I am struggling with chapter three of my book and thought a blog might help me work through some of the issues.

            The chapter covers only four months but so much happened during this short time period it is hard to keep the themes clear. The period began with me moving out of the house and ends with the first domestic violence hearing

Basically, Patricia began to spin out of control; restricted only by the fact that she was getting pretty much everything she wanted.  I was out of the house and Kyle was in. When Glen started to object she got a series of mental health counselors who helped her abuse him and eventually filed child abuse charges against Glen himself. The lawyers billed an average of seventy hours a month, gladly draining our financial resources while we fought about missing knee braces.  Despite getting approximately five thousand dollars a month in support, Patricia applied for and received food stamps and Medicaid. Joint custody was a joke; Patricia did with the children as she wished.

When I finally stood up to protect Glen the period ended with Patricia filing her first petition for an order of protection and initially winning it based on the legal standard that if Patricia felt threatened she was.

I lost time with my children, any say in their future, my home, and Patricia used the legal system and unethical health care providers to launch an assault against our oldest child. Tens of thousands of dollars flew out of the community and into the hands of lawyers who either would not listen to me or believed Patricia’s stories about the millions I was hiding. The Beast Machine made it clear that our free will was gone and they would decide our children’s future based on only a few hours of work and testimony.

Many people, to include Patricia speculate her mental health problems began at this time. Patricia later blamed a health supplement she began taking about six months previously as a reason for her increasingly erratic behavior. This was later supported by a psychiatrist after a single visit with Patricia.

Mainly, Patricia blamed me for her health problems. An email in February 2002 stated the same themes she espoused to the ‘hit man’ in February 2004 – namely, that I made her sick.

The reality is that, as I have outlined before, the fragility of Patricia mental health was known to all of us before 2002.

We tend to speak of the mentally ill in terms of a single diagnosis. The paperwork surrounding the mental health profession supports this as patients are assigned a primary mental health diagnosis and any secondary diagnosis tend to be dependent on the primary diagnosis. Patricia never proved this simple. Her mental health issues were always varied and expanded after 2001.

Before 2002, Patricia’s primary mental health issues included the inability to distinguish right from wrong, problems with the truth and anger management. Yes, you could roll these up into broader view seeing her as emotionally developmentally impaired. Our children were being raised by a mother who could not mature emotionally much pass the age of twelve.

Patricia’s amoral behavior is demonstrated by her decision to lie about her financial situation to the welfare office, and her lies to protective services about Glen. Her problems with the truth are also contained there but took focus in her lies about me to the lawyers and others. Her anger problems, unless I showed up at a doctor’s appointment, were directed at Glen. He took a lot of heat until we got him out of her house.  All of Patricia’s behavior during this period was in character, despite later assertions.

What proved different during the first four months was how Patricia reacted to her new freedom, as she put it, my inability to set consequences for her. Of course there were consequences, even when she ‘won’ there were consequences.  One of the psychologists later referred to this as ‘Magical Thinking’ Patricia’s inability to see the results of her actions or her belief that it would turn out, magically, as she wished.

Of course, he was looking at this after the magic vanished, but for these first few months, Patricia did seem to be able to accomplish whatever she wished. I was gone and Kyle was there. I paid the mortgage ($1500 a month), her car payment ($500), her credit card and student loans ($1,000), Medical and Dental Insurance ($250) and cash (1200). Despite this, she could plead poverty and get food stamps and Medicaid for the co-payments. I saw the kids only two days a week and despite orders and agreements otherwise, was not allowed to talk to them during any other time. According to the children, physical abuse became more common and ‘imaginative’. She could spend a couple of thousand dollars on legal bills about a fifty dollar knee brace. She could say anything she wished about me and Glen and people would listen. Finally, she could go down to the Courthouse and convince a Domestic Violence Commissioner that because she felt threatened, she was.

Of course it did not last, the next four months saw the tide turn, and Patricia would argue the four months after that resulted in her losing everything – the children, the house, and her share of the money. She ended up addicted to the power she perceived as hers and became increasingly more reckless over the subsequent twenty months.

There is no doubt Patricia believed that if the ‘truth’ came out about me then no one would punish her for having me killed, that everyone would understand, as she tried to explain to Judge Sanchez that she was simply protecting herself.