"You don't give a fuck about the kids, I am filing for full custody". "You can see your kids every other weekend like all the other divorced Dads". These are typical phone messages and emails I get from my ex regularly.

Since April of 2008 my ex wife has moved 4 times. The fact that she threatens to file for full custody does not ever worry me. The kids have one place that is stable in their lives and that is in the home that they grew up in. Should she actually file for full custody I won't even retain a lawyer. I will print out these nasty emails that I save and bring them to the courtroom.

In October she'll be uprooting them again. She says to me that she cannot afford the aparment that she lives in. I have no sympathy for her problems when it comes to finding a place to live. In the last year I have had to drive a car that I bought at a car auction for $650. The car is a piece of junk. It's got 166,000 miles on it. The front end rattles every time I hit a bump. I won't put my kids in the car. I borrow my sister's car when I want to take them someplace. I drive my car to work and back. My ex-wife on the other hand still continues to live for the day. She recently claimed bankruptcy. By filing for bankruptcy she didn't realize that she may lose the house for her kids. She is still on the mortgage. I still can't qualify for a new mortgage due to the fact that I now only have one income. When I sent the July mortgage payment I found out that she had filed for bankruptcy from my mortgage company. They told me that because my ex had filed for bankruptcy, they could not cash my mortgage payment check. "Because your ex is on the mortgage she is protected from her creditors". I had to hustle and prove that I was divorced and had been keeping up with the payments on my own. I actually had to have my ex-wife's bankruptcy lawyer send a letter to my mortgage company that stated "this office would like to inform the bank, that any arrangement allowing the mortgage payments to continue to be applied to the loan be allowed". My ex still tells me I am lying and that her filing for bankruptcy had nothing to due with the fact that the bank would not cash my checks. "If you filing for bankruptcy had no affect on my mortgage, why then does my mortgage check sit in your bankruptcy lawyers office". Thats where the check was. I had to actually bring a new check to her lawyer and have her lawyer send it to my mortgage company. Recent;y she bought a 2007 Dodge. Nice car. I wish I could get a car like that. Must cost her close to $450 a month in payments and insuracance. I still drive the $650 auction car that now leaks gasoline. It leaks only when more than 3 gallons of gas is put in. So I put 2.5 gallons of gas into the car every single day.

Today I am cleaning the house of dog hair. I didn't want a dog. We had dogs the whole time we were married. When our first dog was reaching the end of her life we had agreed "no more dogs." Maybe when the kids got older. We had a german sheppard. Due to the fact that our sheppard shed hair so much we were constantly cleaning dog hair. Not to mention the cleaning of poop that would be tracked into the house occasionally. Every time the door bell rang chaos ensued. The dog would bark as if there was an attacker present. My ex wife would do her under the breath growl that I learned to detest. "Grrrr Shut up". "Damn dog hair". "The dogs up my ass all day". The list of complaints related to the dog would go on and on.

Six months after the dog died she wanted to get another dog. "What about the aggravation a dog brings to the house?" I asked. She didn't seem to remember the negative parts of the dog. There wa only one thing in her mind that brought aggravation into the house and that was me.

After my youngest son was born we continued to have dogs. A Chow lived with us for a while. I still recall the day she told me she wanted to adopt a Chow from the animal rescue league. I Googled Chow. First thing I find is "Chow's are not recommended for families with young children". When I told her this, it was if it didn't matter. The dog was not good with kids. We had to get rid of her after I saw the Chow leaping up at a friend of my son's face and snapping. I could hear the sound of the dog's jaws clamping shut. Thank God the dog didn't bite the young boy in the face.

About six months after my ex moved out she moved for the third time. This time she rented a house with her sister and the new man in her life. Her sister owned a Great Dane and a Bulldog. A month later she added another dog to the house along with a cat. I started to notice that every time my younger boy came home, he was not feeling good. He'd be coughing and feverish and sneezing. "I think that our son may be allergic to dogs" my ex told me. She wanted me to make sure that I was cleaning up all the dog hair. I was doing my best but it was everywhere. I cleaned dog hair every single day. I vaccumed as often as time allowed. Then the confirmation. Our youngest boy is allergic to dogs and cats.

