If I were commissioned to write a movie script based on these years of my life this would be my rough draft.
The longtime family bookkeeper – a wife and mother of 4 – steals her family’s entire savings.
But rather than take the money and run, the wife returns home to secure a divorce from her husband.
To obtain the most lucrative divorce settlement possible, the wife would need to present her husband to the courts in the worst light imaginable.
This would require destroying him as both a husband and a father.
Like a super cell tornado touching down, the wife’s path of destruction begins. The wife would:
- Continually accuse the husband of being drunk even if he isn’t.
- Make repeated false reports to law enforcement to get him arrested.
- Try to get the husband shot (almost getting her son shot instead).
- Try repeatedly to get the husband fired by calling his job to accuse him of being drunk on the job, a dirty cop and a wife beater.
- Create bruises on her own body to show her children and to blame her husband.
- Pathologically lie to her children – feeding them endless lies as reasons to fear and hate their father.
- File multiple restraining orders to prevent her husband from returning to the house.
After years of this abuse, the wife felt it was time to go for the gold. She had her lawyer demand the husband agree to the maximum divorce settlement or they would take him to court!
Plot Twist: Her husband was a detective. He investigated the missing family savings and had a case file ready for court.
The husband counteroffered with a choice to the wife – either she walks away with nothing or she goes to jail for forging his signature to steal the family savings.
Realizing the well had run dry and she would get nothing, the wife promptly abandoned the home, taking everything she could carry on her back – leaving her three eldest teenage children behind to fend for themselves.
The tornado up and left, leaving nothing but utter devastation in its wake.
The End.