Armchair Anonymous: Divorce II

0:00Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous. I'm Dax Shepard, joined by Lily Padman. Hello. Today's topic is a heavy one, but I loved it. It was such a wonderful perspective reset. Yeah. I left going like, my God, people are going through some stuff. They really are. Wow. But there's a lot of angles. There's some twists and turns. Yes. It's a phenomenal episode. Yes. Divorce. Divorce stories.

0:39Crazy divorce stories. So, you know, as much as one can, please enjoy Divorce. Hard times come and go. Good times take them slow. My life, I had them old. But one thing you gotta know. I'm looking for shining. Hi, you're Jane. I'm doing air quotes. Hi, how are y 'all? Good old fashioned Jane Doe. Oh, love it. Classic. What is this fun blanket behind you? Who are those people? I feel like I should recognize them. Blink-182. Tom, Mark, and Travis. If I had seen Travis, I would have been able to get it. I was covering him the most, I think. Sure, well, you wanted to be closest, I'd imagine. Yeah.

1:28Now, we have a fake name for you. are we allowed to say what region of the world you're in? Yeah. So first of all, this is not my story. It is actually my parents. Oh, great. Okay. Okay. That'll work. We were in Texas. I'm not going to go any more specific than that. I was 17. I was just starting like my senior year of high school. I'm not going to give my age out either. Just I'll tell the listener from looking at you, I would say you're in your mid sixties just so they have a visual. Yeah. Okay, great. So I remember coming home from school. I was the first one. So I have an older, younger sibling and it looked almost burglarized, but we were missing big furniture items, not just like a TV, but armoires and dressers and like coffee tables.

2:10It was so strange. I investigated parents' rooms, missing a lot of stuff, living room, dining room, kitchen, go upstairs to my room and my siblings. My siblings are relatively untouched. My room had clothes missing and some jewelry. What? Were you afraid that there was a burglar in the home at that moment? No, because we had an alarm system and I was the first one home. I had to disarm it to get in. So I wasn't suspicious of anything. So I get my phone and I call my mom because she doesn't work at the time and it goes straight to voicemail. So I call my dad. My dad picks up after a couple of rings and I said, we got a lot of stuff missing.

2:45Do you know what's going on? He said, yeah, I do. I'm heading home right now. Sit down and just wait for me to be there. And at the time he worked like an hour away. So he comes home and tells us, hey, I was served divorce papers from your mother. I don't know where she is. I don't know what's going on. And she doesn't answer my brother's phone calls. I think I'm blocked at this point because I'm going straight to voicemail. I don't know what I did. Did you sense this was coming? Like, were you surprised to hear this? Or were you like, yeah, they've been struggling? I was surprised. Let me backtrack here.

3:11My dad's job is kind of important in this matter. My whole life, he is military. He was active duty up until I was like maybe six. So he settled down and went reserve. So he's still technically military. 9-11 happened. He went active duty. So he was doing tours out and about, not really home as much as he was. That took a toll. And there was a lot more free will because my dad wasn't home. People were lonely. Yeah. And so we get like a visit from an estranged uncle of ours. And this uncle has been in and out of prison. There's a reason we haven't met him. On your mom's side or your dad's side?

3:46My dad's side. And this is prior to the divorce papers. And so we get strange visits from him. And he's like, yeah, I'm your cool, fun uncle. By the way, really quick. That's such a trope in TV shows, isn't it? Cool fun uncle comes. He's got some prison records. Yeah, he's a convent. And then we get a lot of story out of it. This is high to Facebook as well. So we started doing investigating on Facebook. We started reaching out to people, seeing what's going on. Friends, she reached out to friends from our old town. Lots of random connections we're trying to make here. Can I also ask, how old is she at this moment?

4:15She's probably 47. Okay. So all fours. So we find out that she had moved to an area that we have our only one estranged uncle again living. Oh, my God. Dad's brother. Oh, my. Dad's brother. I knew it was going to be bad when he showed up. Me too. Yeah. We found out she's living with him. Oh. And there had been a years-long affair with my dad's brother. Find out he had, like, warrants out in the arrest for Texas. So we're bringing someone who's not very safe around our kids. And then they get married. So she's not talking to you at all? That's a no. There was an olive branch extended later on. Before we get to the heartbreak, because this is heartbreaking.

