Wife panics over money. Regularly.

Wife seems to have a lot of trouble with the financial planning aspect of the divorce.  I suppose this is no surprise ... part of why I am leaving her is that she has no sense of financial reality.  But the other night she was complaining that I had offered her far too little money to live on (that being the exact amount that our state's standard formula calculated).  So I asked her to make a counter-proposal, and we could negotiate it.  "How much do you need?"

"Well, I don't know that because I don't have all the figures."

Silly me, at this point I think she's talking about figures like what I earn and what we pay for the mortgage, so I say, "Gosh, I'm pretty sure that's all in there. Go through it with a pencil in hand, and if you find something missing just jot it down and I'l get the number for you."

"But I can't do that because I don't have all the information I need."

Ummm, ... what?  Didn't I just answer that?  "Right, but that's why I say to jot down whatever it is you don't have and I'll get it; meanwhile you can replace those with X and Y in your calculation and just say that whatever you need is so much a week plus X and Y. But you have to start somewhere. Don't make a huge project out of it. I'm just looking for a rough draft. You should be able to sketch it out in a day or two. If you are spending longer than that then you are going into more detail than you need for a first draft."

"But I can't do that because I don't know what I'm going to need!!!"

At this point she was getting pretty upset, and I was completely clueless why.

"Huh?"

"Well, the house needs all this work and there's absolutely no way I can save up enough money to have it done on what you are offering me. So I have to get quotes on all of that. And I have no idea how much it will cost to hire a gardener, so I have to get quotes on that. And getting quotes on all these things is going to take months! There's no way I can do all that in the 48 hour deadline you are giving me! And what if I have to rush through it so much in those 48 hours that forget one little thing that I really need? I can't come back to you later and ask for more -- you'll just smirk and say I should have thought of that before. And so whatever happens I'll end up losing the house and all of my possessions and I'll be homeless!"

Wow. 

I don't remember quite what I said.  I'm sure it was ineffectual -- something on the order of, "Look, just get started and I'm sure you can get most of it. It can't be that hard."  But I started thinking about what she had said.

I have to admit the part that struck me first was the gardener.  We don't have a gardener now ... so why does she think that she "needs" a gardener?  All I can figure is that she means she won't have me to mow the lawn any more.  Or maybe she means that the garden is all overgrown and the yard is a wreck and she "can't" do any of it herself because of her illnesses and allergies and trick knee, and so "of course" she "needs" a gardener to bring it into minimally-acceptable shape, that being better shape than any of it is in right now.

Except that spousal support is meant only to maintain your existing standard of living, not improve it.  If your current standard of living sucks, spousal support won't change that.

The second thing that struck me was the intensity of the panic.  She is clearly feeling enormous fear, and therefore feels compelled to know that every possibility is covered and accounted for.  But when does any of us ever get that?  Isn't life inherently uncertain?  Isn't the future always unknown?  It is, but that kind of uncertainty has always been "unacceptable" to Wife.  It's part of why she is never able to trust anything or anyone, and therefore (out of a desire to protect herself against the betrayal she "knows" is coming) behaves in ways that make her untrustworthy.  That's another reason I am leaving.

She cannot distinguish between needs and wants -- I mean that not in a frivolous way, as if I were merely trying to say that she indulges herself too much, but really deep down.  She does not have the intellectual tools, whatever they are, to make that distinction.  And I think that somehow she really has no idea how to get started.  She has no idea what she needs or how much it costs.

She also can't listen, because her fear is so great that she is always interrupting.  "No, I can't do this because ...."  "No, that's impossible because ...."  "I'm completely trapped because ...."  Some of this might even be true, but I can't tell.  There is so much of it that I tune it all out completely.  I can't listen to it, can't digest it, therefore can't evaluate it or try to help her disentangle reality from fantasy.  In the back of my mind I think I used to try to do that, but whenever the issue touched one of her deep fears -- and money is a very, very deep fear for her -- it never worked.  She could never hear me.  She could never bring herself to let go of the fear long enough to see that there was a world beyond it.  That's another reason I am leaving.

One side of me thinks that divorce is going to bring an end to the craziness I have lived with for so long, at least as far as I am concerned because I will be out of here.  But I'm also starting to suspect that it will bring to the surface every last scrap of craziness that I have been avoiding for so long.  That one last bonfire is going to be a big one.