CHAPTER 21, Part 2: The Beginnings of the Bureau of Loss
From "The Saga of One F**ked Mother
“The Beginnings of the Bureau of Loss” is Chapter 21 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother. [This chapter is too long for a newsletter so the second part will be posted next week.]
In Part 2 of this chapter, Legion consults with friends about how to go about hiring an attorney after Herry serves her divorce papers. She gets some unsettling advice and discovers that her friend, Margaret, lost custody of her five children during her divorce and was financially devastated. She rarely saw her children again. The father was able to “buy” the children with an upscale lifestyle but said she would not do that even if she could. Legion could not understand then how a mother could lose custody of any children, much less five. She had no idea the same fate awaited her.
In Part 1 of this chapter, Herry files for divorce behind Legion’s back and she is the last to know, which disgusts and angers her immensely. Looking back she sees the ending of her marriage was just “the beginnings of the bureau of loss”—the wreckage that would be her entire life—just as Herry had vengefully plotted. One major loss she soon would discover is that taking years off to be a full-time mother to her boys has destroyed her career prospects.
In the last chapter, Legion is busy with the boys’ activities in their new school year while Herry is secretly plotting with Family Court attorneys to get sole custody of her boys and be able to blame her for the divorce. She stumbles across his AA notes in which he admits to molesting his sisters and engaging in bestiality. She is sickened and learns his father and brother also molested the girls and begins to worry about her boys being alone with him.
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Custody Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic oppression and violence directed at ex-wives—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point [on the web page]. All published chapters are included in the Section: “Saga of One F**ked Mother” accessible on the top bar of the home page of Women’s Coalition News & Views. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday and subscribers will find them in their inboxes, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
TEASERS
…Except that an adult, pillared male human being who, apparently most willingly, had seeded her very essences not once, not twice but at least five separate times had then up and gone and physically kept them all as his property, domain and dominion after he first dumped the chaff which had been Margaret’s tiny frame of a hulled shell.
“…he could … purchase their affection—he could. So he did. And, ah, I? Well, I couldn’t. ’nd … ah, and I just want to state: I wouldn’t’ve … anyhow.”
“[T]his lawyer guy has your entire fate in his control.” She paused but not for long, “And you owe him for it, Legion. You owe him for him taking over, for takin’ over your entire life. As a matter o’fact, a whale’falot you owe him.”
CHAPTER 21, Part 2
The Beginnings of the Bureau of Loss
“We still discover the church, the state, the world, all … regarding the exercise of her own judgment even upon the questions most closely related to herself as … woman’s greatest sin.”
—Matilda Joslyn (Gage) on page 310 in Chapter Six, “Wives”, of her 1893 work Woman, Church and State [http://www.sacred-texts.com/wmn/wcs]
…The telephone book’s Yellow Pages is daunting when it comes to researching someone of the Law. Even in a small city just over 50,000 such as Ames is. Of course, all of these legal types aren’t listed under ‘Lawyers’. No, it seems, as far as their phone book listing is concerned at least, they and the Yellow Pages’ formatters much prefer an up‑front approach beginning in the As with an apparently classier‑sounding category title, that being one under “Attorneys” or “Attorney Referral and Information.” There a person finds as many specialties in different law aspects as one does under “Physicians” for various medical practitioners. This, of course, is not true of and is in stark contrast to the listings under “Veterinarians”. Veterinarians are lumped into one big bunch who are assumed, because they mostly do, to practice generally. And, therefore, of course, they would have to, because they mostly do, know more … than their human medicine‑practitioner counterparts.
At any rate, there I was, knuckle‑deep in the local Yellow Pages, not recognizing one name nor one firm that I saw printed there. The Referral and Information service was useless, a recording at its phone number’s voicemail with no real information onto which I could quickly grasp. It was Friday. I’d called Daddy; it was now time to call Grace and Mona. Again. That is, for about the umpteenth time anyway since The Horrid Herod Revelation of last Sunday night. But they too, like me, knew nothing and hadn’t need of legal help themselves nor did they anticipate that they would soon be needing any such thing.
The telephone rang. I expected it to be my girlfriends calling me right back with information or findings that might help. I should have known; it was a person I always considered a crone, a very wise woman and my other mother, a real mama rather, Margaret Sagely, wanting to know, as she had simply felt a need to ask, “How are you doing, Legion?” She’d seen me in Meeting once, eyes closed, not at all an unusual event among members and attendees in Quaker Meeting anywhere in the World but instead, this time, with just the slightest hint of a tear falling from my eye; and she had felt the need to follow up. Hhmmm, now there’s a lesson from her in ‘follow‑up examinations’ which almost all practicing physicians could certainly stand to learn. Including Herry, most especially. But, of course, that was not about to happen in my or her lifetimes … with Corpses’ Vaginas‑Examining Edinsmaier!
