard to read it in black and white. My uncle died in the summer and left me an inheritance, the entirety of which we offered to the opposing side on August 27, 2020. On September 6, a Sunday, I was out for a hike in the woods near New York when I checked my email and saw that my attorney had sent me a letter written on September 3rd agreeing to my offer. I signed the amended judgment when I got home and my attorneys filed it and on October 5, 2020, I got the email that the court had noticed my status as of September 29th, approving my divorce on March 30th. 

I got married at Anvil Ranch on March 28, 2015. It’s a beautiful venue. I recommend it.