5:01But I just want to say as a rule of thumb, if you have an affair and then you leave your spouse, you don't get the furniture. Like when dudes do this, they're like, yeah, take the house. I fucked up. Especially when you just up and leave. Exactly. Not just like your spouse, but like also your children. Well, let's be clear, not to disparage, but they stole jewelry from their daughter. Well, technically, it was gifted from my mother. Yep. Repossessed. The jewelry she gave you, she took back. So this is the type of people we're dealing with. So I'm not surprised they took the furniture. Yeah, I just wanted to do a PSA, which is if you do just walk out on your family, you don't get anything.

5:41Yeah, probably leave this stuff. So they got like a moving truck to get this armoire. I mean, this is crazy. Yeah, you guys went to school and they got going right away. Yeah, it was a plan. Yeah, and I always joke, my Jerry Springer story, RIP. Oh, yeah. They're no longer married. I will say that. At that point, my mom was my step-aunt and my uncle was my step-dad. Oh, wow. Yes. That is so weird. But they didn't come around when they were. No. And was it your dad's older or younger brother? Younger. By like a good, almost two decades. Oh, wow. Did your dad have any fantasies of going and beating the shit out of him or anything?

6:26I'm sure. I mean, military background. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. This is not nice. I forgive and forget. Honestly, I have a newborn son and I want my kid to know both his family's apologies. had been made and the legwork is there it's just in the process has she ever offered any kind of explanation like yeah i really lost my mind or i was struggling it was a lot of pointing fingers a lot of blame not really like accountability wow so mom moved the furniture out while you were at school and got together with dad's brother i want to blame it on perimenopause it doesn't sound like we can. I don't think it's bad.

7:11I wanted to, too. That's why I asked her age. I don't think it's bad. And then I said all fours, which is really. Yeah, you really put that. It's explicit at that point. Yeah. Yeah. You made it clear you thought it was perimenopause, but no. Well, maybe all I could hope for you held your baby. He's nine months. Hey, congratulations. Yeah, congrats. Thank you. And then, too, I hope you have the moment I had, which led to an enormous amount of forgiveness of my father, which was like, oh, I thought I was the victim my whole life. And soon as I had kids, I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. To miss one day of these girls' lives would be the biggest heartbreak I could have.

7:48And I was like, oh, my God, no. He was the victim. He paid the price. It's much worse to not be able to be a part of your kid's life than vice versa. Absolutely. Thanks. Y 'all have a great one. All right. Take care. Bye. Hi. I'm in quotes. This is Seth. Yes, this is fake name Seth. And let me just quickly ask, how do we come upon Seth as a fake name? I'm always curious. Is it like a name you may have always wanted? In a way, yeah. It's a name that I heard from where I come from. And a friend named his child Seth. And I was like, oh, that's a cool name. I kind of had it in my back pocket. Okay, now I don't want to offend you, but I'm going to guess Irish.

8:25But again, I'm a little fearful you could also be Scottish. Are you either of those? Close, like in the middle. I'm English. Where? Oh, you're English. Okay. Classic, standard. I've been Americanized or Canadianized for the last 20 years. So you have a little bit of a mesh. Okay, so you have a divorce story. I do, yeah. It's not one thing that happened on a day. It's a few stories that happened over the course of the last year. So my ex, we'll call her Karen. That doesn't feel fair, but okay. It may seem fair at the end. Okay. You can judge later. I separated from her last February, so a year and a half ago.

9:06To set the stage a little bit, about five years before we separated, she cheated on me with one guy at first, which I found out about after about a year. And then there was another two guys after that over the course of time. You know, I stayed there for the kids and to try to make it work, but we just argued too much. It didn't really work. Last year, it's like I'd had enough. It was time to separate. My job and my schedule kind of keeps me away. So it was hard to leave her when I felt like I wanted to. I worked 28 days away, 28 days at home. So I worked for the Coast Guard in Canada. Oh, cool.

9:38Cool job. Now in August last year, I had separated from her for six months at this point. I was living downstairs in the basement suite that was kind of unfinished, but that's where I was sleeping down there. We'd play happy families when I was home, pretend to be a family essentially for the kids' benefit. But her and I were separated. and August last year I was away on a trip actually took us down off the California coast for like a research trip we'd been arguing on and on for the whole trip it was like a week before I came home I'd had enough mid-argument one time I said I just can't do this anymore I want a divorce this escalated I finally got home I told her yeah I want a divorce I want to move out and she just started losing it she can't contain her anger anymore like a red rag is to a bowl So she gets red mist and she just can't have any rational thought.