Margaret said she knew something was terribly wrong because on First Day mornings the Boys had ceased coming with me; and she conjectured most correctly that they had gone missing from Meeting, an activity when I myself was in attendance they did not forgo, because … they had to be. Why, in this day and age, they had to be absent usually meant only one thing: The Boys’ father had them elsewhere … because he, their daddy, had himself also stashed elsewhere. “And it’s First Day, that is, ah, well, on the weekend, Legion, so, ah, Zane, Jesse and Mirzah, umm, they, they aren’t with you then, are they? Or, um, they’d be comin’ to Meeting with you, ah, ya’ know, wouldn’t they?”
Shit, she knew it all, Margaret did, even before being told any of it as fact—with the very same prescience which I knew her to own in many other matters as well—and was on the other end of the telephone line there now, a little hesitant about what her reception by me would be––because of her intuitively knowing all of this but there, nonetheless, for me to be able to vent to, to bleed in front of, to regroup around and, most of all, to learn from. There, in the capacity she was … as that of a mother of an adult daughter, bleeding badly,––in fact, hemorrhaging really, as one who should be there for and protective of her own child. There, and ready to go to the Mat and the Ends of the Earth for me if I needed her to. A Righteous Ancestor.
Margaret, about 70 years of age, knew also that, for boys especially and really for all children in general, church attendance ranks about dead last on their litany of weekly things to get done. Fortunately Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends, maybe a bit christianesque, a lot more pagan and most definitely with the many secular and humanistic atheists such as Margaret herself and I among us, at most times and in most places do not call their gathering site a church. So Quaker Meeting, held on First Days’ mornings in Ames in a meetinghouse and where pretty much everything’s okay that, first, does no harm and which also uplifts and sustains others, had certainly not turned off the Truemaier Boys. They came.
After all, it was a fine hour for pastime‑planning moments. With peanut butter cookies, hot cocoa, slices of Jonathan apples and other treats after Silence or First Day School besides! Zane, in his reverie, divined the fanciest and finest of fishing trips as well as Little League strategies when next he hit the diamonds. He told me so on several occasions. Jesse, during his meditations, probably planned soccer maneuvers and reviewed the last tournament plays. Maybe even how it was he sounded on the flute like the cassette tapes he owned of James Galway or, more likely, Mozart on the piano. Eyes closed, his silent digits fingered out the Suzuki piano pieces on top of his blue jeans as he sat slouched in a corner easy chair, yet a part of the Meeting circle. Jesse didn’t tell me his mind’s goings‑on, but he never balked at coming along with us all to Meeting either. Mirzah, who was forever reading in the backseat of my Shitbox Dodge, was also reading and reading and reading First Day after First Day in Meeting, all the while getting better and better week after week about being o–so quiet with the turning of the various books’ pages. Mirzah, just like his Grandpa AmTaham, could read until there were no more books around to be read. So his hour of Meeting flew by, too, and he always willingly came as well. Often, if an adult felt like taking them all out of Silence, off they’d go to another room for fun activities or, better than that, outside for a walking or raspberry‑picking, garden‑planting adventure. This was no church such that their schoolmates had to go to on the weekends—and would then lament about to the Truemaier Boys at recess on the playground; this was, well, fun. This? This was in every sense of the word … Friends … Meeting. The Truemaier Boys came with Legion, Margaret knew, when Legion herself was in Meeting.
Only, now, they weren’t coming; and Margaret knew why that was so, too. “What can I do? I don’t often say anymore; but, Legion, maybe you know: I have children. Maybe I can help you?”
“No, Margaret, I did not know. How many?” I knew Margaret from her vocal ministering in Meeting to be so smart and nurturing, mother‑like; and I had for myself sort of adopted her and two other old women in Meeting as my mother types, my ‘other mothers’ I called them—since Mehitable was never, ever going to be willing to fill this yearning for respectful mothering that I so wanted. I assumed because she was so wonderful and crone‑wise to me and to other people my age as well as to little, little kids that Margaret must’ve had children, but I’d never really heard her say, come to think of it.
“O … five, Legion. I have five children.”
“No!?”
“Yeah. I do. Well, they’re all grown now, o’ course. And none of them live around here. Nor … nor do they come here either.”
