A couple weeks before Sophia was born Kurt and I went to see a lawyer about ensuring paternity rights, drawing up our wills, and creating a trust for our spawn in the event Kurt and I die of spontaneous combustion or we go out on a date without the kid and develop a severe case of road rage and the S.W.A.T. team is required to take us out Bonnie and Clyde style. Anyway, we signed our wills on Wednesday and none of you gets anything so even ask. Although I may allocate a boot to the head to a few special people, one of them being my ex. Sit down this might be a long story.

My ex and I have been legally divorced for NINE YEARS. We parted as friends and didn’t use lawyers for our divorce. We were stupid and thought that because we were parting on good terms we wouldn’t need them at all. Stupid stupid stupid! We agreed on everything as far as who would keep what and who pays which bills. We filled out one of those “do it yourself” divorce packets, filed it with the court, and $130 in filing fees later that was it. The problem is that we had and STILL have a house together. In the divorce decree the house and all the bills associated with it are his, but no where in those do it yourself papers did they have a place for me to write in a deadline for when my name should be removed from the title or the LOANS. We removed each others names from the credit cards we kept and have since sold all the vehicles that were owned by us jointly, but the house, the fucking house is still in my name.

We bought the old 1930′s home as a fixer and intended to uumm fix it up. It wasn’t in bad shape when we bought it. There were a couple highly fixable oddities, but it was livable. Not the case anymore. While we were together, he upgraded all of the single pane windows. He also ripped out all of the cloth wiring, which meant insulating and adding sheetrock as well. It still needs the sheetrock, doors for the kitchen cabinets, siding on half the damn house, but that’s not what makes the place unlivable – oh nnnnooo. It’s the dry rot from not finishing some of the outdoor type projects, the dead 60 year-old tree next to the house that is so infested with termites that they spread to all the trees on the property and the house, and the transients he lets store all their crap all over the place and live there rent free. Now according to our divorce decree the house is his and he has been making all of the payments, so I really don’t care who lives there or what condition the house is in, but my name is still on the title and the loan. That means two things to me. If one of the many people or their kids get hurt in the house of perpetual construction or anywhere in the half acre landfill junkyard it sits on and they sue the owner of the house…that includes me! Also the three late payments to the house affect MY would-be pristine credit.

I’m ex military but he isn’t and we took out a VA loan. I think if he had been military it would have been as simple as dropping my name from the loan through VA. However, the actual loan is not through VA it’s been shuffled off to a mortgage company just like everyone else’s home loans. You may sign the papers at a local bank but they often sell it off to some other company, so the fact that it started out as VA is moot now. I’ve called VA and they tell me to do a “quitclaim deed” – oh hell no! That means I have no interest in the property, but I DO! As long as my name is on the loan and my credit is affected you had better believe I have a very real interest in that property. VA said that I need to go to the mortgage company to find out how to take my name off the loan. I call the mortgage company and they say that HE must refinance and qualify for a new loan, and here is where the big problem lies. How the fuck do you drag an unwilling adult to the mortgage company?! And the really big question how do you get a mortgage company to agree to give a loan to the person who has been making all of the house payments by himself for the last NINE years when he has no actual job? That’s right, legally, on paper, he has no job! He’s paid under the table for construction work.

So sell the house ye may say. Nay says he. We tried that route about two years ago. I brought out my real estate agent (I keep one in my pocket at all times). I gave her full warning about the property before I had her meet with my ex. We set up a day for her to come out and view the place for pictures and a value assessment, and afterwards she privately said to me, “You know what this is right? This is a practice house for the fire department”. I’m not kidding, that’s really what she said. Of course, before she said that she said she legally had to ask me, “Have there ever been any drug ‘cooked’ there?” I really have no idea, but I don’t think so. I was so ashamed to be associated with that property. She knew but I had to tell her anyway, “That is not how I live”. He has made that house THAT bad.

He found a sucker in one of his friends and we and came very close to selling. He wanted to make the purchase without agents and I reluctantly agreed, but he didn’t qualify for the loan. I should have seen that one coming, so that was it. My ex didn’t really want to sell for the price my real estate agent gave. He has put WAY too much money into that shit hole and for some fucked up reason he thinks he can get much more and actually gain a profit from the sale. Across the street from the house is a fourplex that sits on the exact same size lot. I was hoping that she could give a number that he would like by focusing on contractors wanting to build apartments, but the property just isn’t worth it when you factor in demolition of the house and such.

This whole ordeal is what finally ended my friendship with my ex. Actually, it ended when he called me a “stupid bitch”. So enter the lawyer stage left. When Kurt and I first talked to our lawyer about getting my name off this house, he made it seem like something definitely could be done and that it might not take much at all. After I sent him my divorce decree and we talked on Wednesday – he doesn’t seem so eager for the job. He said I would have to submit a revision to the divorce decree, but the way he said it sounded like that sort of thing isn’t approved often, or it would somehow be very difficult. I didn’t ask for details as to what had to happen to make that happen. He said he would look over the decree again to see if there might be another option.

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