z2smith

z2Smith
2013-02-18 22:49:40 (UTC)

Letter to Sister-in-law

I am writing you this mail for one specific reason. This is so that you are aware of the facts of recent events because I really don’t know where this is going and how I will react in the future, at least you would have information on my side of the story.

One thing though I will continue to pray to God to immense me in his spirit of tolerance, peace and patience above all enable me to make the right decisions and to give me the strength to follow it through.

Before I continue I will reiterate the thing I told your husband, I was very disappointed that yourself and your brother did let me know that the talk with his mother-in-law was not happening again. Since the last time I spoke to your brother about it the first time I would see or hear from him was at my daughter’s birthday. I know what I went through (mentally) to agree to come and speak to his mother-in-law about issues that are very private to me and not very complementary. I summoned enough courage to agree to it (even though I was extremely uncomfortable about it) but for the sake of my marriage. Clearly she was not interested but the least I would have expected was a quick call, text etc. to say it was not happening again.

Before I go on to recent events I just want to touch on two particular subjects:-

(1) Remorse:- The other day I had her talking on the phone saying I have never shown any remorse and that I only pretend about it. From the onset of this whole saga, I have said sorry to her in different disguises, written her a mail, written her a poem, spoken to her, read her a letter, sit down on the floor next to her through the night saying sorry. I even went to the extreme of telling her my entire story so that I could have a clean start in my marriage. I spoke to other people about it, pastors, my parents, friends etc, saying it entirely my fault and she has every right to feel the way she does. My parents spent time with her and I stood there saying it was my entire fault. Yet she throws everything back at me.

(2) Land Purchase:- She keeps repeating that I cheated her on the land purchase. Sometime towards the end of last year maybe around October or November she wrote me a mail about how she wants to go ahead and be financially separated from me and one of the things she said was that I should take the land and go and that God will judge me. I told her then that that payment of the land was promised for December (as I was told) and that we should wait until then to see if they would make the payment and that I will give her the money but will need to X amount from the money for my business. Is that the saying of someone that wants to cheat her? I lost money in property investments Florida, in Dubai and I have 2 court cases regarding the property in Spain (which she has washed her hands off) and Spain costs me about eur1k every month. She says we remortgaged the house for some property investments and I used my credit card for some investments as well. I, that’s right, I take the burden of all these credit. She has never paid a penny towards any of the remortgage we did. The credit card payments that she says she paid off for me, 95% of it was the agreement we had that I pay all the bills and she paid off all our debt. She did not pay off all my credit card and the ones she paid was because I was paying the bills. Beyond that there was a time when we structured again when my finances (self-inflicted I must say) was dire and she paid one of my credit card I think, I can’t remember the details but I will check this. My point is that I pay all the bills in the house and she was supposed to pay our debt. Later she started paying the children’s school fees and related costs and supermarket shopping. I pay for all the other bills in the house. She says I gambled away all the money. It is true that I did gamble and I lost money but in all these years I have always paid all the bills in the house, the money I lost was personal and that is the reason I am where I am. I ring fenced my bills money. She accused me of a 40k black hole in the bills account as we use to call it (my own account) for the year 2010. I had to account for every transaction in this account; I never once saw her bank statement. We went through the account for the year, transaction by transaction until about 4am. We then found that the account actually owed me 1k (approx.) instead of me “stealing” 40k from the account. I did not get a single apology from her, all she said was that, fine, we will then have to go through the accounts for the other years i.e. (2009, 2008 etc). The bills I pay go up regularly with inflation , usage etc my salary was reduced by 30% and there was a time she was earning a very high salary as a contractor, I never once told her to come and pay more towards the bill. The cost of the school run that she pays for has risen by 20 a week because we now use the driver and her (driver’s). She says she can’t afford the increase. Even in my dire state I now pay the extra 20 a week. All ad-hoc bills I still pay for. The car she drives, I pay for all the maintenance and tax on the car (apart from petrol, which I still pay for whenever I drive the car). Her clothes to the dry cleaners I still pay for it. She bought a table for our son in his room where I sleep. I use that table to read in the mornings or when downstairs is noisy. On Saturday she took my laptop away from there and put it (aggressively) in front of me downstairs saying I shouldn’t use that table. Since then anytime I put my books or laptop on that table (in the room I sleep) she will come there and take them away from the table.

Moving Out

She recently sent me a text saying she is moving out with the kids in summer. When we spoke we agreed to sit down and talk. She now asked me about the modalities. I told her that she was the one with the action so she should tell me the modalities. She mentioned 2 things. How I want to see the children and child maintenance fees. I told her that regarding the children I will get back to her as it is a sensitive issue and I need to think about it properly. Regarding child maintenance I told her that she knows my finances and the history of our finance. I pay for the house bills and she pays for the children’s fees etc. if they move out my bills would not change by much so how will I be able to afford to pay for anything extra? She went on to talk about the monetary value of caring for the kids. she is your sister but I will say these things:- I was the one that did our first son’s work with him from class 1 to class 4. It was only when he was in class 5 that she took over his work . Up until recently I was the one overseeing the work of the other two. The younger boy has to submit a weekly report on maths (Tuesday) and English (Thursday). Until recently will stay at work till the late hours. Weekends she spends in her room on her phone and watching TV. Typically my cousin will come and give her food and she will put the tray outside the door when she finishes like a hotel. In the last 3 weeks I have seen her in the kitchen which was shocking. In the last 3 to 4 years, I can count the number of times (on my hands) she has been in the kitchen. My cousin looks after those children. She now tells me about monetary value towards child care. During the meeting I told her more or less what I thought about the monetary value, basically that is it when she is at work until midnight or when she is in her room during the weekend that she looks after the children? From there she started raining abuse at me and cursing me about different things, My cousin could hear her, so I just did not respond and walked away. She continued the shouting and abuse but I just ignored.