10:28She goes crazy and just starts lashing out, punching, kicking, physical attacks. So over the course of the first week after being home, she would almost on a daily basis after the kids had gone to bed, come down, argue, lash out, fight, try and hit me. I would try to restrain her so that she wasn't hurting me. But she's only five foot two and she's really strong for her size. She's like a Tasmanian devil when she gets going. So really hard to like stop her from hurting me. I don't want to hurt her. Yes. One particular night, I got away from her, closed the door to the basement suite and she kicked the door in.

11:03And I just stood there and she ran towards me, jumped on me, legs around my waist, arms around my neck and bit my ear. Oh my God. Like sunk her teeth into my ear. Mike Tyson style? Yeah, Evander Holyfield. Oh, Evander Holyfield? You're the Evander Holyfield. She's Mike Tyson. I felt like that. That image went right through my brain at that point. But I tried to get her face away from mine and it felt like I was going to rip my ear off because she wasn't letting go. I put my finger in her mouth to try to like force her teeth apart. And I managed to get her off me and to try to move her away from me.

11:37And I got my bag, which was already packed at this point, threw it in my car and went upstairs. The kids were awake and I told the kids, my ear's bleeding. I'm sorry, kids. I don't want to argue with your mom anymore. I'm going to go stay at a friend's. I'll call you tomorrow. Everything will be okay. And I left. And that was the last time that I lived with them. Now, really quickly, did it ever cross your mind to call the police on her? It did. But some of them are children. It's not fair for the kids to not have their mom there. She's actually a good mom. She's not like that with her kids. It's really just me.

12:10So I didn't want to have her taken away and have a police report or her go into the system or have the kids taken away from us. It would be hard for me to go away to work. I would have to change everything to be able to be home. So I ended up moving into a friend's place. And actually that happened on my birthday when she bit my ear. Oh, happy birthday. Little side note. Yeah. Few weeks after that, I'd been gradually gathering my stuff from her place. And we'd argued at one point when I had a car full of stuff and I drove away and she lost it again. She put everything out on the side of the road, spare tires for my car, a couch that I was going to have, like a bunch of my study books from school, boxes of stuff, and just put a free sign on it.

12:49Oh boy. I managed to get some stuff back, but she's just trying to find any way to hurt me. But then her brakes went on her truck, so she needed to fix her brakes. Didn't want to pay for it. She acts all nice. I order the brake parts. I go to her house. I say, okay, I'll fix your brakes, but you got to like stay in the house or go somewhere else. And the kids are at her friend's house playing. So I got down there. I couldn't even undo the wheel nuts. And she was just in my ear, arguing, fighting, trying to stay and help me with it. But she just needed to argue. She ended up throwing a tie around at her door on the truck, just putting a big dent in that.

13:22I said, okay, I can't do this. I'm out. Get in my car. She jumps onto the hood of my car, dents the wing, sits on the hood and puts a dent in the hood as she's sat there shouting at me through the window. I'm filming her, telling her to get off. She takes a minute, but eventually gets off and starts hiking up the street to go to where the kids are playing. I give it a minute because I'd have to drive past her to get away. It's one road out. I drive up there. She's in the middle of the road. She's just trying to block me. And it's like, oh no, what's she going to do? So I have to swerve one way to make her sidestep.

13:55And then I swerve the other way real quick and go around her. And she punches the back of my car, puts another dent in it, just running up the road, screaming at me. I was filming as this was happening. So this is documented. A couple of weeks after, we'd arranged to take the kids to a fair over in a neighboring town. We were going to meet the kids' friends, friends of hers. I said I would be there because I wanted to be there with the kids. The kids wanted me to be there. So I drove out to meet her. We met just outside of town in a little parking lot. I got there first. She arrived. She didn't want to bring her truck into the small car park where the fair is.

14:25I didn't really want her in my car because I didn't trust her. I wouldn't want her either in my car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reasonable. Was she going to grab the wheel while I'm driving? So she just hops in her truck after arguing with me, leaves me and the kids there and just drives away. Okay, kids, I guess we're going to the fair by ourselves. We start driving down the road to the fair. We're going down a bit of a windy road towards a bridge. She's coming the other way. There's other traffic on the road too. She swerves right when she gets past the car in front of me onto my side of the road. With her kids in your car?

14:56Yeah. Oh. And I'm off the road fully on the hard shoulder. The edge of the bridge is coming up so the hard shoulder stops. So I have to swerve back onto the road real quick to get back. And it's like, what the heck are you doing? Just lost it. get to the fair, park up. She arrives and just tries to play it off like nothing's happening. Next thing is I went to pick the kids up for the weekend. I'd moved into a place of my own by this point. Went to pick the kids up. She'd packed a bunch of their stuff, toys and stuff that they don't really use anymore. They were either going to be given away or thrown out because some of them don't work.

15:29You're just avoiding going to the dump. So I was like, I'm not taking this. She loses it because I said no. Grabs one of the big pictures. It's like a driftwood piece, pretty heavy, over the top of her head and tries to smash it onto my car. I have to grab hold of the picture. She wrestles me to the ground and is like full trying to be a jujitsu wrestler, like punching, kicking, elbowing, biting and everything on the ground. My kids get out of the car. They're upset. They're crying. They're asking us to stop. And I managed to like break out of her grip and run around the car, drive away. I drive up the street.

16:06I pull in. There's a fire station at the top of the hill. Kids are crying. I try to console them. And she has followed me up the hill in the truck and tries to pull in front of me to block me from leaving the car park or the fireplace. Car's running and it's in gear. I just have the clutch down. I just drop the clutch and I floor it and I'm trying to get out of there so she can't block me in because I don't know what she's going to do this time. I spin around and I drive away. Maybe 20, 30 missed calls from her, constant text messages. She did call the police saying I've stolen the kids. She wants to talk to the kids to make sure that they're okay.

16:38I'll give kids the phone. They can talk to her. I'm not going to stop my kids talking to the parents. So she gets on the phone with my kids on speakerphone and she's trying to explain her side of the story like it was all dad's fault. Dad attacked me. You saw. Prime them for when the cops ask.

17:11And now bearing in mind that this is only a handful of the things, this has been constant for the last year. She's preventing me from talking to them, not answering the phone. She's manipulating their idea of me and co-ocing them like, oh, dad doesn't want to talk to you. Dad's too busy working. Dad prefers his life now that he's not with you. Whenever I get them on the weekend, I have to like, you know that none of this is true, right? Yeah. Oh, boy. Right. She's so nuts. Did you have inklings of that during the relationship prior to the divorce? Yeah. She's attacked me before. She actually punched me a bunch of times.

17:45The first time she lost it with the red rage. It's like, you know, when people black out when they're drunk and they have no memory of it. It's kind of like that. She'd done this a couple of times. I had to get stitches in my lip one time. I knew it was there. Every time we argued, I'd have to deescalate everything or walk away. So I knew I needed to get out, but I didn't know how to leave her. To plan this was really hard. And eventually it's just like enough is enough. And coming back to the August trip that I eventually told her that I wanted to get a divorce. On the trip, there was a new deckhand on our ship.

18:18I'd separated from my ex for six months at this point. Been on a couple dates. She had two. This new deckhand had come on and she was beautiful, young. You usually don't get ship workers that look like this. Right, right, right, right. And in that first week, we get on just like a house on fire. And it's surprising like how many things we have in common. Usually you see those things in Disney fairy tales. One day we're talking about relationships, asking if she was in one. I was trying to hit on her. Apparently shouldn't have done at work, but whatever. She said, oh no, I don't really have a boyfriend, but a couple of friends with benefits.

18:52And I don't know what came over me. I was just like, well, do you want another? She was kind of taken aback and said yes. So we decided to meet the next night. Her shift finished at midnight. So we decided to meet at midnight on the bow of the ship. And it was off the California coast, right below the Oregon border. There was the Mercedes meteor shower at the time. Oh my goodness. We took like a yoga mat out, a blanket out, pillows. And we laid out on the bow for about four hours, just watching the meteor shower, talking. For us, the rest is history. We've been together since. It was like, okay, this is giving me enough courage to say that the grass is greener on the other side.

19:28Yes, yes. I'd like to pursue this. I think I'm ready. Well, you got a glimpse of the fact that you could be happy. Yeah, just to not end up with an argument. It's nice to be able to have just a nice, healthy, positive relationship. Yeah. It's been a bit of a tumultuous year. It's still going on. There's probably more drama to come. This is a nightmare. When the cops got involved, that obviously worked out. You're not in jail. She called the cops off every time she'd called them. She's done it maybe three times now. I went to the police station and I asked, can I open a file up without actually you going around to her house and taking her into custody?

20:03I wanted to at least report something, but they said, no, we'd have to go and take her away, take her to the station and question her. And I didn't really want to do that. Well, I'm glad you've documented a lot of this stuff. I think that's very smart. Definitely. I've got a lot of printouts. Oh, man. That's harrowing. It is. Dude, what a story. I'm so sorry you've been going through that. And I'm delighted you have someone that's nice. Oh, yeah. We're actually on a boat right now. We're sailing. Oh, you are. Wow. This meeting just timed in a little sailing trip with our friends. So we're on the west coast of Vancouver Island on their sailboat heading to an anchorage right now.

20:39So that's why I kind of look like I'm a little drunk on the camera. Okay, wow, wow, wow. I hope your sailing trip is super fun. Okay, take care. Thanks, Seth. Bye. You gotta be careful about who you procreate with. You do. This is the theme of this last week, I think. You just don't know what's going on with anybody. Like, people are in relationships like that. Yeah. Oh, it's brutal. Here's Emma. What if it's our Emma? We're just learning she's been divorced. I've known her since she was quite young. Well, that's what's even crazier. Has it been a high school? Cherry shirt? That's a cute shirt.

21:15Oh, and I bought this. I was like, if I ever go on Armchair Anonymous, I obviously have to wear this shirt. It's great. Yeah, it's super cute. Emma, where are you? I am in North Carolina in a little suburb outside of Raleigh. Oh, I just love North Carolina. So you have a divorce story. I have a crazy divorce story. Oh, good. The crazier, the better. So I have to give you a little bit of backstory before we get to the juicy bits. The sad parts are first, but don't stay too sad. And in order to understand why my 32-year-old husband was in a nursing home, I have to tell you these parts. Okay. So April 28th of 2021, I'm a chef.

21:54I own a catering company and I opened a little cafe. And six days later, my 32-year-old husband had a massive stroke. Oh. He had a genetic condition that we didn't know about called vascular Ehlers-Danlos. And it causes your organs and arteries to rupture spontaneously. So in the middle of the night, his carotid artery just blew up. Oh my God. So thankfully he woke up when that happened and he fell out of bed and made noise. And so that alerted me. I was able to call 911. We got him to a stroke center in time and they were able to save his life, but it left him with massive deficits. Thankfully, it was on the right side of his brain and he was right-handed.

22:36And so if you're right-handed and you bleed into the right side of your brain, then most of the stuff that's held there is the function on the left side of your body. So he didn't lose speech or himself or anything big like that, but he was paralyzed on the left side of his body and he lost his filter. Whereas you and I would know not to say things, suddenly he didn't. They were able to stop the bleeding, but they were not able to restore blood flow. So he was basically dead on the right side of his brain. And we went through months and months of rehab and therapy in the hospitals. And in the end of July, they were like, we think we can send him home.

23:18And I was like, I don't know. We have three little kids. Little, little. My youngest was one at the time. I got to just say, Emma, already. Wow, did you go through it? I mean, oh, my God. It was one full year of every morning waking up being like, what catastrophic shoe is going to drop today? So they sent him home and his best friend, Tim, came to live with us and be his caretaker so that I could keep working, keep taking care of the kids, keep taking care of him. Everyone was just treading water, just trying to survive. Obviously, when you have brain injury, the stimulation of a regular household is a lot, but a household with three little kids and we were poor, poor.

23:59I had just opened a restaurant. We had a little house with little kids and it caused him to become really violent. And unfortunately, he hurt one of our kids where I would have been like, oh, my four-year-old said no to me. You need to go sit and time out. He didn't have that filter anymore. And so the four-year-old said no to him and he just lost it. And he didn't have function on the left side. So his right side was way overcompensating. That night, CPS had to get involved because a child had been injured enough that I had to take him to the hospital. The doctors were able to say, okay, we're going to take your husband out of the home and re-hospitalize him.