Untitled

I have made no secret of the fact that I am divorced. I still love the woman who divorced me, which makes it very, very painful when things happen as a result of the divorce that cut me deeply.

The divorce happened in 2015. I did not want it. I tried to do whatever I could to stop it, but my ex was insistent. In retrospect, it was probably for the best that our relationship as it had been ended. I needed to come out of the closet, let my egg finish hatching, and address my own mental health, which has never been good. She is stuck in the comp-het world of Mormonism. Obviously, these two things are not supportive of each other.

During the divorce, I agreed to pay a certain amount of child support, take on certain parental responsibilities and parenting time, and cover various insurances any growing child needs: health, vision, and dental. At the time, I was working a pretty good job, the most per hour I had ever earned in my life, with copious overtime available. I was always on the lookout for better, but my job search skills have never been stellar, and I was in the middle of trying to make a career change. I had come to recognize that IT had become a boys' club, and I was never going to be treated as a fellow professional as a trans woman coming out in the current climate.

Consequently, I suffered a rather severe career setback in terms of climbing positional and experience authority, which meant the amount I could earn per hour was cut back. And then there was the fact that I was transitioning from man to woman, which has its own problems when it comes to equal pay. And then there was the fact that trans women are on the bottom of the barrel when it comes to equal pay. It was a pretty bad combination. That I was able to earn as much as I was per hour, given the circumstances, was remarkable. But I lost that. My career change goals meant I had to take a pay cut when I took my next job.

I started seeking ways to eliminate some of the more egregious expenses. The job I got was through a staffing agency, and by this point my ex had managed to start garnishing my paycheck, which actually worked out just fine. I don't think I was ready to sit down and face the finances after twelve hour days at work and still make everything balance. The garnishment made sure the child support payments stayed current for me.

Part of that process was that the state would reach out to every employer I started working for, tell them how much needed to be garnished, and specify that I had to be enrolled in certain benefits packages so my daughter would be covered for health insurance. The challenge was that my kiddo is autistic, and in Arizona, if you're diagnosed autistic and under eighteen, you're automatically enrolled in the state Medicaid program, AHCCCS. So her health, dental, and vision were already covered, better than I could have provided through work at the time, and still comparable to what I have now.

When I found that out, I started pursuing it. She's covered for insurance until she's eighteen, as long as she's living in the state. Can we get the parenting plan or the decree modified to reflect that I shouldn't have to pay for insurance that's already being provided? But because my legal name was a man's name, and my birth certificate and driver's license both had an M on them, I was treated like a deadbeat dad trying to escape his commitments. Every time I tried to ask someone if this could be fixed, I would lead with, I cannot afford this. The insurance program I've been put on, combined with the child support payments, is putting me at poverty level. I can't afford rent. And nobody would listen.

I managed to keep that apartment for a year. But the perfect storm of everything combined made me homeless in 2019, for almost six months. During that time, the van that was my temporary house had problems with the cooling system. Around month four or five it blew out, and while I was trying to fix it, I experienced the worst pain in my life and still have the scars from the scalding burns.

By the time I got an apartment again and a job that paid better, I was so terribly depressed that I still have flashbacks in the middle of the day to being homeless, injured, in pain, and not sure if I'd really be alive the next day. My ex is not the person responsible for all of that. The system is almost entirely to blame for how it played out.

I do not want to take that out on my child, I don't want to take that out on my ex. But there have been darker moments, exhausted and struggling and barely functioning, trying to hold onto a job I hated because I couldn't afford any time jobless. Letting somebody abuse me because doing otherwise would have made me the problem. There have been times my darker nature got the better of me, and I blamed people who weren't at fault, including my child, for the situation I was in. And then I'd catch what I was thinking and hate myself even more for it. I've been trapped in that cycle for over a decade.

My kid turned eighteen a few days ago. I didn't let myself think about what that meant. I wished them a happy birthday and moved on. Then I got my first paycheck after the garnishment stopped. I realized I needed groceries, went to set up a delivery order, and started filtering by sale prices, because that's what you do when you're counting every penny. Steaks were on sale. And for the first time in a decade, I realized I could buy them and not feel guilty. I cried for forty five minutes. I'm crying right now writing this.

Finally free. I can make choices I haven't been able to make. I can put myself first in ways I haven't been able to before. I'm not free of any obligation I didn't already have, it's just that the obligation looked like one thing before and looks like a different thing now. Still an obligation. Just a different kind. And I still can't help feeling like I've been let out of prison, even while some part of me feels guilty for calling it that, like I wasn't really imprisoned, like I'd just had obligations to meet.

There are bad guys here. I'm not saying there aren't. Specifically, the people on the other end of those calls, looking me dead in the eye and telling me there was nothing that could be done, that I had to suck it up and stop trying to be a deadbeat. When all they had to say was, you've had a change in income status, here's the form, it results in an automatic recalculation of your support obligation or defers it until you can pay. That's it. That simple. If someone had just told me that was a thing, I wouldn't have felt trapped. I wouldn't have felt like I was in prison. I would have been happy to fill out a form every time I switched jobs trying to get enough income. I would have been able to afford rent. I would have stayed in my apartment. I wouldn't have ended up jobless and homeless.