Family

When my mum’s mum died I wanted someone from her family to call her to extend condolence so I told her brother to do it. Later she heard and told me not to talk to any of her relatives again. Now lately she sat down with my sister-in-law apparently for several hours and basically destroyed my character. I am very sensitive about the kind of relationship I have with my younger siblings talk less of their wives. She knows that my sister-in-law likes talking a lot. Any way she decided that she will destroy my character with her. She then goes to my other brother’s wife and does the same thing. Up until now, I have not told my brother anything about this whole saga. His wife then tells him, you can imagine his shock. I spoke to him yesterday and he told me that his wife mentioned a lot of things that shocked him and that he is coming to see me next weekend. He did mention that she said that sometimes I go out on Friday and that they will not see me until Sunday.This has never happen before in my life. I have always slept in my house. The kind of person I am, I am very careful how I interact with people and I respect myself. she knows this, hence why I think she is trying to hurt me this way. My sister-in-law will tell anybody within earshot my story and how “useless” I am but God will judge your sister. I have left that to God. I was very angry at first but I have let it go.

Email

She called me on Saturday saying she sent me an email and I should respond. The email was about the child maintenance report she said she was going to write up and how we would share the cost of the kid’s upkeep. The second thing she wrote in the email was that her credit card that I was paying for had bounced again and so she cannot afford for her credit to be bad so she will pay off the credit card (about 8.3k) with the funds she has for the kids school fees and that I should then pay the children’s school fees in 2 months’ time (about 6.5k) and then the remaining balance at the start of the following term. Now on this credit card, she has a 0% for life on it so during my credit card restructure we did she moved the balance on my card to her card. This was a long time ago and we both actually thought she was making the minimum payment towards the card. Sometime last year she told me she couldn’t afford to continue making the minimum payment anymore and that I should start paying it. As it luck would have it, the payment to the card bounced the following month that is when we realised that I was the one actually paying for the card not her. That shows the level she was going to go to destroy me financially. She didn’t even check that she was paying for the card or not before saying she could no longer afford to pay for it. Clearly, she just wanted to increase my burden. Since then the payment bounced again. This is now typical (i.e. bouncing of my DD) as the truth is that I don’t earn enough to pay off my obligations. She knows that, so much that she was paying me 2.5k every month and that was not even enough. She stopped paying that after about 3 months (around June last year) how I have been surviving and paying all my bills since then is by the grace of God. Yet any opportunity to increase my financial burden she will do it. My older son just restarted Taekwando (costing about 50/month) I am paying it. The daughter says she wants to start Tekwando she tells her to go and tell her daddy. The electricity bill we just got was higher than normal. I wrote her a mail saying we should buy the oil radiator in Argos as it consumes less electricity than the electric fan she is always using. She did respond to my mail and continues to use the electric fan. Now back to her credit card. It cost 120/month to pay the minimum on the card. If I am struggling to pay that how would I be able to pay £6.5k in 2 months’ time and another 2k the following term? I responded to her mail saying I can’t afford to pay the fees and any child maintenance as things stand. Personally the way I envisage this child maintenance is that we should list all the bills in the house and we share appropriately. She is not ready to do that as the current arrangement we have had for years favours her and now on top of that she wants me to start paying child maintenance. Anyway, she then calls me upstairs. She starts to talk about the same old thing, and I tell her that I pay for the whole bill and she paid for the credit cards not that she was paying the credit card as a favour. She gets up and start to shout and curse me….the children were there, my cousin could hear, all the other children could hear……”Are you not ashamed?! . “Useless man! A shadow of a man! You are not a man! You have no dignity! You are shameless! All you want to do is collect my money! Go and see what men do out there! Men pay for all the bills in the house and women don’t pay for anything!” She even mentioned my friend that died….”Your Lord, he paid for everything in his house”, this is the same person that they never saw eye to eye with because of his principles…his wife has to be at home to cook for him when he gets home….etc…she started screaming and shouting at me….my major concern was my older son because he could see everything…so I just ignored her…..I came downstairs to my desk…she now tried to provoke me further by bringing the laptop (I put on the desk upstairs) downstairs to where I was and say the desk doesn’t belong to me. I went back and put the laptop on the bed I sleep and told her never to touch it again. Since then she will move the laptop and my books away whenever I put them on the desk.

I will conclude and say, I know what I have put into the relationship and the home I built with her, and it is only God apart from the two of us that knows the full truth. I hurt her and she is hurt and I understand that, but she has taken this too far and I no longer will just sit down and do nothing…..




Ad: