Rainy Day

I just bought yogurt with a hundred dollar bill. Money I was saving for a rainy day. Last night I dug through my bathroom cabinet and pulled it from a half-crushed box that once held some beauty product that undoubtedly promised to make me younger or thinner or more beautiful. That hundred dollars survived most of the last decade, and then last evening as I pulled up to my local bank I discovered my ATM card was missing just hours before I'd be leaving on a trip.

I went home and called my bank and waited briefly on hold while I read yet another maddening email from my attorneys asking for information I've already detailed for them. I cancelled the card and came close to canceling the attorneys as well.

The ATM card and the attorneys are dominos. Things are falling down. Yesterday was a tumble of phone calls:
The guy who's appraising the farmland got two calls, neither of them returned just as the two or three others I've made to him in the last couple of weeks weren't returned. He has my money. I don't have his appraisal. Which is needed in order to calculate how much dough Mr. Ex owes me.
I called the investment bank too. They have even more of my money. A check gone missing.
I called the bar association. They don't have my money, but some of their members have cascades of it. If that money were rain, we'd be hovering around the TV watching some meteorologist yammer on about The Storm of the Century. I'm getting something for that phone call. A complaint form I can fill out.

My Internet also went missing yesterday. More money dispensed for a service I don't actually receive. Every day or two, I'm on my knees under my desk plugging and unplugging, shutting down and starting up. "I don't want you to shut down," my therapist says about my grief and anger. I plug myself into her words and try to stay up and running.

Mr. Ex says the money I used in the 14 months before my attorneys managed to wrench alimony out of him (why o fucking why did they wait so long?) is money that I "took." In his narcissistic book of life, it's not support, and now I owe him. I don't owe him anything. He was "the taker."

Took. Taken. I have. I was.
Taken when we were on our final family vacation and he had no time for family. I was taken by him while he was taken with the Soon to be Little Missus and slinking off to see her. I was taken while I sat next to him at our daughter' graduation. Taken in by his charade as the perfect dad. "He's divorcing you the same way he was married to you," my therapist said. A point well taken. "He ignored you during your marriage and now he's ignoring you in your divorce." Going on four years of ignoring.

I can't take it any more.

So.

I just went ahead and took the money. Take that, Mr. Ex.

Now I have it for the next rainy day.