This announcement just shocked me. Margaret had, for years and years right after the end of World War II, gone off with the American Friends Service Committee to China to help that country’s ‘comfort’ women recover and rebuild after the Japanese surrendered and left it. How could she have possibly raised up five kids and done this mission of hers as well?! She was barely 5’ tall, maybe 100 pounds now; I’m sure she hadn’t been much bigger than that ever! Margaret spent all of these most recent years when I had become acquainted with her taking in Chinese college students under her wing and helping them adjust to this country and system of education when they came here to Iowa State University for graduate school. In her tiny duplex apartment just four westerly blocks off campus, Margaret Sagely played her old upright beater piano and nearly daily steamed up white rice and simple vegetables to facilitate her bringing to innumerable Chinese nationals such familiarities of their far‑off home fires. I’d known some, too, about that AFSC mission; it’d taken up most of the rest of her 1940s’ decade, and even into the 1950s for Margaret.
I just had so not known about the incidental five children whom she had evidently also found the time and the space to grow, to bear and to raise up!
“They don’t come here either, Margaret?”
“Well, no. No, they don’t. They really never knew Ames as a home for them, I’d have to say. They were gone from me for most of their late childhood and teen years. And, well, ever since after that time then, too, of course.”
“O Margaret. That was because of your work in China? Not?”
“Ah well, no, not exactly, not really actually. Their father, uh, the children’s dad, well ah, he was a college professor in Minnesota, and they, well, … ah, they stayed there to live with him when, well, when he didn’t, ah, … when he didn’t want to be married to me anymore.”
“All of them stayed?”
“Ah, ah, yeah. Yeah, they did. None …, ah, none of them lived with me.” I could tell Margaret was so not wanting to discuss this or, if she were, she wanted to get it damn straight first that I was someone safe with whom she could talk about this. Even though she knew me as a Quaker for the last couple of years, I was sensing that Margaret really didn’t know me which was, as a matter of fact, quite true; and before she was going to go on talking much further, she was definitely testing the waters around her, about whether she could trust me … or not … and for what she would hear back from me.
I could tell this because that is exactly how I was feeling.
Hesitant and so very, very guarded about discussing anything that smacked of mothering issues, of how I was, as a mother, a ‘good’ (enough) one or a ‘not‑so‑good’ (enough) one, of the very thought of children not being with their mama when they were still children. Margaret continued then but not very far, “He got a new wife right away, well, really the woman he’d been with when I’d thought he was the children’s dad and my husband actually. It was his house and his job there, and the kids were all in school there. I found a little apartment nearby; but then, ah, … um, then I couldn’t afford the rent there and it was, well, it was no place for five kids. Pretty soon I had to leave so I came back here to Iowa, to where my folks’d lived, the Sagelys of Muscatine, perhaps you’ve heard of them? Of the Sagely Foundation? Perhaps not, no matter. Eventually I wound up here in Ames. Sooo … so my children, well, they never really knew Ames as their home. And, yes, it’s true: I was gone a lot to China. But … but that was mostly before I’d had the children and, umm … umm, just recently again. Just the last few years when they would’ve all been adults anyhow, ya’ know. He was, well ya’ know when they were all so little—and then, well, when they all got older for sure, well ya’ know, he could, … ah, he could, … he could … purchase their affection—he could. So he did. And, ah, I? Well, I couldn’t. ‘nd … ah, and I just want to state: I wouldn’t’ve … anyhow.”
Margaret was done. That was the extent of any of her personal history during the three decades that were the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s about which I was ever to learn. I knew nothing more of her story during the next 3½ years in which I came to seek out Margaret for solace and wisdom and advice and even for a little bit of … joy.
Except that an adult, pillared male human being who, apparently most willingly, had seeded her very essences not once, not twice but at least five separate times had then up and gone and physically kept them all as his property, domain and dominion after he first dumped the chaff which had been Margaret’s tiny frame of a hulled shell. And while, over the years, she got to see her children pretty much whenever they chose to visit her (rather than, of course, Margaret’s owning the choice of visiting them), she never one time ever again, she told me herself, sought out the interest or the insight or the friendship of another man in the sense of an intimate setting. Margaret was done.
Regarding the trusting of at least one more such human myself I stated into the telephone receiver, “I need a lawyer, Margaret. Umm, I’m told by my daddy that I need one right away. It’d be in family law. I am being divorced, and apparently I’ve got about 2½ weeks left to file some kind of a response to Herry’s petition for that, Margaret.”
“O my, Legion. My … my … my, my, my. JYeah. Well. I knew I needed to call. Um, let me see here. Yeah, you do. That’s right, you do. Your daddy’s exactly correct, Legion. You do have to get a lawyer right away. Aaahh, know any?”
“Well gosh, no. Just before you called, I was on the line to him about this and what I should do to get started with one around here. Would you know of any who deal a lot in divorce, Margaret?”
“No, I don’t. Not personally. Not around here.” I felt my heart beginning to beat fast. Short of breath, my breathing was so shallow and that throat‑chokehold thing started in again. I might have begun panicking except that then Margaret interjected, “Well, come to think of it, actually I do know of one that a couple of women at the University used for their divorces. I really don’t know how they fared with him though; they just didn’t say. And, ah, … an’ one has left Ames to go back to China. My own experience is that, well, what you’ll find is that, aaaahh, you’re … you’re entrusting over to this lawyer person what you believe to’ve been your whole life up to this point, ah, up to now. I mean, you don’t know it at the time you’re doing this … that you’re doing this; but it’ll turn out that ya’ are. That this is exactly what you are doing. That this lawyer guy has your entire fate in his control.” She paused but not for long, “And you owe him for it, Legion. You owe him for him taking over, for takin’ over your entire life. As a matter o’fact, a whale’falot you owe him.”
“Control? His control? Aren’t there laws about what’s controlled and who controls what? Ya’ know, with divorce or, ya’ know, making a marriage not a marriage any more? A lawyer has to follow ‘em, right? He has to follow those laws, right? What you just said there, Margaret, sounds like, well, ah, …um ya’, it sounds like ya’ gotta take a lawyer just to go see your lawyer! That isn’t what ya’ really meant, is it, Margaret?”
“O. O. Well, actually, … ah, ah … —as a matter of fact, that is it, Legion. That just about hits the nail on the head, I’d have to say. Still. If he handled these two foreign cases and of Asian people at that, not even European or Canadian or somewhere English‑speaking and, uh, an’ … well, women from a way different culture than ours, maybe he’s the one you should get, too. What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think I need a lawyer. And right away. Sorta sounds as good as any I guess, and I really haven’t anybody else that I know of. I’m so angry I could spit. Any idea how much I should expect to have to pay up front, that retainer money? Let alone, a reasonable fee to expect overall? Actually, Margaret, do you have any idea what this whole thing’ll cost me? And, will he take me on credit, do you think? Cuz, because, um, I really need to get someone started on this response thing, and I only have what Herry gives us for the bills every month and some, ah, … for some groceries. That’s it. I’ll have to borrow from somebody, my folks I guess.”
“No Dear, I don’t. But you’re quite right: you must get going on this right away. Today, if you can. Ya’ know, it’s Friday. Give his office a call and just feel them out there. His name is Jazzy Jinx, and here, I’m looking in the Yellow Pages right now. Yeah, here it is. His number is 555‑1761. He’s in with a bunch of others; looks like they’re all men. No women. You probably don’t want a woman, right? Ya’ know, the perception and all? Whiny and weak. It should probably be a man, don’t you think, Legion?”
A woman? A man? Why should that count? Laws are laws, right? How much money now? How much money later? When later? Every month? Does it take a payment to a lawyer every month? What does it take? Who should I borrow from? How much should I borrow? What should the interest and repayment terms on my loan be? How often do I visit the lawyer? Surely the Boys won’t be involved, will they? If so, when do they have to go to the lawyer? And to Herry’s lawyer, too? There’s a three‑month waiting period in Iowa always, isn’t there? If there isn’t, then what is there? Mandatory counseling? No? Not mandatory counseling? Anything mandatory then?
“O yeah, … and one more thing, Legion. One more thing here,” Margaret was sort of picking up on my thought thread there, “the divorce is mandatory. It will happen. Whether you want it to or not. Herod Edinsmaier will get his divorce, Legion. Unless he rescinds this action which he has started, then there is absolutely not one thing you can do to stop it. Not now. What else can I do, Legion? I’m here whenever you need me.”
I had no degree in this, not even one experience, in any form of, well, in legal management of a family household. Legally handling an estate and anything and everything therein, no less. I didn’t even have a will. Alone or jointly together with Herry. No will at all even. Let alone, skill in dissolving a household that included in it very, very affected little persons, that is, my kids. How the hell should I know any of the literally mother‑fucking answers to all of these questions?! It was Friday all right, and I was far more bewildered than I had been before on last Tuesday’s morning.
It has been my experience that Fridays are horrible days, especially in the afternoons, to call anywhere, to any place of business or level of government and expect to get a damn thing answered or done. I made the call anyhow. “Mr. Jinx can see you next Tuesday morning at 8:30 am for approximately 20 minutes before he leaves for the courthouse in Nevada. He has a 9:30 appearance there. Please be here 20 minutes beforehand to fill out the appropriate paperwork, okay?”
“O, um, it couldn’t be later, could it, I suppose? Um, I’m still taking my children to their school at that time.”
“No, it cannot. But he can see you at 11:30 am next Friday, the 14th . That’ll work then, won’t it?”
“Aaaahh, ah, um, I’ll just take the Boys to school early next Tuesday I guess. I really need to get in to see him earlier than next Friday, I am thinking. About ten minutes after 8 then, you say?”
“Yes, that’s right. I have you down.”
“Okay … okay then.” I hung up. I forgot to ask one damn thing about money. Why hadn’t the woman bothered to offer me any information whatsoever on this matter? On this matter of the money thing? Why? Must be they kind of know greenhorns such as myself are so stupid we do this. We simply forget to ask about the money, don’t we? Till it’s far, far too late and we absolutely have to have something legal done so we just end up paying whatever sum it is that’s simply put upon us.
Because that’s what happened. That’s exactly what I did. I entered the environment of lawyering, of family lawyering, in nearly the most bumbling of manners possible. I just called up a name, asked nothing about money and, without any input or direction or control and supervision on my part, wherein culturally and factually I should be my soon‑to‑be hired lawyer’s employer, assented to whatever this voice belonging to the total stranger on the other end of the telephone wire told me to do.
Throughout this wholly inept organization and retention of my initial legal “counseling” and for months and months to come thereafter, little did I know and how in the absolute dark I was—in that … I would never practice veterinary medicine nor teach veterinary microbiology again. My expertise for which I had struggled through, gathered and obtained over 14 years or, more accurately, 38 formal terms of college education and that I, long, long steeped in the northern European and Anglo ancestral culture transplanted now into generations of its Iowans of utterly pulling one’s own weight had paid for entirely by myself save for the mere $125 of it which my parents had ponied up during my very first quarter back in the fall of 1966, at Iowa State, that expertise? ––Useless! Whatever genius and competency as a creature healer and as the leader of young animal handlers’ minds which I may have had outside of the home and of mothering, and I say genius because I was good at both the healing and the teaching, damn good at them actually, well … my bones would never realize the licensed use of this craft, this gift of mine, this profession … ever again.
* * * *
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: Legion’s husband/Sperm Source [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
Zane Truemaier: Legion’s son
AmTaham True: Legion’s father [Mahatma backwards]
Mehitable True: Legion’s mother [Me hit-able—i.e. she was abusive]
Ardys and Endys: Legion’s sisters [names backwards]
Sterling: Legion’s brother [her mother’s planned name of next son (who never came)]
Mi Sprision O'Revinnoco: Herry’s sister [misprision: concealing knowledge of treason/O'Revinnoco = O'Connivero backwards]
Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier: Legion’s father-in-law [juggernaut; aut = 0; misein = “to hate (misogyny)”]
Detanimod Edinsmaier: Legion’s mother-in-law [dominated backwards]
Fannie Issicran McLive: fawning enabler of ex [narcissi(st) and Mc(Evil) backwards]
Legion’s Friends: Margaret, Mona, Yanira, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl
Legion’s Best Friends: Ms Grace and Dr Lionel Portia
Wende: = Legion's friend after divorce [committed suicide due to Custody Crisis]
Jim Cornball: Herry’s acquaintance from AA and realtor
Loser Lorn: Insurance agent referred by Cornball
Judge Harley Butcher: Family Court judge
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: Family Court judge
Judge Barry Crowrook: Appellate Court judge
Judge Pansy Shawshank: Appellate Court judge
Jazzy Jinx: Legion’s Family Court lawyer who sold her out
Shindy Scheisser: Herry’s lawyer [shindy = noisy; scheisser = German for shithead]
Li Zhang: Herry’s Aussie affair
Dr Freddie Goldstein & Ella: Herry’s colleague and wife
Mick: = Herry's acquaintance from high school; best man [not in Herry’s life after that as he had no true friends]
Varry Wussamai: Herry's AA sponsor (not a real friend) [I am a wuss backwards]
David Humes: nursing student; classmate of Legion's, y1968 - y1971, New York City
Edmund Silver: Legion's boyfriend pre-Herry
Braemore St: where Legion and her family lived, y1983 - y1986
Havencourt condominium: Legion's Ames apartment; after separation
Zephyr: tabby cat of Zane's, Mirzah's, Jesse's [pronounced “Zay – fear”]
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
You may also give a gift subscription to a friend who is going through the Family Court nightmare.
Or feel free to support the Coalition’s work through a one-time or recurring contribution at paypal.me/TheWomensCoalition.
All contributions are greatly appreciated and thanks to everyone who has subscribed!