The day of my older boys birthday party my ex went to a local beach resort. My phone was ringing constantly. "Can you feed the dogs" "Can you let the dogs out" I told her that I would have set up someone to come take care of my dog had I gone away for the weekend and that I did not want her asking me to do these kinds of things. I did go to the house the next morning to check on the dogs. What I found was disgusting. Dog feces in the kitchen and living room. Holes dug in the backyard from dogs. The house smelled like shit and urine.

Flashback to my first paragraph. "I am filing for full custody of the kids". I went back to the house and took pictures of the filth. I then called her and told her what I found. She knows her son is allergic to dogs and cats and subjected him to the largest dog breeds in the world.

My ex now lives in a basement apartment. She lives alone. She gave away her dog and her sister moved back to the west coast with her 2 dogs. My son still suffers from allergies. I have a neighbor. My ex-wife is friends with her still. For the last 2 weeks she has brought my youngest boy to the neighbors house to use the pool. My neighbor has 3 dogs six cats and a rat in a cage. I objected to her bringing our boy into that house. I've been in that house. It stinks from feces and urine. The woman that owns the animals is a lazy slob that doesn't clean the cat boxes. I have not been in that house for almost 2 years but I do remember that when I did go in, the cat boxes would be caked with shit. There'd be litter all over the floor. The stench would aggravate my sinuses after just half an hour.

Today I was told by my ex "you need to do something about the dog in your house". You mean the dog that I didn't want? The dog that you brought into the home 3 years ago and then bitched about every minute of every day? I agree though. I can't keep up with the dog hair. I have spent the day pulling out all the furniture. I have washed and vaccumed and cleaned since 8 am this morning. Not to mention do laundry and make lunches and get the kids baths and kept them occupied. After I write this hub I will start dinner. 

Eight months after divorce is final I still deal with decisions that my ex made. I knew that would be the case. I read it as I fought divorce. "The effects of divorce can last for decades". Especially for children.

- Children of divorce are four times more likely to report problems with peers and friends than children whose parents have kept their marriages intact. (Tysse, Burnett, "Moral Dilemmas of Early Adolescents of Divorced and Intact Families. Journal of Early Adolescence 1993)

The statistic is spot in my oldest son. Every single neighborhood kid that he was friends with last year no longer associate with him. I don't know how they know, but they know my ex wife was unfaithful in the marriage. They have told my son "Your Mother is a whore". He keeps these things inside. Sometimes I ask what is bothering him. It's hard to get him to open up but he does tell me when I tell him I just want to help him to be happy.

A quarter-century after a group of middle-class Marin County couples got divorced, their children are still suffering.

So says a study that chronicled the lives of 26 children whose parents divorced in 1972, when the children were between two and six years old. The results of the study, The Long Term Impact of Divorce on Children: A First Report from a 25-Year Study, by Judith Wallerstein, the country's foremost researcher of divorce, and co-author Julia Lewis, a San Francisco State University clinical psychologist, were published in June.

Few parents get divorced without thinking of how it will impact their children. But what has surprised family researchers is how long the effects of divorce last. The children in this study are now approaching 30. Divorce has been a major factor in their experiences growing up, and Wallerstein and Lewis contend that "its impact increases over time."

"I don't have time to read" That's what my ex told me after I suggested she look into the effects of divorce on kids. She did have time to spend the last six months of our marriage drinking and cavorting.

I still deal with some of the decisions she made 2 years ago. According to Wallerstein I will be continuing to deal with these decisions for quite some time. So will the kids.

"I just want to be happy" the line echoes in my head. "So does everybody" I would reply.

In October she will move for the fifth time in less than 18 months. "The kids will be fine" another one of her lines. I don't think uprooting children 5 times in a year and half is what is going to make the boys happy. She still looks for her happiness. I just look for stability in my boys lives. We have it here at our home.