While communicating to me that we are pressing forward with our plans for moving to Minnesota, she was secretly trying to get a job in Alabama. She communicated this to a number of people, including neighbors, and my own family members, all with the same either sentiment or explicit statement to “fuck Brad, because it was her turn to do what she wanted.”

What is so outrageous about this behavior is not just the deception, the impact to the children, and the implications of the kind of person who would go into weekly sessions with a therapist to work on co-parenting and planning our post-divorce relationship (for the interest of the children), but this notion that “it was her turn,” was based on this narrative that she’d made conscious decisions to sacrifice her career for mine.

This narrative was not only factually inaccurate, but she had already admitted to not even believing it herself. This narrative was based around the moves around the country that had taken place during our relationship, and she had built a narrative that she was the victim of these moves (willing or not), only after the fact. She even testified in the emergency hearing that “we moved several times for Brad’s job.” Well, here are the moves that took place:

1. New York: I had already taken a job in NYC when I met Kim at my brother’s wedding in June of 2007. I moved to NYC shortly after we started dating, in August of 2007. and we started a  a long-distance dating relationship. Kim loved coming to NYC, and said that ever since her father moved to upstate New York and she started visiting NYC with him, it had been a dream of hers to someday live in NYC. By the end of 2007, Kim expressed an interest in moving to NYC, but made it very clear that this move was not for me, in fact, she would never make such a decision for anyone else, but especially for a man. Her company had an office in the financial district, and she could move without a significant impact to her job. My roommate’s girlfriend at the time was spending a lot of time at our place, and offered to split the rent of her apartment with her, if she wanted to do that. Kim moved to NYC, but instead of moving into my roommates’ girlfriends’ apartment and splitting her rent, just stayed at my apartment (which I later learned, she never communicated to the woman she had made the agreement with).
2. Minnesota: After a couple of years in NYC, Kim started to communicate that she was unable to continue living in NYC. We were having frequent disagreements, and although living together in a small apartment, had begun to drift apart a bit. She would always blame her moodiness, and any ensuing arguments on the fact that she suffers from major-depressive disorder, and either the cocktail of drugs she was taking to cope with that, or non-sensical reasons like “not being around water,” like in Minnesota. So when our lease was up in April of 2009, Kim moved back to Minnesota, and I stayed in NYC. We continued a long-distance relationship, until it became clear that if we were going to continue our relationship, we needed to be in the same location, and take the next step in our relationship. In July of 2010, I moved to St. Paul from NYC, and started looking for jobs in Minnesota while continuing to temporarily work for the same company.
3. Georgia: While looking for jobs in Minnesota, and finding that the job market was 2-3yrs behind what I had been working on in NYC, my manager left the company and our CIO asked me to take over his position. The caveat being that I would have to move back to NYC, or the Georgia, because the company did not support remote workers, and this role would require that I be in the same location as the team of engineers that I was leading. I told Kim that that I was being asked to assume this position, and that it would mean significantly more money and responsibility, but I’d have to be back in NYC or GA. We scheduled a trip to NYC in December of 2011 for me to meet with the CIO to discuss the position. I rented a room at one of the classic NYC hotels on the upper west side, and went to the meeting with the CIO, where he offered me the job. I told him that I like the sound of the offer, I just have a decision to make because my girlfriend didn’t take to NYC, and I didn’t imagine she’d love the idea of Georgia (given her progressive outlook, and open disdain for the south). When I got out of the meeting, I told Kim that I was offered the job – and her response was “I guess we’re moving to Georgia!” There was no conversation, which was pretty surprising to me. I was going to move, with or without Kim, and if it was without, that would be the end of our relationship. But, at that point, I was OK with that, as moving to Minnesota to take the “next step” in our relationship had not been a convincingly correct decision. I was told that the continued lack of happiness, mood swings, lack of physical relationship, and outbursts (such as the one in front of my brother as a house guest), were the result of a change of the drugs that she was taking to combat her depression, and that it would level off when she and her psychiatrist found the right dosage, but it was an ongoing struggle to find the drug that worked without severe side-effects. Part of me was cautiously optimistic that this “perfect cocktail” was coming soon, part of me would have felt guilty for not “standing by” her as she said she was struggling to find this pharmacological balance that would even out her personality. Those combined were enough for me to just “go with it,” to see how this worked out in Georgia. Despite her very vocal opinion of the south, and southerners, she said that she had contacts at the CDC and it was an opportunity of a lifetime to work work at the “Gold Standard,” of public health, and she had already started conversations with a woman (“Beth”, or “Betsy”), who would likely be able to get her a job there.

 

At some point, Kim had started this narrative that “she had sacrificed her career for mine.” And, as it was allowed to linger in the background for some unknown amount of time, due to a confluence of things relating to how interactions with Kim go:

1. She distorts what you are staying in real-time, trying to shame/guilt you into conceding an argument, not for what you said, but for her reaction to what you said, regardless of whether or not her reaction to what was said was rational or justified.
2. She bombards each interaction with so many things that require correction, that it is impossible to respond to every one.
3. Anything that IS confronted is met with arguments without basic rationale, accompanied with either a guard of a disingenuous accusation (e.g. you’re essentially calling me stupid), or dramatic personal insults of her own, focused on things geared at shaming/guilting:
   1. (e.g. Last argument: Kim: “You have no care for me, because you’re a heartless prick”; (also Kim)”I don’t know how to say this delicately…I don’t like you, I don’t care about your feelings…”), but my use of the word “stupidity” for her previous actions regarding COVID precautions and our daughter was used as a weapon for the entirety of the argument, because I don’t stoop to the level of personal insults.
4. Anything that is NOT immediately confronted immediately gets folded into her inventory of “agreed upon history” and she uses repetition to make those points stick.